With offices in NYC, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong, MYN Group is a worldwide digital innovative agency. We work closely with brands to create a high-converting digital experience for customers. This experience often involves influencer marketing. Influencers are a form of independent media buys. To read more about the basics of influencer marketing, check out our other article regarding the basics of influencer marketing.
With many of our campaigns involving media buys with influencers, MYN Group has written a quick step-by-step guide for how to create a successful influencer marketing campaign. Visit here to see more of our influencer marketing campaign work.
1. Define Customer Journey Targeting
The first step to create a successful influencer campaign is to define where in the customer journey your customer could be targeted. A customer journey is all the touchpoints a potential customer has before, during, and after their purchase. Defining the customer journey is important because it lets you know how you’re going to target customers when they are engaging with influencers.
2. Establish Your Goals
Setting your goals and defining your indicators of success is an important second step. Defining goals will help you create a consistent strategy from the beginning of the campaign to the end. Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) will tell you how successful the campaign was. You’ll also want to set a budget.
Some potential goals could be:
Create and foster strong client-brand relationships
Increase brand awareness
Engage customers with brand social media account
Garner revenue
Gather customer information and preference
Build site links
Generate quality leads
KPIs include:
Reach: the total number of people who have seen an influencer’s content, either as follows or as people who have been recommended content through the platform’s algorithm
Impressions: the number of times content is on a screen. Impressions are calculated by multiplying the number of average number of shares per post by the number of followers per user on a platform
Engagement: how much people like, comment, etc on a post. Engagement is calculated by dividing the amount of likes by impressions
3. Choose a Social Media Channel
Selecting a platform is contingent on your end goals. Different platforms cater to different types of content and different audiences. Have eye-catching products? Try Instagram. Looking for business-oriented customers? Focus your efforts on Linkedin. The right social media platform allows you to target your optimal group of consumers and allows that group to engage with your campaign.
4. Identify Your Audience
Once you have an idea of your goals and baseline audience measurements, you need to identify your target audience. Create an overview of the people you want to reach during your campaign before you begin your search for influencers. Having a buyer persona that includes demographic and psychographic information will make it easier to find out who your target audience follows and on which platform.
5. Choose a Campaign Type
Think about the type of influencer marketing campaign that will help you achieve your company’s goals.
Some strategies to consider:
Sponsored content: paying an influencer to post content mentioning a brand’s products.
Gifting: sending free products and services to an influencer for a review or mention in the influencer’s content
Affiliate codes: offering followers a unique discount code to give influencers a percentage of the sales they drive
Discount codes: providing influencers a unique discount code to offer to their audience
Brand ambassadors: forming relationships with influencers where they mention and promote a brand for an elongated period of time in exchange for free products or exclusive offers
6. Find Appropriate Influencers
Influencers often specialize in niches of content, and their followers are interested in those niches. Profile types such as urban, lifestyle, food, family, fashion, parenting, travel, and many others. Finding an influencer in your product’s niche is crucial to a successful marketing campaign. An influencer, someone who creates content online, can take many different forms, such as:
Popular social media figures
Bloggers
Celebrities
Customers
Non-competing brands
Industry experts
Your influencer should:
Adjust content for your campaign to your brand’s messaging
Have a dedicated and engaged audience (which you can check by measuring engagement, reach, impressions, or views)
Demonstrate positive KPIs from past campaigns for similar work
Communicate succinctly and honestly
Be seen as an expert in the industry
Often, influencers include their email addresses in their account biography. Once you’ve identified the right influencer, reach out to him or her about your campaign. Don’t be afraid to vet your ideal influencers and ask the hard questions. Sometimes numbers can be deceptive. It’s important to know what an influencer can provide so you can hit your KPIs and run a successful campaign.
7. Create a Publishing Schedule
To guarantee your campaign’s success, you need to coordinate your social media platforms and brand communications (such as press releases and events). A polished schedule for your influencer marketing campaign will help push customers through the sales funnel.
8. Review Content Before Publishing
Before your influencers’ posts are published, you should double-check that the content aligns with your advertising and brand guidelines. Though it is important to give influencers creative freedom (58% of influencers say their favorite part of a brand campaign is creative freedom), it is vital for you to audit any posts, photos, and videos before they are published.
9. Enhance the Content
To boost the impact of your influencer marketing campaigns, be sure to promote posts before and after they are published. You can also request that your influencer promote the posts on all their social media platforms. Doing so will further emphasize your calls-to-action and publish more content for your campaigns.
10. Measure your Results
As with any marketing campaign, you need to ensure that it is delivering a ROI (return on investment). Refer to the KPIs that you defined at the beginning of the campaign strategy and review the numbers. Have you made progress? Have you learned about your audience? Which posts are performing well? Which posts are underperforming? The answers to these questions will determine your success and help you plan future campaigns.
By following the steps laid out above, you will have the capacity to create strong relationships with your audience, build your brand’s awareness, and learn about your audience. If you want to hear more about influencer marketing campaigns, MYN Group frequently collaborates with client brands to ascertain social media success. Please contact us at MYN.Group@MYNGroup.com if you want to discuss creating an influencer marketing campaign.
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