Influencer Marketing is a form of marketing where brands cooperate with influencers on social platforms to promote products or services. These Influencers can be celebrities, bloggers, YouTubers, or even individuals with a certain number of followers on social networks, capable of influencing the audience’s shopping decisions.
In the modern marketing landscape, Influencer Marketing plays an important role in building brands and increasing product recognition. With the trust of followers, Influencers help brands reach target audiences more naturally and closely. This is especially helpful as consumers become increasingly skeptical of traditional advertising and prioritize genuine recommendations from people they trust.
In the article below, let’s discuss with Ecomobi how to effectively use Influencer Marketing.
Why has Influencer Marketing become so popular?
Influencer Marketing has become popular because of its ability to connect with target audiences effectively. The strong development of social networking platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube has created an ideal place for Influencers to build their own communities and create engaging content.
Additionally, Influencer Marketing helps convey marketing messages more diversely and flexibly. This marketing form can be customized to suit each customer, from introducing new products to increasing brand awareness.
7 effective Influencer Marketing strategy
Influencer Marketing can be very effective, but its success depends on how well the strategy is executed. Below are seven strategies that can help maximize the impact of your Influencer Marketing efforts, ensuring that your brand reaches the right audience and drives meaningful engagement.
Determine the objectives
Before starting any campaign, the business must clearly define its objectives. One of the most familiar models for identifying business objectives is SMART. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. Usually, the objectives that businesses choose will often be factors that directly affect the success of the campaign. Some indicators that businesses often pay attention to when setting goals include:
- Reach: For businesses want to reach new customers and increase their awareness of your product or service.
- Traffic: If businesses want to increase the number of people visiting the website, searching and learning about the product after viewing the influencer’s content.
- Sales and conversion: If businesses want the viewers or followers of KOL and KOC to convert into customers and bring revenue to the brand.
Identify target customers
After determining the objectives of the Influencer Marketing campaign. Every business must know what is the insight of their customers, as this information will help businesses understand what their customers want, thereby they can develop a suitable marketing strategy. Some notable factors that brands cannot ignore include their demographic information, pain points, purchasing behavior, etc.
To build a customer portrait, businesses must look back at where their previous revenue came from, and which customer files bring the most profit. Then businesses need to understand customer pain through forms such as in-depth interviews, surveys, and analysis of available data. This is the foundation for the Marketing team to know how to approach customers most appropriately.
Identify the key message
One of the most important steps when building a strategy is determining what the message for your Influencer Marketing is. You can only expect a KOL and KOC to introduce your brand to everyone with messages. The message is what customers will remember after each campaign and gradually forms a brand image in the eyes of customers.
In order to choose the right message for your campaign, businesses need to consider two factors:
Communication objectives
This will depend on the objectives of the campaign. If the aim is to increase brand awareness, the message should focus on building recognition and connecting emotionally with the audience. On the other hand, if the objective is to boost sales, the message should emphasize the benefits of the product or service, include clear calls to action, and highlight any promotions or incentives. By aligning the message with the campaign’s objectives, businesses can ensure that their communication is purposeful and drives the desired results.
Customer journey map
Next, businesses need to determine where customers are on the customer journey to have appropriate messages. At each stage, customers will have different behaviors, so different cognitive impacts are needed. The customer journey of an Influencer Marketing campaign can include 6 following steps:
- Awareness: At this stage, new customers only know about brands, products, and services. Influencer Marketing will help educate and inform customers about the brand’s products and services.
- Consideration: Customers already know about the products and services and show positive emotions about them. Businesses must give customers more target information and build relationships with them to drive their interest.
- Intention: At this stage, customers already have the intention to make a purchase, but they are not completely sure about it. This is because they lack of stimulation and impact to make purchasing decisions. To get customers truly ready to buy, businesses can offer trial usage, and webinars, and provide information to turn customers’ interest into intent.
- Conversions: To drive successful conversions, businesses must focus on every customer touchpoint throughout the purchasing journey. This means delivering a consistent and seamless experience from initial awareness to the final purchase. Businesses must address customer needs, answering questions, and providing a frictionless buying process at each stage will help build trust and encourage customers to complete their purchases.
- Retention: This is an important step to turn customers into loyal customers, businesses need to have a professional and effective after-sale customer care process.
- Referral: Business can turn their loyal customers into brand evangelists by sharing reviews and user-generated content. This way, more and more people will know about your brands without spending money, and there are high chance that this new audience will turn into a potential customer of your business.
Develop a specific plan
Next, businesses need to make a detailed plan to be able to operate the campaign as smoothly as possible. Some important contents that businesses need to determine include budget, channels, and content.
Budget
Determining the budget is a very important task for businesses. Incorrect cost estimates can cause many unpredictable consequences. For example, a lack of budget will cause a business’s original plan to fail because they lack the money to operate the original plan while changing the plan is also very difficult and time-consuming.
To estimate budgets, businesses must identify these factors:
- The campaign’s objectives
- Number of Influencers to collaborate with
- Which media platform to use?
Identify social media channels
Choosing the correct social media channels is also very important because different types of channels will cater to different audiences and content. For example:
- Facebook: This platform is extremely suitable for businesses to expand their reach to more audiences because of its versatility. Facebook supports a wide range of content formats, including text posts, photos, videos, live streams, and stories, allowing businesses to engage audiences in multiple ways. This versatility means that brands can tailor their content to fit different objectives, whether it’s educating customers, promoting products, or fostering community interaction.
- Instagram: Instagram is a hub for highly visual content, making it perfect for brands in lifestyle, fashion, beauty, and travel. Through posts, Stories, Reels, and IGTV, influencers can create aesthetically pleasing content that resonates with followers. This platform can have an emphasis on visuals and allows for creative expression, which often leads to higher engagement rates, especially when influencers use interactive features like polls, Q&A sessions, and live streams.
- TikTok: TikTok is famous for its short and creative videos with the advantage that the content can trend quickly. The platform’s algorithm favors innovative, engaging videos, making it ideal for campaigns aimed at quickly capturing the attention of a younger audience, which will increase the chance of converting the audience into potential buyers.
- YouTube: YouTube is very suitable for campaigns that want to utilize long-form content. This platform is usually where people seek detailed information and are willing to spend more time-consuming content. Some examples of popular YouTube videos are tutorials, product reviews, brand stories, etc.
Find the right Influencer
The right influencer is the deciding factor in the success of an Influencer Marketing campaign. To do this, businesses need to consider the following factors:
- Consistent with brand image: Influencers need to have a clean, positive, and reputable image, not related to sensitive or controversial issues. The influencer’s image also needs to match the values and messages the brand wants to convey.
- Suitable for target customers: Influencer must be someone the target customer regularly follows, likes, and has no negative emotions.
In addition, businesses should also evaluate based on the level of interaction and quality of content created by the influencer to make a reasonable decision.
Content preparation
The next step for businesses is to determine the content strategy for each video or article in their Influencer Marketing campaign. There are two primary approaches:
- Pre-Developed Content: Businesses can create the content in advance, outlining the key messages and themes they want to convey. This pre-built content is then shared with the influencer, who adapts it to their style while maintaining the brand’s core messaging.
- Influencer-Driven Content: Alternatively, businesses may allow influencers to develop content ideas that align with their unique style and audience. This approach leverages the influencer’s creativity and authenticity, often resulting in more engaging content. However, to ensure consistency with the campaign’s objectives and brand image, businesses must review and approve all content before it goes live.
This strategy helps maintain a balance between brand control and influencer creativity, ensuring that the content resonates with the target audience while staying true to the brand’s message.
Implement campaigns and evaluate effectiveness
After completing the content, businesses can broadcast the Influencer Marketing campaign as planned. Businesses need to closely monitor the feedback and influence of that article to optimize the content. Some outstanding indicators that can be used to measure the campaign’s effectiveness are:
- Engagements from followers (Views, likes, comments, shares, etc.)
- Number of clicks on link/registration/form
- Number of leads/purchases
- Revenue/return on investment (ROI)
- Brand memory/recognition
Mistakes to avoid when implementing an Influencer Marketing campaign
Influencer Marketing is an effective form of marketing that helps brands reach target customers through influencers on social media channels. However, not all Influencer Marketing campaigns are successful, so businesses must be careful when implementing their campaign.
Not checking content before posting
One of the most common mistakes when implementing an Influencer Marketing campaign is not checking the Influencer’s content before going live. This can cause negative consequences for the brand, such as loss of reputation, criticism, and even lawsuits for providing false information.
Therefore, businesses should ask Influencers to send you a draft of content before posting and ensure that the content is consistent with the brand’s strategy, goals, and values. In addition, businesses should also check whether the Influencer’s content violates any regulations of social media channels, to avoid having posts deleted or accounts locked.
Choosing an Influencer goes against the brand image and philosophy
Another mistake when implementing an Influencer Marketing campaign is choosing an Influencer that goes against the brand image and philosophy. Inconsistency in conveying the overall message of the brand will cause the business to lose credibility and be unprofessional in the eyes of customers.
Make sure the influencer’s style, tone, and audience are consistent with your brand. Businesses should also learn carefully about the influencer’s past to avoid potential risks and controversy.
Misjudging Campaign Metrics
Evaluating the success of your campaign based on irrelevant metrics, such as only caring about follower count instead of engagement or conversions, can lead to misguided decisions and ineffective strategies. Businesses should consider every aspect of the Influencers, including followers, engagement, clicks, etc. to monitor their campaigns.
Conclusion
Influencer Marketing has proven to be a powerful tool for brands looking to connect with their target audiences more authentically and engagingly. By carefully planning and executing an Influencer Marketing strategy, businesses can significantly boost brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, and ultimately drive revenue growth.
Contact us, Ecomobi:
– Fanpage: https://www.facebook.com/ecomobi.ssp
– Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ecomobi_ssp
– Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ecomobipassiovietnam
– Email: info@ecomobi.com
