Influencer marketing tips Archives

3 Main Tips to Win the Battle of Influencer Marketing Campaigns

As influencers continue to be a hot topic on social media, influencer marketing is becoming more and more popular. Thus, we start seeing more sponsored posts in our feed every day, and that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. COVID-19 lockdowns have been quite devastating for many industries, however, coronavirus seems to fuel the fire for influencer marketing. In fact, 63% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets during 2021. Based on data from Mediakix, Business Insider estimates that brands are expected to spend up to $ 15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022.

According to Mediakix, 89% of all marketers find ROI from influencer marketing comparable to or better than other marketing channels.

When we take the influencers’ impact on the consumers’ purchasing habits on the one hand, and the influencer marketing statistics which I mentioned above, on the other hand, we can straightforwardly claim that influencer marketing is the best of the effective marketing strategies. However, when it is used wrongly, it not only damages the brands’ online presence but also its reputation.

So as you see, influencer marketing is sensitive. It isn’t just about finding someone with an audience and offering them money so they can say good things about you. When you start your influencer marketing campaign, you should take some steps and avoid taking some. What are the secrets of successful influencer marketing campaigns? What should brands pay attention to during their campaigns? In this blog, we’ll generally talk about you need to consider to avoid your brand becoming a loser and make your bank account look like a phone number.

1. What are you trying to achieve from an influencer marketing campaign?

Are you building awareness about an upcoming product, creating buzz about services, increasing social engagement, or driving clicks to your website?

It’s important to set up specific goals before starting a campaign(in fact, the first and foremost thing you should do) because it is like a guideline for tracking and measuring success throughout the campaign. Also, these goals assist you to ensure that influencers are on the same page with your brand.

Brands must be as clear as day in their campaign goals. Clear and brief influencer marketing goals are crucial to a successful influencer campaign. Your campaign goals can be various and specific for your brand. However, in influencer marketing, the campaign should target at least one of these three goals:

Build brand awareness and strengthen brand online presence.
Increase social engagement and interactions.
Generate leads and drive sales and profits

If you focus on too many goals in one influencer marketing campaign, that is not effective as well. So, every influencer campaign should target one or maybe a couple of main business objectives.

2. Your most important criterion when choosing an influencer is number of followers?

Your-most-important-criterion-when-choosing-influencer-is-numbe-of-followers

Then you already lost the battle. Paying attention to only the influencer’s follower count is the most common mistake while choosing an influencer to promote a brand. It should not be the most critical priority of influencer marketing. On the contrary, brands should choose influencers who have a similar culture to their campaign. Finding the right influencers can be challenging. Brands should carefully analyze the audience, key metrics before starting collaboration because an influencer with a lot of followers doesn’t mean an engaging audience.

You can check out the influencer in the following sequence:

Go through the influencer’s pages.
Look at what kind of content influencer share:
Check whether the influencer’s culture fits with your brand.
Look at the engagement they get on their posts with the help of likes and comments. (However, Influencers can buy fake followers and pay like or comment on their posts that can mislead you.)

These steps will help you to explore and make a better-informed decision. Take time to dig into these details. However, searching for the right influencer on Instagram or elsewhere is time-consuming. This is where it makes sense to use Keepface.

How to find the right influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns?

As an influencer marketing software, Keepface focuses on finding the right influencer for your brand with any niche and audience. With the access of over 350K influencers & content creators, you can find the perfect match for your business. Keepface is an automated platform for brands to reach the most relevant influencers, communicate with them, and manage campaigns using real-time analytics.

Keepface influencer marketing software helps you identify, recruit, and negotiate with influencers in one platform. You can find influencers with any audience and engagement rates in the Keepface database with spending less time. Filter influencers by category, country, engagement rate, followers, gender, budget as well as analyze their key metrics to find the best-fitting influencers for your campaigns. You also get an in-depth analysis of influencers’ social profiles, performance data, and audience.

Also, you should consider fraudulent influencer factors. According to a report from Cheq, fraudulent activity is costing advertisers $1.3 billion in 2019. Fraud figures not only prevent the product from reaching the target audience but also causes brands to spend money without getting any noticeable results. When influencers use social media bots for increasing follower count and creating fake engagement, it becomes difficult to determine the credibility of influencers.

3. Be realistic when offering, make authentic relationships with your audience.

Real offers, communication, authenticity play a huge role in your influencer marketing.

Keep it real and make realistic offers. For example, in February 1992, Pepsi Philippines announced that they would print numbers, ranging from 001 to 999, inside the caps of Pepsi bottles. Certain numbers could be redeemed for prizes, which ranged from 100 pesos to 1 million pesos for a grand prize (roughly US$40,000 in 1992), Pepsi allocated a total of US$2 million for prizes. But an error at a bottling plant led to 600,000 winners — and lawsuits, rioting, and even deaths. One marketing campaign creates a big crisis not only for the company but also for the country. Certainly, the above is not an example of an influencer marketing campaign. However, brands should learn lessons from this mistake: it is better to stick to promises you can deliver on.

Also, communication and authenticity can affect your campaign’s achievement. If brands want to pursue a successful influencer campaign, then they must think about building real connections with their target audience. At least personalizing each message, avoiding cliche statements are ways to keep communication between brand and audience genuine.

Lamiya Babazade January 17, 2021

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Influencer marketing

Top 6 Mistakes in Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

We live at a time when there is so much competition amongst brands and services. This challenge has forced brands to come up with a highly effective marketing strategy to stay in business. One such is influencer marketing as a social media marketing strategy. For instance, in the online casino gaming, a brand such as Lightning Link is engaging influencers in their marketing strategy to create brand awareness.

According to a study conducted by Tomoson, businesses are making as much as $6.5 for every $1 used in influencer marketing strategy. The poll additionally rated influencers as one of the fastest-growing customer acquisition channels.

We highlight 6 of the most common mistakes in influencer marketing strategy.

#1 Not Cherry-Picking an Influencer for your Marketing Strategy

If you pick a wrong influencer, your marketing strategy will barely result in sales. The biggest assumption that we make is that more social media followers would result in more sales, while it is not an obvious cause.

To effectively pick an ideal influencer for your online business’s marketing strategy, we recommend that you consider the following:

Scrutinize the Influencer Followers

For influencers, followers make one of the most critical marketing strategy elements, and hence they are always on the race to bag them. Surprisingly, some influencers purchase ghost ‘followers’ such as bots, which would always have their numbers spiking. Looking at the posts by most influencers, you will always find the bots posting unrelated or incoherent comments, which should be a red flag.

Analyze Previous Influencer Engagements

If a competitor previously used the influencer in their marketing strategy, it would be prudent to analyze the level of engagement on their posts. A keen analysis of the influencer posts helps you understand whether the comments and interactions are by organic followers or bots. You will know rich influencer interactions from the comments and feedback on inquiries made by followers.

However, there might be posts with followers who comment or engage more with the influencer’s personality instead of the product. This only means that this influencer might not be ideal to be one of your marketing strategy components.

#2 Having No Primary Goal in Mind

Since you are considering an influencer for your marketing strategy ideas, do you have any specific goal in mind?

It would be a waste of resources to engage an influencer without any intent. Just getting the product mentioned is not always an end to itself.

Thus in your business marketing strategy steps, you need to pause and analyze your primary goal for involving an influencer. Some of these goals could be:

To increase your own brand social media following.
To capture a new audience through brand awareness.
To drive sales and business leads.

Develop a specific communication strategy for any of these goals without a general one unless under special circumstances. This critical component should point you in the direction of the right influencer for that marketing strategy.

#3 Failing to Measure Results in the Marketing Strategy

To gain a return on investment (ROI) in your marketing strategy, measure the effectiveness of the influencer campaign vis-à-vis the set goals and objectives, ensure that each objective ties to a measuring metric, and link the results.

If, for instance, you aim to drive traffic to a site like Lightning Link, insert tracking links on the website. The tracking helps you understand if there is any new traffic to the site resulting from the influencer’s posts.

On the other hand, if gaining more social media followers was your primary goal, use relevant social media analytical tools to gain some insights. At the end of it, the results help you analyze your marketing strategy and learn from any mistakes in future influencer engagements.

#4 Ignoring the Few Posts by Micro-influencers

While celebrity influencers have millions of followers, micro-influencers rake in between 1000 to 100,000 followers on social media. We recommend that you target both types of influences but with a balance on the volumes of their postings for your marketing strategy.

Develop a marketing strategy whereby a given number of micro-influencers will post a certain number of posts per day and for a certain duration. The repeated posting will result in the audience remembering the message or call to action much longer.

#5 Sitting Back as Influencers take Center-stage

Once you came up with a clear marketing strategy for online business and identified an influencer to champion it, you should not take a back seat. Influencer marketing requires that you walk with the influencer throughout the marketing campaign.

If you identified the right influencer for the products, you would expect that inquiries, comments, calls, and reactions would be on the rise. Practically, it is nearly impossible for the influencer to respond to all these inquiries. It is at this point that you kick in and address the relevant questions concerning your brand. No matter how long it takes, keep track of the post, and respond to queries.

#6 Treating Influencer Marketing Strategy as Actual Sales

A big mistake made by businesses that hire influencers for their marketing strategy is assuming that influencer marketing is actual sales. In the real sense, influencer marketing strategy is just that; marketing.

Influencers could help drive traffic to your website or social media platforms, which would make most of the time drive sales. As marketers, you need to involve them in your marketing strategy so that they own the process and become persuasive in their pitches.

Conclusion

Finally, social media influencers have become a big hit, and if tapped into correctly coupled with a proper marketing strategy can magically create the much-needed sales leads and traffic.

Do you know of any other mistakes made in influencer marketing strategies? We would love to hear from you in the comment section below.