Just like any other marketing strategy, there are many levels to an influencer marketing campaign. The basics are crucial: find a fit for your brand, establish a budget, and be thoughtful and thorough when engaging your influencers. However, you’ll undoubtedly have lots of questions to further refine and fine-tune your campaign, both on present and future ventures; specifically—the dreaded ROI issue. It can be difficult to grasp how to quantify your investment, both to your team and to the folks that approve your budget. So, here’s a few hints to get your numbers and strategies on point.
The Perfect Fit
You have done a lot of research to establish a consumer profile for your potential buyers. It follows, then, that you should do the same for the influencers you’d like to work with. Here’s an identification worksheet from one of the leaders in the influencer identification game. Of course, you’ll want to distribute it to your marketing team…but pass it along to your sales and customer experience team as well, and any other client-facing department you can think of. There’s ample opportunity for this type of strategy to improve all levels of the sales funnel, as this post outlines. Basically, the more specific and targeted the influencers are, the better chance that the right eyeballs get on your brand which means great things for the ROI of your campaign.
Crunching the Numbers
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Return on investment calculations can be tricky for more traditional campaigns, and even more so for influencer marketing. Executives, particularly those who aren’t up to date on how this strategy works, often have difficulty quantifying and justifying it. The real issue is, however, exactly what the measurable is. Obviously, sales is the bottom line, and continually developing software like GroupHigh and Traackr are making it easier every day to configure ROI in the conventional sense. Hiring an A-lister celebrity to hawk a product will likely boost that bottom line for you…with a hefty fee. So you may want to consider the “mid-level” influencer. That said, are you really looking at the right metric? The true power of this strategy, and this is crucial, is brand awareness and personal engagement. Increasing your voice through diverse and multiple channels to loyal followers is the value here, and that’s the golden ring you should be reaching for. Once you start factoring engagement (i.e. shares, likes, comments, etc.) into your final return, you should see more numbers breaking your way.
Over and Over
Here’s another way to get the most out of your campaign: repurpose. All the earned content that your influencers produce can be used by multiple departments in various ways including social media and on our website for as long as it’s effective. That’s a big deal. Brand-produced content not only costs you time and money, it’s losing effectiveness to the consumer. Think about it: recommendations from others, whether it’s reviews on Amazon or a detailed demonstration of a product by a top blogger, are now almost always a part of the buying process. And a brand telling you how badly you need their product, through any medium, rings a bit hollow. Using your earned content wisely doesn’t only spike interest, it can keep the slow and steady push of brand awareness moving and expanding over the next several months.
There are ever-evolving strategies in this field, and we’ve just scratched the service. We’ll continue to post these tips here on this blog, so stay tuned. And we’d love to hear if you have any yourselves! Please post below, and we can chat about it!
