A Beginner’s Guide To Influencer Marketing: How To Start Your Next Campaign 

Influencer marketing can be an extremely effective strategy for your brand or business, but it can also be easy to get wrong. It’s not as simple as finding the biggest influencer within your budget and letting them do whatever they want; the process needs careful consideration and planning. Take a look at our beginner’s guide to Influencer marketing!

What is Influencer Marketing?

First off, what is influencer marketing? It’s the process of paying an influencer – i.e., someone who has influence online, usually through a large social media following – to promote your brand or product.

How to Start an Influencer Marketing Campaign

Arguably the most important step in influencer marketing is finding the right advocate for your brand. Obviously, they need to have a large audience on social media, but what sort of demographics make up that audience? It’s no use getting a 20-something fitness vlogger to promote your pet insurance company – you’d have no idea if you’re targeting the right audience.

So, firstly, you need to know who your target audience is. This could be through A/B testing or audience personas and segmentation, but you need to have a clear profile of the types of people you’re aiming content at. 

Identifying the right Influencer for your brand

You also need to ensure you work with an influencer who aligns with your brand values. It’s unlikely an influencer will agree to use branded assets or templates; they’ll want creative freedom, so you need to be sure that what they produce does not conflate your standards.

So, it pays to do your research. Look through social media, use keywords and hashtags in your searches to find appropriate influencers and create a shortlist of candidates. This way, you’ll only be contacting suitable influencers.

Look beyond vanity metrics and audience size, and pay attention to the quality of influencers’ posts and the engagement they have with their audience. In recent years there’s been an increase in the number of brands that work with micro-influencers who typically have audiences of 5,000-25,000 followers. 

Though their audience isn’t as large, it is highly engaging and pays more attention to what the influencer posts, creating more potential for your brand. Naturally, these influencers will also not be as expensive.

Engagement is a key aspect to look out for when vetting potential influencers to work with. It shows a level of trust with their audience and provides proof that their content is resonating with real people.

Sealing the deal

Once you’ve found the right influencer, it’s time to get down to the logistical side of things, which means making a deal. You need to be aware of your budget and where there’s wriggle room, then work with the influencer on coming to an agreement. 

Draw up a contract that outlines what content will be produced, when it will be delivered by and how much it will cost. You should also ensure the influencer adheres to the relevant advertising guidelines and laws of their location, which usually means they need to disclose the endorsement/partnership in their posts.

You should also be willing to hand over a fair amount of creative control to the influencer. They will have worked hard to build their following and their own brand on social media and will not want to compromise that too much. So, it’s likely that you’ll need to let them take the lead, but you should make sure you’re able to vet any content before it’s posted and provide key talking points to make the most of your content.

Analysing Results

Once the influencer marketing campaign is over, as you would with any marketing initiative, analyse the results. It’s best to have the influencer use a trackable link in their posts so you can see exactly how much traffic they delivered, but it’s also good to monitor engagements and reach.

At each&everyone, we handle this whole process for you, before we begin a campaign we provide guarantees based on your KPI’s and budget. We then use our bespoke analysis to identify the most effective influencers for your brand, handle briefs and manage content creation to ensure both you and the creator is happy with what their producing, and thoroughly analyse results and identify future ways to optimise the campaign, providing a detailed post-campaign report with future strategic suggestions.

Start your next Influencer Marketing Campaign

So, if you’re interested in influencer marketing, then hopefully, this short guide has given you something of a framework to move forward with; do your research, spend time getting to know the influencer and make sure your agreement is clear.

For help and advice on starting your next Influencer campaign, get in touch today!