Influencer Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Digital Presence

Influencer marketing is becoming more popular and is projected to be the leading form of digital media advertising. Research has shown that 84% of marketers will launch one or more influencer marketing campaigns within the next year and Google Trends shows a huge increase in “influencer marketing” and a decrease in “print advertising” searches in the past five years.

However, to launch a successful influencer marketing campaign, it’s crucial to implement the right influencer marketing strategies. Today marketers and businesses are busy trying to determine the best practices for their influencer marketing strategies but are finding it difficult to find the right influencers, targeting the right audiences, tracking performance, amplifying top content, influencer payments, etc. It’s for this reason savvy agencies and brands should take proven influencer marketing strategies seriously before embarking on this type of media.

Why is an Influencer Marketing Strategy Important?

Like everything else, you should not rush into influencer marketing without a plan. Setting clear KPI’s, define how success will be measured, determine distribution platforms, brand messaging, defining your targeting audience, creating measurable goals and making sure you conduct it in the right way are all part of what makes an influencer marketing campaign a success.

How your brand puts together an influencer marketing strategy depends on what goals your brand sets for the campaign and are usually executed by the following objectives:

• Link Clicks – For link clicks the primary purpose is to optimize your placement and content to generate clicks that lead users to a destination like a website’s landing page and hopefully achieve a low CPC and a higher CTR. Usually, the influencer is required to place a strong call to action (CTA) within the content or button for paid ads asking their users to perform an action “click here” or “learn more” or “sign up.”

• Boost Brand Awareness – The brand awareness campaign objective is a good option if you’d like more people to find out about your brand. This objective shows ads to people who may show interest in what you offer. If you’re not looking to drive sales, comments, or shares (and only want people to recall you), choose this objective.

• Engagements – The engagement objective is for brands looking to get more active participation from their audiences such as likes, comments, and shares at the lowest possible cost.

• Reach – If your goal is to reach out to a new demographic, your strategy is likely to include working with influencers who already connect with that audience. The influencers can then use their position as a trustworthy source to introduce your brand to their followers.

Collaborate with Influencers Who Already Love Your Brand

Collaborating with an influencer is an extremely crucial part of an effective marketing strategy, and most influencers consider it very valuable to have brand collaboration when it comes to creating an impactful message. Thus, it is essential to give them clear guidelines about the messaging you are looking to achieve.

So how do you find influencers who are already talking about your brand? You must use proven influencers with a highly engaged audience and outreach teams to check for brand affinity, review content relevancy scores and make sure the audience profiles are in line with your targeted audience.  If an influencer has a propensity to talk about your brand, it means they have an affinity towards your products or services and already have an interested audience who are likely to receive your message well.

Bigger is NOT Always Better

It may be tempting to hire the influencer with the most social media followers. After all, the more followers, the more your message will be amplified, right? Wrong! Instead, opt for the influencer with a dedicated following that is more aligned with your brand message and goals. Just having many social media followers is no guarantee that those followers will be engaged, and engagement is crucial for your campaign to succeed.

Know Your Competitors

When considering which influencers to work with, looking at past collaborations is an important factor that is generally overlooked. You don’t want your competitors to do better than you, and you don’t want to end up not doing enough. If competitors have not yet launched an influencer marketing campaign, that’s notable as well. You may have a first-mover advantage that can improve campaign performance.

Identify the Right Platform for Your Campaign Message

The right promotional content can boost your search engine rankings, making it even easier for consumers to find you. YouTube videos are fun and informative and great for Google rankings. Instagram is a perfect platform for beauty and lifestyle brand promotion. Every platform has its benefits, and we can help you identify which channel is best for your brand. A good influencer marketing campaign is linked and shared across several platforms and keeps people talking.

Reach Your Audience in Ways That Speak to Them

Let’s talk about one demographic you want to reach with effective influencer marketing strategies as an example: Millennials. These are the twenty and thirty-somethings who prefer streaming and binge-watching to regular TV, who probably don’t get a newspaper delivered but have a smartphone in their hands. The Pew Research Center estimates that Millennials will overtake Baby Boomers as the largest population group in the US by 2019. Millennials have changed the way information is consumed, and the most effective advertising methods have evolved too. As the influence and buying power of Millennials increases, you’ll want to make sure you can reach them in a way that speaks to them. Influencer marketing is a top advertising method for the millennial market – over two-thirds of Millennials consider the internet to be the most important medium for information. These young people look for authentic engagement, and influencer marketing can deliver that to them on their favorite channels.

Amplify Your Top Performing Content

Part of an effective influencer marketing strategy needs to include content amplification.  Until recently, Facebook and Instagram pages were great at giving you the visibility to help you reach your target audiences efficiently and allow them to engage with your posts. However, those days are gone as you may have noticed a decline in the engagement on your organic posts and users are now missing around 70% of the content on their Instagram feeds from people and pages that they follow.

One of the best ways to combat content fatigue is to boost your top performing content to your users and their lookalike audiences using ShopHer Media’s Smart Boost technology. This technology allows us to tap into our premium influencer-derived audiences, construct lookalike audiences, and run hyper-targeted social ads natively through influencer accounts all the while optimizing for brand awareness and media spend.

1. Platform identifies top-performing Instagram influencers to tap into their derived audiences (brand can only use the brand audiences/ Facebook targeting)
2. Optimize spend according to influencer performance and objective in real time, programmatically.
3. Reporting has organic and paid performance of content at the campaign and content level. The content level looks like:

• Target your best content to the best audience
• Measure performance across influencer, content, and audiences
• Optimize for reach, engagement, traffic, or conversions
• Generate actionable insights
• Build audiences and retarget consumers who are engaging with your influencers
• Effortlessly scale the impact of earned media

Monitor Your Campaign Performance

78% of marketers find it difficult to determine the ROI of their influencer campaigns, and that is why it’s imperative to accurately track and report all social activity while analyzing content and providing insight into what’s working and how to scale.  Here are metrics that must be monitored to ensure a successful campaign:

• Social Media Posts (per Platform/Influencer)
• Blog Posts Analytics
• Engagements
• Clicks
• Earned Media Value
• Conversions
• Reach
• Impressions and Reads

In conclusion…

It’s all about being a smart marketer and for your next influencer campaign, don’t shoot from the hip. Take the time to set up a full proof influencer marketing strategy to gain a clear advantage over your competitors.