10 Simple and effective tips for working with influencers

With influencer marketing, you are looking for people to share your company or brand, telling your story using their influence. We have covered the ‘what is’ before in our post Talking about influencers, now we will look at 10 simple and effective tips to get started working with influencers.

Before you start any marketing activities you need to establish your goals, and influencer marketing is no different. Ask yourself:

“What do we want from this and what would we consider to be a success?”

This will allow you to know what you need to measure and test your activities, meaning you can see whether something has worked or not. Set KPIs to review before, during and after.

By understanding your audience or target market, you will find it easier to identify your influencers. You need to look at who your customers are and think like they think, asking why they have chosen your business, brand or product.

You will then be able to identify purchasing patterns and what factors bring your customers together. You can use customer analytics and feedback to discover this.

Once you have established your goals and your audience, it’s time to start planning what sort of outreach you want to do.

Try targeting influencers to share brand related content, such as product photos, sponsored posts about a product or some company information. With this give creative control to the influencer so that what they share seems genuine.

You could also look at co-creating content with influencers. This can be specifically created with them to fit their platform or style, however it can take a lot longer to produce. But the audiences of their platforms will relate to content which sits naturally on their platform.

Run competitions or giveaways with influencers, asking for promotion or for them to run the competition. This is one of the most shareable of types of content and the quickest to execute, but it can rely heavily on the influencer having control of a competition.

With influencer marketing you want to concentrate on engagement over all-out promotion. You’re not running an ad campaign, instead you’re using influencers to tell the story of your brand.

Don’t look at influencers to simply share a pre-produced brand advert, because it will look as such and audiences won’t identify with it in the same way.

Your influencer marketing does not have to cover every platform, in fact you want to target the platforms most used by your target audience. Whether that is Facebook or Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest, online magazines and blogs.

You don’t want to focus activities on a platform your target audience does not engage with.

There are 3 types of influencer; which you use depends on your goals, audience and who and where you want to share.

1. Aspirational influencer – As the name suggests this would be someone your target audience aspire to be. Whether that’s a celebrity or someone with a large social presence.
2. Authoritative influencer – This is an influencer who is more specific, someone who holds authority in your target market. An expert that your target market already trust.
3. Peer influencers – These influencers are people who your target market will see as their equals. This could be friends, co-workers, and people of the same demographic.

You want to ensure the influencers you choose are what is right for your business/brand or product. Aspirational influencers may seem like a big score, but they may not be quite right for what you need. You don’t always have to aim high and work with celebrities. Sometimes someone knowledgeable in your target market may be a better choice, or quite simply peers, those with the same interests or previous customers might be who you want to target.

It’s important that you find the right influencer who will be most beneficial for your activities, the groundwork for this is done by following the previous steps. Then look for similar content, what the reach was and who was sharing it to build your prospecting list.

When researching influencers, look at their reach, what engagement they get and what the relevance of your brand is to them.

One of the best ways to approach an influencer is by using the personal approach. Avoid sending generic emails, let them know you have seen what they share and understand their profile.

Also ensure your subject line is something which grabs their attention. Don’t be too cocky, look to pay fair prices for their time. You can gauge budget on the type of influencer and their engagements.

When working with influencers you need to establish guidelines on what and how you want them to post, setting out exactly what you want from the start. You will know how an influencer works by the type of posts they share.

You can avoid asking an influencer to do something which they wouldn’t normally do, or work in a way which doesn’t fit their platform, from thorough research before you approach them.

Once you have completed your influencer marketing activities, don’t forget to review the work conducted. Did you meet your goals? Did the activities exceed expectation, or did they fall flat?

The only way you can build successful campaigns is to analyse where you went wrong and right, so don’t be defeatist if your first campaign doesn’t yield what you expected. You learn for the next time.