It no longer requires expensive up-front payments on collaborations to achieve success with influencer marketing. In fact, it is quite easy and straightforward as a company to get started with this marketing discipline - even for newly started entrepreneurial companies.
In this post, we will guide entrepreneurs on how they can quickly achieve results that can be felt on the bottom line through influencer marketing in 2021.
Brief introduction and 'definition' of influencer marketing
At Make Influence we ourselves work from this definition of the term:
"Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating relationships with one or more influencers and getting them to promote a product or brand against payment and/or gifts.
The strategy lies in the field between social media, product marketing, user reviews and PR. But where in PR you reach out to journalists to get coverage in a newspaper or magazine and exposure to their readers, here you reach out to influencers to get mention on a social media."
Then that part is under control. Let's dive into the 6 specific pieces of advice.
Advice 1: Set concrete goals
Just as when you sat down and developed your business plan, you know that it is necessary to set some concrete goals.
Ask yourself:
- What is the purpose of working with this marketing effort?
- Long-term branding of the product and/or company?
- Or quick direct sales?
These frameworks are set from the start of the collaboration. This also means that both you and the influencer agree on the project and the desired goal.
Both approaches can be effective, but create focus and avoid putting yourself between two chairs.
Advice 2: Get your target group defined
Now you have hopefully got your goal under control. Then you have to find out who on earth you intended to buy your product/service - i.e. the target group.
There are a lot of different target group analyzes and theories.
Depending on how young or old your website or webshop is, we recommend you to scour your Google Analytics for precious insights. Gain insight into gender distribution, age, trading patterns etc. It can be a cheap way around expensive tests and analyzes of the market.
Advice 3: Choose the right influencer
“Well! So I shouldn't take the wrong one?”. It may sound quite obvious, but choosing the right influencer is crucial. But what do we mean here?
You have just selected and defined your target group. From here you have the opportunity to match these demographic traits with the demographics of the influencer's followers.
Focus on the following:
- What kind of followers the influencer has - not what their SoMe-Feed looks like.
- Look at the influencer's exposures and reach - not their number of followers.
The number of followers on their channel does not in itself say anything about whether they can generate sales for your business. Range and exposures, on the other hand, tend to be some parameters that tell how strong the influencer's engagement really is.
Advice 4: Finances and payment
Nothing in this world is free. And the company's finances are something that every entrepreneur often has an extremely high focus on in the first several months.
The short version of the long story is that you have now found yourself one or more influencers that you want to collaborate with. So the question is: How much do you want to pay and how do you want to pay the influencer?
There are primarily two payment solutions: Up-front or performance-based.
Up-front: Before the start of the collaboration, the influencer is paid X number of DKK for what the agreed collaboration entails.
Performance-based model: Via affiliate links, the company and influencer can track conversions and sales via the collaboration. From this, the influencer will receive a commission of X % of the sales that they have generated on the campaign.
In certain cases, the two forms of payment can be mixed, depending on which influencer is collaborated with.
Advice 5: Set your influencer free
Remember that the influencer has achieved this amount of followers by being creative, innovative - and by being themselves.
A good piece of advice is therefore as a company not to set too many demands on how, when and where a lot of content, they need to put it up. Your followers will eventually also sit and look at this content and feel that the influencer is not acting like themselves.
It will come across as untrustworthy, and it will most likely damage the company's earning potential.
So let the influencer's creativity run free. It is of course sensible to have specific guidelines for what the influencer must not say/do (in relation to legislation/company policy). But at Make Influence, we often find that the best results are achieved when companies avoid making too many demands.
Advice 6: Make your influencers feel unique
As with other collaborations, you can benefit from nurturing the good relationship with your influencer(s). You can do this, for example, by offering them unique discount codes, or giving them access to see the company's upcoming products before everyone else.
The influencer will experience this as an additional reward on top of the current collaboration. It will probably give him/her inspiration for new possibilities for content development.
In the end, it is another person that you as a company work with. So nurture this relationship as you nurture many other relationships.
If you want to know more about performance-based influencer marketing and how it can benefit your business, you can read a lot more at makeinfluence.com. Make Influence is a data-driven platform where all companies have the opportunity to work with influencer marketing based on results and transparency.
The post was written by Astrid Dam Schiøller, Marketing Manager at Make Influence.
This blog has been translated by Startup Central.