How Do You Create a Viable Influencer Marketing Plan?
Influencer marketing, like any other digital marketing discipline, necessitates a deliberate approach in order to produce meaningful outcomes without wasting anyone’s time.
Setting precise goals for your influencer marketing campaign and selecting which metrics to employ to gauge performance are the first steps in this strategic strategy.
Set the proper objectives.
Your influencer marketing campaign’s objectives should be in line with your company’s requirements.
Your objectives may include the following, depending on your current situation:
- The flow of traffic (any non-paid source is applicable here)
- A greater number of branded search queries
- There are more brand mentions.
Increasing the number of referring domains
The expansion of your network: the number of influencers with whom you can collaborate and involve in your marketing efforts.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of setting the correct goals. Everything that follows — the campaign execution strategy, reporting KPIs, and so on — will fall apart if you don’t figure out what you’re doing.
If your major goal is to increase high-quality brand awareness, for example, you should work with specialists who contribute to top-tier industry blogs. If you need traffic more than anything else, though, you should deal with bloggers who have a larger audience; the quality of their blogs is secondary. As you can see, these two objectives necessitate opposing and nearly incompatible implementation strategies.
Make a list of influencers with whom you’ll collaborate.
You’re ready to go on to the next step: developing a list of influencers to work with once you’ve defined your objectives.
Use BuzzSumo in addition to searching for influencers on Google, which is a great method. This tool allows you to find the authors in your field who are producing the most engaging material. It provides you a list of the most popular posts on topics related to your target keywords in specific. It also displays the top blogs in your niche where these authors contribute.
Followerwonk is another tool for finding prominent people. You can use this tool to look for target keywords in people’s Twitter biographies. You can also export a list of a well-known brand’s followers in your niche and organise them by number of followers. This method reveals the brand’s most popular followers – ostensibly, these are the ones with the most clout.
Finally, there’s a programme called Pitchbox. It compiles a list of industry influencers and provides you with their contact information, including email addresses, social media profiles, and website addresses. It also allows you to automate the process of communicating with these influencers, greatly speeding up the outreach process.
What is the mechanism behind it? It, like many other tools, necessitates a keyword list. The tool then looks for the most popular content pieces that rank for those keywords, extracting the author names and contact information. Please keep in mind that these keywords should be as precise and thorough as possible for the best results. Otherwise, you can end up with contacts who aren’t relevant to you.
Make Friends with Influencers
You only get one chance to make a first impression. When reaching out to new influencers, keep this in mind. When dealing with experts and influencers, the biggest and most typical mistake made by marketers of all levels of skill is to ask for something before delivering any value.
Key Steps to Reaching Out to Influencers
Your initial message to influencers and communication with them are just as important as your influencer marketing strategy. Here’s an example of a good communication outline to get you started.
Find a way to provide value to their lives. Find out what they’re working on now and how your company can assist them. You could, for example, use your social media channels to promote their website or content, give them things to test, or send them swag. Don’t just send leftovers from your last conference if you decide to give them freebies. Make the things one-of-a-kind for a specific person. It demonstrates that you care about the connection and want to invest in it.
After that, you might inquire about their willingness to assist you in promoting your business. Simply ask if they want to cooperate with you rather than sending them a to-do list. You might be surprised to learn that if you do a good job with the first step, the majority of influencers will respond “Yes!”
Consider the future. What are some ways you might include them in your marketing campaigns? Including their remarks in your postings, allowing them to conduct an event — such as a webinar, podcast, or Twitter chat — and offering co-branded material are just a few options.
Keep the relationship going. Keep an eye on their new content, promote it throughout your networks, and stay in touch to show that you care about what they’re doing. This will assist you in forging a strong bond between your brand and the influencers.
Sometimes, a healthy, mutually beneficial connection with an influencer might last for years. Monitor your connections with influencers to ensure they’re the perfect fit for your organisation, just as you do with your marketing initiatives. The objective is to cultivate relationships with people who can help your business and industry grow. You can end the relationship and try something new if and when the time comes.
