In this article, I’m going to walk you through how to set up a social media influencer marketing campaign strategy from start to finish.
But, before we dive in, if you are new to this site, make sure to check out some of our previous articles on our blog to give you the knowledge you need to grow your brick and mortar business.
Here are two from earlier this month:
Now let's dive into the power of social media influencers.
The steps to set up an influencer marketing campaign.
1. Set your goal (s)
2. Define your budget
3. Research your influencers
4. Reach out to your influencers
5. Negotiate terms & put plan into action
6. Track & review to see if your campaign actually worked
Step 1. Set your campaign goal (s).
The first step is to ask yourself what the goal is. Why do you want to work with an influencer (also referred to as a KOL - Key Opinion Leader)?
Aside from sales, there are other goals that you might want to achieve.
These can be:
Build awareness
Improve conversion (newsletter subscribers, in-store bookings, etc)
Increase your social media engagement interactions
An example of a goal could be: I want 200% of my marketing effort (my marketing cost) in return.
Step 2. Define your budget.
The next thing you want to do is to set aside an influencer marketing budget.
There are various ways you can compensate your influencer (and I’ll talk about all the different ways to compensate influencers later on in this article) but for the sake of structure, let’s stick to one example when touching on your marketing budget for your influencer campaign.
For example, if you decide you want to pay your influencer in a product, your budget might look something like this:
Furthermore, let’s say you want to work with 10 influencers. Your influencer budget will then look something like this:
As you can see, it can be as simple as just noting down your campaign goals and costs on a simple document.
This should give you a rough idea of how much you would be willing to spend on an influencer. Now, let's move to the exciting part - finding the right influencers for you.
Step 3. How to find influencers?
The very first thing you want to decide on is the type of influencer you want to work with.
Tip: Note that in the process of choosing the type of influencer for your campaign, you want to make sure the type you choose meets the goal and budget you listed in step 1 and step 2.
Types of influencers:
Micro influencers.
Mid-tier influencers
Top-tier influencers
There are ups and downs to each of these types of influencers.
Micro-influencers:
Less than 10k followers.
Pros: Brands like to work with these people as their audience is genuine and dedicated.
Cons: These people will lack experience as they are not used to this type of work.
Example of a male Irish micro-influencer, Stuarts Select Style
Your mid-tier influencer:
Has between 10K – 100K followers.
Pros: Their audience is also genuine and dedicated.
Cons: These people will most likely be looking to get paid with money. We need to respect that, as some of these people might actually be making a living off their channel.
Example of a male British mid-tier influencer, Gurj Sohanpal
Your top-tier influencer:
Has between 100K – 1M followers. They are very exciting for brands to work with, because of their reach. And a shout out from these people could make an impact on your business overnight.
Pros: Their reach and impact, if their audience fits with your product.
Cons: As influencers grow, they do tend to lose connections with their audience, and their niche might start to dilute. So don’t just look at the number of followers. You want to make sure their audience is located within the area you serve and that they fit the profile of the people you like to reach.
Examples of top Irish influencers; Niall Breslin (above) and James Patrice (below).
No matter the size of the influencer, always ask to see a screenshot of the analytics of their social media account. With this, you can see if their audience falls within your reach, gender and target age group.
Here’s an example of the analytics you would want to look at of an influencers' Instagram account.
Source Neil Patel
Outside validating if your influencer reaches your audience, you are also going to want to confirm that this content creator can create the type of content that you are looking for. Just make sure to check their past work to do this.
For example, if you are a menswear shop owner, you want to look for content in regards to good styling and taste that would appeal to your target audience.
Now you are ready to reach out to your influencer with a message.
Step 4. How to approach influencers?
This is the part that a lot of business owners fall down on. They get nervous. They don’t know what to say. They get intimidated by the fact that these social media influencers have a lot of followers.
But hey, let me share some insights with you. The hype is always less than what you think it is. If someone has 50K followers, you are probably imagining that they are getting 100 DMs (direct messages) a day. BUT the reality is that they probably aren’t getting more than 5 DMs a day.
How to message influencers?
When writing your message make sure you include:
Who you are and your role at the company
A short sentence showing that you know them (and that this message isn’t spam).
A compliment of their previous work to set the tone
Short intro on why you are reaching out
The link to your website so that they can find out more about you
Sign off with your name, as well as social channels to your brand, as this will build credibility if they haven’t heard about your brand before.
Do not:
Make it long
All about you!
Do make yourself:
Friendly
Clear in what you are asking
And firm
Check out our messaging example for when reaching out to influencers below:
It’s crucial you make the message about them and their work (not you!) as that’s going to help warm up the conversation.
When reaching out via a DM, the tone is going to be a little bit more casual than if you reached out to them with an email. When reaching out on IG, you can, for example, even use a voice note, as this feels a little bit more personal and it’s a great way to stand out.
Once you found out that they are interested, you need to finalise and align on the details for the content you want the person to create.
Step 5. How to work with influencers?
Terms of partnership negotiation. This can happen over a phone call or emails back and forward. It doesn’t have to be a formal contract.
Ask yourself, what type of content do I want?
Do you want a feed post?
Do you want a story post?
It’s really up to you, and what makes sense for your business, your product and the influencer you are working with.
Building on the example mentioned earlier, if you are a menswear store owner, and your goal is to grow your awareness on Instagram, your collaboration requests might look something like this:
1 x Instagram video feed post showing how to pair the chosen product in 3 different ways
1 x Instagram story – product shot mentioning your brand.
This was a very simple example, but I think you get where to go with it.
This is how you would message your influencer on the collaboration details:
It’s really important you talk about the type of content that you want them to create. You want to look at content their audience has engaged with in the past to get a feel of what content performs the best with their audience. I would also ask the influencer for their professional opinion and recommendations on how to feature your product and services.
Tip: If your goal is to build your Instagram brand awareness, don’t pick a different channel even though the influencer seems to have a stronger audience there. When people are browsing on one channel, they don't usually like to be redirected to another platform.
Specific requests.
If you and the influencer are meeting common ground at this point, you can also put forward a list of additional requests for your influencer to fulfil. But, if the influencer is “doing more than their fair share” already, then don’t push it.
Either way, I recommend you give the influencer creative freedom. You’ve chosen them because you liked their work in the first place. Try to trust them to do a really good job, because a scripted speech normally comes across as lacking authenticity and stiff. So just keep that in mind as you are working with your influencer.
Timeline.
Next on your itinerary is a timeline.
If you want to see a first draft, just set the date for when you would like that to be due. Generally speaking, it is usually just a date of when the content will go live. You also want to set a time for how long you would like the collaboration to last.
For example, the story might only last for 24 hours, but the link to your product that the influencer agreed to add in their bio, will last for 1 week.
Mentions
This is the most crucial part of your influencer marketing campaign. It's really important you come to an agreement on how the influencer will mention you. This will be the connection that the influencer makes between their audience (your potential customers) and your brand.
Ask yourself:
Do you want your name to show up on the screen?
Do you want to be tagged in the photo?
Or maybe you want them to include a link to your website in their description or Bio.
Call to action (CTA):
This is the action you want the audience of your influencer to take after they see the content. In the best-case scenario, the influencer will have a very clear call to action.
An example of a call to action for an influencer campaign could be; - "Make sure you are checking out {your business name} to see their new collection" .
You also want to agree on compensation.
If you have a budget to pay for their time, you can simply ask them:
What are your rates?
Can you send me your price list?
But if you don’t have a budget, there are ways around it, like I mentioned earlier.
You can give them something of value that’s not just a simple exchange of money.
Just keep in mind that if the roles were reversed, and you were the influencer, would you be happy with what you are about to offer them?
Product: You can exchange products for content. This is a very popular way to carry out an Influencer relationship. You can also offer your influencer a discount that they can offer to their audience with the promotion, to elevate their desire to make a buy.
You can exchange professional opportunities for content. You can invite an influencer to come and design a custom collection in exchange for them talking about it on their social media This can be a win-win. The influencer gets to add this unique opportunity to their experience as an influencer and you get to add a new collection with a face behind the line + free promotion.
Ad Spend: This is another idea. Actually one of my favourite ones. You can exchange ad spend for content. This can be done in two ways. After the influencer has created the content (a photo or video with your product) and posted it onto their social media platform, get them to send you that content and then:
1. Run the content as an ad on your end. Using your credit card, the Ad spend is on you (with micro-influencers you can even ask to take over their ad account and get someone from your team who is familiar with Facebook Ad Manager to set up and execute the ad for them).
2. Or give them an ad budget to run the ad on their end
The reason why this works is because you are getting exposure from the content that they shared and they are getting growth support from your ad budget.
The next step is to track and review to see how your campaign worked.
Step 6. Review and track results.
At this stage, all you want to know is if the influencer actually brought back return on your investment. Remember, in the beginning, we said we wanted to make double (200%) return.
Example: So if you set aside €25 for an influencer, you want to make sure you are getting €75 back.
To track the performance, it's important you give your influencer one of the following two:
A unique tracking code
Or a promo code
A unique tracking code (also known as UTM) is a unique link made just for our influencer that allows you to see how many people clicked on this link and made a purchase. If the collaboration is on Instagram, the link can be inserted in the influencers Instagram bio during the time of the collaboration. You can use a free tool called UTM base. This tool allows you to generate a tag at the end of your product link, where you can set the tag (the medium) to be the name of the influencer.
Just make sure you connect your website with Google Analytics (a free tool by Google that analyses the performance of the traffic coming to your website)
Don’t worry. This might sound complicated, but it's actually not. And there's plenty of easy and quick tutorials online on how to set this up. Like the video I've included below.
Alternatively, you can use a unique promo code, that the influencers fans and followers can use online or when visiting your offline location.
Tip. Make sure you don’t re-share the content yourself, otherwise you will corrupt the testing by offering the influencers' benefits to your own customer base and cause the test to be voided.
Once the campaign is over, you can measure your results vs. your initial goal. At this point, you can see if you want to work with this influencer again and keep that relationship going.
On the other hand, you might discover that your campaign didn’t bring in what you thought, and in this case, you might want to try a different influencer or different type of content.
Starting small at the beginning to see if influencer marketing is a viable traction channel is definitely the best thing to do. Some business owners might find that influencer marketing works for them, while others might not. If influencer marketing isn’t for you, then just make sure you are keeping up to date with your marketing education to find those winning tactics. You can do this by subscribing to our newsletters. Just head to our report page to sign up for free. We send one email a week with tonnes of information, from how your business can save more money to how to respond to negative reviews.
That’s it! Congrats on getting started with influencer marketing. I hope it will bring your business that boost it needs.
If you are interested in learning about how your business can easily attract an influencer to partner up, design their own custom collection and then talk about it on their social media, keep reading.
One of the huge benefits that some brands around the Republic of Ireland and United Kingdom have is that they are able to offer walk-in customers virtually any fabric, design and fit with they like, without paying for 1 unit of inventory in advance.
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If you found this article useful, give it a like or comment. It will help me and my fellow writers know if you found content like this useful so that we can better serve you in the future.
Cheers,
Camilla
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