The days of mass advertising don't work anymore. The audience has become selective and the focus has shifted from generic marketing to niche and influencer marketing strategies led by influencers on different social media channels.
People trust people, and social influencers are at the forefront of driving brand's trust and voice to a broad audience. As per report, over one-quarter of consumers make a purchasing decision based on an influencer's recommendation. This says a lot about trust people in influencer which shows why you need have an effective influencer marketing strategy.
But a winning influencer marketing strategy is more than just reaching out to influencers to promote your product. It's more audience-centric and focuses on driving specific goals. And this article will help you create an effective and successful influencer marketing strategy.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing where brands collaborate with influencers to promote their product and services. In earlier times, celebrity endorsements were the major marketing tactic used to boost brand awareness, but the influencer marketing industry has taken a wide shift in today's digital age.
For example, In 2016, Dunkin Donuts partnered with 8 influencers to spread awareness about National Donut Day. Their successful influencer marketing campaign led to a 10x increase in their followers on National Donut Day, with a total reach of 3 million people during the campaign.
Social media platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, became an avenue for people to create content and build an audience, eventually turning them into huge influencers.
Khaby Lame won 100M followers on TikTok in just 17 months with his unique, humorous, and engaging videos. The best part? He has never spoken a word in his videos.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CUFpU6DIt27/
What's the Value of Influencer Marketing
We have bought various clothes and tried out tools recommended by our favorite influencers on Instagram and LinkedIn. One major deciding factor was trust. We have been following them for a long time and loved their content and the community they built.
All this strengthened our belief in their values and the products they shared. So, that's the best value you get from collaborating with authentic thought leaders and genuine influencers.
Another distinguished advantage is you can send them your free product, without any strings attached. If they like the product, they'll promote it organically because it is useful for their target audience. You don't get such a promotion via any other format, do you?
Moreover, they expand your brand reach massively, and even if people don't buy right away, you still get huge exposure and might drive sales later by using retargeting campaigns. All this can move the needle leading to higher influencer marketing ROI.
What Is An Influencer Marketing Strategy
An influencer marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines your campaign's goal, outreach, and content strategy for different niche influencers only. A well-thought strategy is like a roadmap with different checkpoints to ensure your campaign is running in the right direction toward your goals.
Lacking an effective influencer marketing strategy often leads to a lack of direction, which affects the possibility of tracking progress while at the same time negatively impacting your brand's relationship with the influencer in question.
- Alvin Wei, CMO, SEOAnt
4 different types of social media influencers
Before we move on to the influencer strategy part, it's helpful to learn about different types of influencers for brand partnerships.
Nano influencers
They have less than 10K followers, like Mom nano influencer Noelle Graham.
Micro-influencers
They have a 10K-50k following on different influencer marketing platforms. For example, lifestyle blogger Sharon Mendelaoui.
Macro influencers
These influencers following goes beyond 50k, like travel blogger Jean Lee.
Mega influencers
Influencers with 1M+ social media followers fall under this category such as Bretman (Da Baddest) Rock.
Steps For Implementing An Influencer Marketing Strategy
Define your target audience
Depending on this step, create your audience persona as your campaign type and the influencers you want to collaborate with. So, look into the following aspects:
- Demographics: Attributes like your audience's age, gender, language, ethnicity, nationality, job profile, etc., all come under the demographic details.
- Geography of the audience: Also, figure out where your audience lives. Geography matters when you have a location-specific product or service, like a local restaurant or shopping center.
- Social media channel they are most active: Targeting the right audience on the wrong channel will give you a different result. So, figure out where your audience is most active.
- Major pain points they face: This is imperative as once you have a list of pain points, you can define your content strategy more clearly.
To collect this information, look into analytics tools like Google Analytics, or talk to your sales or customer support team to collect major pain points of your audience.
Figuring out your target group will also help you find influencers with a similar target market.
Begin with a clear objective in mind
Once you're done with your audience analysis, set your campaign goal. Do you want to increase your product consideration, or do you want to increase sales and drive revenue for your business? Or do you want to reach a completely new target audience?
This step is crucial because your chosen influencer will vary depending on your particular campaign and's objective. Here's a table to illustrate that point.
Goal:
- Increase brand awareness
- Reach a specific or new audience
Type of influencer
- An influencer with a huge reach and engagement
- Influencers with a niche audience (often micro and nano influencers)
Besides, goal setting will also drive your content strategy for your campaign.
Consider the available budget and payment structure.
Look into the available budget for the campaign and decide which you would like to partner with. Many factors impact influencer pricing, including:
- The number of posts: The more posts you want, the more you'll have to pay. you want from them
- Their follower count: Influencers with 10K would charge way less than those with more than 100k following.
- Influential power: the impact they create and the level of reach and engagement on their post
- The social media channel they use: Influencers on Twitter charge less than influencers on Instagram or Youtube
- Agency fees (if you hire an influencer through an influencer marketing agency)
You can work with nano or micro-influencers if you have a low budget, say, less than 10,000 USD. Within this budget, you can create many posts to meet your goals.
But, with a huge budget, you can go for macro or mega influencers.
Also figure out how will you pay influencers for content creation. You can either pay them an upfront fee or share a portion of the revenue they'll drive via their posts.
Identify the right channel for influencer marketing campaigns.
The right social media platform or channel is as crucial as finding the right audience. If you choose a channel without your audience, you'll waste money, time, and other resources. So, once you clearly understand your target audience, find the channel they're most active on.
For instance, TikTok is the most used channel among GenZ, so it's a rational decision to run your influencer campaign here if your target audience falls into that group. But, if your audience is more inclined towards business, we would say Linked In or Twitter would be your best bet.
Find influencers and start outreach.
One key component of finding the right influencer is trust. To gain trust, they must share content that resonates with their audiences. The trust can be seen by analyzing the engagement rate on their social media posts.
How to decide if an influencer is right for my brand?
Follow these tips to vet potential brand partners:
- Do they post consistently and engage with the community they're building?
- Do they target similar niche audiences that you are trying to reach?
- Do their values align with your brand values?
- Do you like the content they create?
Besides, you can also run a verification check to detect fake followers or engagement rates on their posts using influencer marketing tools.
Once you have a list of potential influencers, start reaching out to them. Here's an email and DM template to use:
Email Template for Influencer Outreach
Subject: Collaboration Opportunity with [Influencer's Name]
Hi [Influencer's Name],
I've been following your amazing work in the [Niche] industry and believe we could create something great together. I represent [Your Brand Name], which offers [brief description of your brand and its mission].
We are interested in collaborating with you on a [Types of collaboration, such as a sponsored content, blog post, video, social media campaign, or product review]. Your unique perspective and expertise would bring our brand a fresh and valuable perspective.
In return, we are happy to offer [compensation or incentive, such as payment, exclusive access to new products, or exposure to our audience]. We can set up a quick call to discuss the details if you're interested.
Thank you for your time, and we look forward to the possibility of working with you.
Best regards,
[Your Name]
Direct Message (DM) Template for Influencer Outreach
Hi [Influencer Name],
I came across your profile and was impressed by your content in [niche]. I would love to collaborate with you on a project with my brand [Brand Name]. Your style and audience would greatly fit our product/service.
Would you be interested in working with us? We'd love to chat more about potential ideas.
Best regards,
[Your Name]
Do content research and create a campaign brief
It's time to work on your influencer marketing campaigns content. This is where you outline the deliverables you'll get from each influencer (if you're working with multiple influencers), timeline, Key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, etc.
Once you have outlined everything, share the details with the influencers. It's also a good time to draw a contract mentioning legal guidelines, payment structure, etc. To facilitate smooth communication and avoid any future disputes.
Measure your influencer marketing campaign performance
The last step is about how you measure the success of an influencer's campaign. How will you measure the influencer marketing ROI? What metric would you track? How will you optimize your strategy to meet your marketing goals? All these questions must be answered during this step.
For example, you can use UTM parameters for tracking links from a particular influencer campaign. In addition, use influencer analytics tools to detail different performance metrics across different channels on social media comprehensively.
Checklists For Influencer Marketing Strategy
Working with influencers, especially for the first time, can be complicated, but the work becomes easier if you have the right checklist to guide you. So, steal this comprehensive influencer marketing checklist to run an effective campaign.
- Collaboration agreement/contract: Outline the deliverables, payments, expectations, and terms and conditions.
- Influencer marketing campaign briefs: Share a brief of your audience, the campaign's content suggestions, timeline, etc.
- Brand style guide: Share your brand's voice and tone that you want influencers to portray to their audience.
- Onboarding document: Create a comprehensive influencer onboarding document to facilitate smooth communication.
- UTM templates: Share some examples or templates of UTM parameters often.
- Campaign report template: You can also share a premade template to help them add the campaign's performance data.
- Nondisclosure agreement: Get NDA signed before starting working with social media influencers.
- Legal guidelines: Outline the legal requirement that influencers must follow, like disclosing a brand partnership in their posts.
Template For Influencer Marketing Strategy
Influencer Marketing Strategy: A Sample
Company: A B2B SaaS brand that offers interactive product demo
1 The goal of the campaign
1. Brand awareness
2. Increase web traffic by 2X
Campaign duration: 2 months
2. Target audience
- Demographics:
- Geographics:
- Behavioral analysis:
3. Preferred channel/s to run the campaign
Instagram and YouTube
4. Influencer marketing budgets
50,000 USD
How will we find the right influencers?
- Channel specific search
- Competitor analysis
- Get a recommendation from our network
How to vet the potential influencers
- Look at the engagement metrics
- Analyze the content and audience similarity.
5. Influencer details
Influencer 1: Name
Channel they're active on Instagram
Payment: $X USD
Number of content pieces to create: 3
Influencer 2: Name
Channel they're active on YouTube
Fees: $X USD
Number of content pieces to create: 2
Influencer 3: Name
Channel they're active on YouTube
Fees: $X USD
Number of content pieces to create: 2
6. Payment structure
We'll pay an upfront fee to each influencer, and we decided not to allocate them a profit share.
Content ideas for each influencer
1. Co-create content: A story
Collaborate with social media influencers and our product marketing team to show behind the scene the making of our product. The idea is to show our value and why behind our brand.
2. Product demonstration + new customer promo code
The YouTube influencer will give a walkthrough of how to use our products, focusing on our value proposition.
3. Product review
We'll ask this influencer to try out our tool and give a review of it to their audience. This campaign aims to make it a more natural promotion where they tell the audience about how they use our tool and how much their life and work have improved since then.
7. Deliverables
Create a workflow to define the right owner to execute different content ideas. Steal this template
Influencer name
Content type
Team owner name
Deadline
Person A
Content type 1: Instagram Reel
Person A, B, etc.
DD/MM/YY
Content type 2: the Instagram story
DD/MM/YY
Content type 3:
DD/MM/YY
Person B
Content type 1: YouTube video
Person A, B, etc.
DD/MM/YY
Content type 2: A crash course
DD/MM/YY
Person C
Content type 1: YouTube video
Person A, B, etc.
DD/MM/YY
Content type 2: YouTube shorts
DD/MM/YY
8. Measurement of the campaign's performance
- Create a report on week-on-week growth in traffic.
- Check the number of signups and demo bookings during and after the campaign
- Assess the expected growth vs. actual growth
Key Takeaways
Influencer marketing works because it widen your brand's reach and amplify your brand voice. But, you need a strategic approach to carry out these influencer campaigns.
Alex Milligan, Co-Founder & CMO of, NuggMD, points out that with an influencer marketing strategy, you might be able to reach certain platforms and, even worse, reach your intended audience. With a good influencer strategy in place, it's easier to measure the success of a campaign and understand how to improve it.
We agree with his point as a strategy works like a roadmap to check your campaign's progress and build meaningful influencer partnerships.
