Marketing

How to Run Your First Influential Marketing Campaign - Part 1

To run your first influential marketing campaign you need to be able to identify who your potential customers are and what drives them.

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Written By Daena King

Jan 2023 / Reading Length: 6 minutes

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To run your first influential marketing campaign you need to be able to identify who your potential customers are and what drives them. If you can discover who influences your potential customers and build a relationship with them, you will find people buy your products or services far more readily.

 

This is known as influential marketing which uses the power of social proof to create positive perceptions about a product or service.

Identifying Influencers

Identifying Influencers

There are different types of influencers depending on your brand’s buying audience. Some influencers are also consumers, known as innovators. Innovators are the consumers who will buy your products first. For example, they will stand in line for hours for a new product. Other types of influencers include bloggers, social media stars, reporters, consumer advocates and industry experts.

 

The 7 steps for identifying the right influencers for your brand, the first step is to identify the goals or your influencer marketing campaign. Before looking for influencers to work with. It is important to identify what you’re looking to accomplish.

Have different goals and how you want to achieve them

  • Brand awareness, if you goal is awareness, then working with an influencer who has a wider following might be worthwhile
  • Sales, influencer marketing, if done well can generate significant conversions.
  • Follower growth, an influencer can help you out, you could host a giveaway with an Instagram influencer, to be to make following your accounts a requirement to enter.

 

The second step is understanding your target audience, knowing your target audience is a key part of any marketing campaign and influencer marketing is no different.

 

Trying to find the right influencers to work with can be changeling, you should have a solid understanding of your target audience and everything about them.

 

Third step is deciding what type of influencer you’d like to work with

 

Different tiers of influencers based on follower count, please see tiers below.

  • Mega influencers: 1 million+ followers.
  • Macro influencers: 100,000 – 1 million followers.
  • Micro-influencers: 10,000 – 100,000 followers.
  • Nano influencers: 10,000 followers or less.

 

Fourth step, search for influencers, after narrowing your campaign goals, target audience and the type of influencer you’d like to work with, time to begin your research and search.

  • Search hashtags related to your industry or niche.
  • Look through tagged posts or mentions.
  • Start with one influencer, then search for related accounts.
  • See which influencers your competitors are working with.
  • Use an influencer marketing platform.

 

The fifth step is to know your influencer selection criteria, an influencer follower count is only one small piece

  • Engagement rate
  • Post frequency
  • Personality / tone of voice

 

Sixth step is negotiate compensation and deliverables, when you reach out to influencers, it is likely that you’ll have to do a but of negotiation to satisfy both parties

  • Gifted products
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Monetary compensation

 

And finally the last step is track your metrics.

  • Engagement rate
  • Reach
  • Impressions
  • Views
  • Positive sentiment
  • Link clicks
  • Conversions
  • Affiliate code usage
  • Follower growth

So let’s get started on running your first influential marketing campaign.

 

Campaign goals and KPIs

As with any marketing campaign, you need to know what you want to get out of it. Is your goal to boost awareness of a new product by 25 percent? Perhaps it’s to increase the size of your mailing list by 30 percent?

Whatever your goals, lay them out in advance. They will inform you how to connect campaign elements from influencers to content.

 

Ideal influencers

Now that you have your goals outlined, it’s time to start looking at your ideal influencers. Just like a customer persona, create an influencer persona. Think about businesses that complement yours, who influences for them? What topic of keywords might your target consumers use to search for content? What factors would stop you from selecting an influencer?

Remember a good influencer isn’t about reach, it’s about relevance. Just because a social media star has a massive audience, doesn’t mean they have the right audience. Check that your influencers audience fits in with your target demographic.

 

Social channels

Different social medial channels reach different audiences so your approach should reflect that. Here are some helpful pointers to get you started from Socialtyze:

  • Facebook – big among women aged 30+
  • Twitter – a strong concentration of 18-34 year olds, skews slightly male
  • Instagram – 90 percent of users are under the age of 35 and are split by gender 50/50
  • Pinterest – 85 percent of users are female from a broad range of age groups
  • Vine – 57 percent of users are female; great for organically reaching people under 30
  • Blogs – The average blog reader is 41, with a median age of 38; readers skew slightly male

Campaign and content types

When you run your first influential marketing campaign you will need to decide what kind of content you want your influencers to create. A good place to start is your goals and then work your way through to content. Some content types you may want to consider are: stories, Twitter parties, YouTube videos, photo galleries, and blog giveaways.

 

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