The influencer marketing campaign scramble. Where every brand, entrepreneur and page admin are DM’ing influencers around like headless chickens – late for the party.
Chaos on the web is an understatement.
Where the demand for influencers is so massive that everyone and their grandma, dog, and goldfish have become influencers – right?
You’re on board with the whole influencer marketing thing to help get your brand out there into the internet universe. Great.
Find an influencer, get them to post about your product, service or event and let your campaign buzz away?
Well, not quite.
I would love to lure you in and let you know that it’s all as easy and as simple as that.
The truth is, mindfully putting in the work into your influencer marketing campaign is what will get you decent results.
You can’t genetically modify this stuff. And you can’t pop it into the microwave, sorry.
However, I can say that once you get into the swing of planning your influencer marketing campaigns, the process will likely become easier with practice.
I’m not here to help you tick pop culture boxes as far as the fad of influencer marketing goes. I’m genuinely concerned about you achieving the results that matter to your brand.
And this guide is all about highlighting the most valuable execution details of your influencer marketing campaign.
Before We Start
Before we throw all the pieces onto the floor and start building the puzzle, this guide assumes that you already have a good influencer match for your brand and you’re ready to build your influencer marketing campaign.
If you don’t have influencers yet, please check out Afluencer to begin your search for influencers in a wide range of categories that could be an ideal match for your brand.
Now, back to the puzzle. Let’s set those important foundation pieces in place and then build your influencer marketing campaign up nicely.
1. What is Your Goal?
Please don’t just join in on the influencer marketing fad without being clear on your “why”. Your goal is your foundation for all your influencer activities. It will steer you towards what you should be doing and what you should not. Need some goal inspo? Here are some of the common high-level influencer marketing campaign goals:
Brand Awareness
If your brand is new, or if you’re launching a new product or service, the objective of brand awareness is to create visibility to as many people in your target audience as possible. Brand awareness is a way of introducing yourself to the market. You want to make an impression and let people know you exist.
If brand awareness is your goal, you’ll want to determine how many people you want to reach and specific demographics that match your target audience comes into play here.
Sales
Driving sales is probably the most common interest for most influencer campaigns. But I think it’s important to mention here that sales cannot exist without brand awareness. So if you have sales goals, it’s important to have sufficient brand awareness activities going on in your campaign, too.
If you’re interested in driving sales from your influencer marketing campaign, you need to set specific sales targets as well as account for estimated sales window periods.
Reach numbers and conversion rates will influence your sales numbers. So, you’ll want to consider the size of your influencer’s audience here.
If your sales target is too high for your influencer’s profile to practically absorb, you may need to recruit several influencers to make sales numbers happen for you.
Signups
Are you driving email signups, free trial account signups, free download signups or anything along those lines?
In marketing terms, these are considered as lead magnets and of course, are easier to accomplish than sales. Lead magnets play a part in the greater sales funnel of a campaign.
Not all sales strategies require lead magnets, however, they do help to capture your warm (interested) audience that could later convert into customers.
So, don’t underestimate the impact of targeting signups in your influencer marketing campaigns.
Event Attendance
Social media influencers have an influential voice and also an influential presence. So, it’s no surprise that some brands organize influencer appearances for brand events.
Influencers with loyal followers have the potential to bring in numbers to events.
If you have an upcoming event that you’d like to get buzzing, an influencer collab could help drive people to your event. For this goal, set a specific event attendance target for your influencer.
Market Research & Feedback
Tapping into influencer audiences is a great opportunity to gather valuable market research. Perhaps you’d like to get feedback on a new product or a new feature of your service. Maybe you’d like to hear from your market about their wants, needs, and problems.
Whatever it is, your next influencer campaign could get this done for you.
To translate this into a specific influencer campaign goal, your market research and feedback goal could be in the form of post comments or form submissions.
Build Marketing Collateral
Many brands miss out on the opportunity to get fresh new marketing collateral created by influencers. Influencers are also creators of content and not just sharers of content.
Your next influencer campaign could get you a fantastic library of new product marketing content. There’s an abundance of influencers ready to snap away, that engaging with them may even work out cheaper than outsourcing the job to a professional photographer and hiring models.
If you’d like your influencer to produce marketing content for your next campaign, specify the content specifics that should be produced for the campaign.
Photos, videos, blog posts, live videos and competitions are some examples of content that influencers could produce for you.
2. What Will Your Influencers Need?
Now that you have your influencer marketing campaign goals clear, what does your influencer need to accomplish them?
Do they need sample products to produce photos and videos? Do they need to be educated on how your product works? Do they need a media kit with your logos, images, videos, and banners?
Do they need their own custom influencer coupon code to share with their audience to help track sales?
If you’re hosting an event and your influencer is making an appearance, do you need to make special arrangements pre and post the event for your influencer?
It’s important to consider how your influencers need to be equipped in order to do their part to create successful campaigns.
Here’s where you need to understand what you’ll need to provide for the campaign. And of course, support your influencer with what they need.
3. Define the Collaboration Agreement
It’s in everyone’s best interest that expectations are clear. And all expectations of both parties should be defined in a collaboration agreement. Initially, this is communicated as a proposal and after deliberations and negotiations, there should be a signed agreement to this effect.
Here are some important details that should be highlighted in the agreement.
Deliverables
What are the specific tasks that the influencer should achieve by the end of the campaign? Are they required to produce specific types of content? What social media platforms will you require them to publish on? And at what frequency?
If your influencer is attending your event, do you require them to give a public speech?
Do you have specific engagement and sales targets you need your influencer to achieve?
Do you need your influencer to give you copyrights to the content produced?
You need to be specific on your expectations from the influencer and in the same breath, you should also highlight the items that you will be responsible for.
Terms & Rules
If you have certain brand guidelines that you’d require your influencer to follow, you need to detail it here. Communicate what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, where applicable.
Do you require your influencer to give you category exclusivity over a certain period of time? I.e they shouldn’t promote any other brands in the same category for the duration of your campaign.
Detail all the terms and rules in the agreement.
Duration
Every influencer marketing campaign should have a start and an end date. Tasks need to be accomplished and campaigns need to be measured. Some campaigns are time and season sensitive. Failing to keep to timelines could be a complete waste of a campaign.
Having a defined campaign duration allows you to keep the collaboration controlled.
Never leave your campaign open-ended even if you’d like every influencer under the sun to promote your brand forever.
Set duration terms and you can always have them renewed after reviewing performance.
Rewards
How will you be rewarding your influencer for the collaboration? Will you be paying them a commission on sales? Will you pay them a media rate? Are you giving them free products? Or will there be mutual media coverage?
Communicate how your influencer will be compensated for activities.
Also, take care to mention payment timelines to manage expectations. If you only make payments 30 days after the campaign has ended, you should let your influencer know.
4. Monitor and Measure Campaign Performance
Now once you’ve plugged in your campaign and all is live, you shouldn’t forget about it. Depending on the goals set for the campaign, you should monitor and measure campaign performance at regular intervals. Why? This will give you insight into what’s working and what’s not working.
You probably should make use of good analytics tools that will give you metrics on the impact of your running influencer campaigns.
What are the actual performance metrics against the target goals?
In terms of timelines, how long does your influencer has left to meet targets?
You also need to keep a check on whether your influencer is following activity requirements as per the agreement.
Monitoring the campaign will give you valuable insights that will enable you to make objective adjustments and also ensure that the plan is being followed.
5. Engage with Your Influencers
An influencer marketing campaign isn’t complete without actually collaborating with your influencer throughout the process. Remember that it’s the influencer that has direct contact with the audience. Check-in with your influencers about their thoughts and even ideas around the campaign.
Including them in the strategy and optimization process of the campaign may help create a solid campaign specially crafted to suit their audience while also meeting your brand goals. A win-win for all.
So, in other words, become friends with your influencer.
Just maintaining a good relationship with them, in general, may even inspire them to go above and beyond the agreement where they could give you extra coverage or create extra content – just because you’re nice to them and you made them feel included.
6. Optimize the Campaign
Now between monitoring and measuring your campaign and engaging with your influencer, you have the opportunity to optimize your campaign based on the data.
Maybe your website sale is about to end but the influencer campaign is performing really well, so you may consider extending the sale to max out on revenue.
Or perhaps you notice that a specific social media channel isn’t performing well, so you could stop the coverage on that channel and instead increase coverage on high performing social media channels.
Measure. Engage with your influencer. Optimize. Repeat.
7. Post-Campaign Report
You don’t have to produce one, but if you’re serious about influencer marketing as an important strategy for your brand, then it’s to your advantage to create a post-campaign report.
This is a high-level summary of the performance of the campaign, any problems or challenges faced and what could be improved on.
You could also get feedback from your influencer after the campaign has ended about their experience, too.
Why? This information will help you improve future campaigns. If you’re in it for the long run win, this post-campaign report will be worthwhile.
Conclusion
I hope that by now you’re mindful of not just how to create an influencer marketing campaign, but you’re now aware of the potential of all you can accomplish with a well-crafted campaign.
Influencers can help you achieve more than just post likes and website visits. Consider the collaboration opportunity to also conduct market research as well as build a beautiful library of new product photos and videos.
And influencers can be maxed out offline too for event appearances to drive attendance.
Equip your influencers with all the resources they need to perform successfully, define the collaboration agreement to manage expectations, measure performance, regularly engage with your influencers and optimize your campaign accordingly.
That’s it.
And if you’d like to get super coverage for your influencer marketing program and connect to influencers across the globe for collaboration, you can sign up for brand coverage on Afluencer.
So. Are you ready to turn the key on your next influencer marketing campaign?
Learn more about creating a roadmap for your next influencer marketing campaign, in this great infographic from Mediakix.
