In today's digital age, influencer marketing has emerged as a potent force, transforming the way brands connect with their target audience. The power of influencer marketing lies in its ability to bridge the gap between brands and consumers. By leveraging the credibility and reach of influencers, businesses are creating authentic connections and brand loyalty.
While influencer marketing holds great promise, achieving a high Return on Investment (ROI) requires careful planning and execution. It's not merely about partnering with influencers; it's about crafting a strategic approach that ensures your efforts translate into tangible results. To get the best ROI, you need to follow a set of well-defined influencer marketing best practices. These practices encompass everything from selecting the right influencers to setting clear objectives, tracking key performance indicators, and adapting your strategies as needed.
Why is Influencer Marketing Effective?
Influencer marketing works well because it relies on expert endorsements. Niche influencers are seen as experts in a specific field among a particular group of people. When influencers showcase products on their own social media profiles, their audience tends to have more confidence in their judgement compared to conventional advertising.
Today, more than 50% of the sales volume is just a result of influencer marketing. It has the potential to deliver up to 11 times the Return on Investment (ROI) compared to traditional advertising. In 2020 alone, businesses were projected to allocate a minimum of $10 billion towards influencer marketing initiatives. This underscores the immense value of crafting best practices for influencer marketing campaigns. Such a campaign can serve as a powerful tool for elevating brand awareness and attracting new customers to your fold.
Influencer Marketing Best Practices To Maximize ROI
In this ad world, getting benefit from the full potential of influencer marketing is not just about finding the right influencers; it's about employing the best practices to ensure your efforts yield the best results.
In this blog, we will go through the best practices for influencer marketing tactics that will elevate your brand's visibility and maximize your ROI.
1. Setting Clear Goals For Your Campaigns
The first thing you should consider while opting for influencer marketing is establishing clear goals - Why do I want to work with an influencer?
Influencer marketing goals primarily center around improving brand identity, and they don't necessarily have to be solely focused on boosting product sales. Instead, a campaign might prioritize introducing innovative and imaginative approaches to shaping new brand perceptions. However, it's important to note that all these strategies ultimately aim to contribute to improved sales, either directly or indirectly– increasing the returns on investment.
Your goals should be SMART. SMART goals are objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
Once you’ve fixed your aim, it’s time to choose your perfect influencer.
2. Look for the Right Partnership - Hiring Niche Influencers
The selection of the ideal influencer stands as the most crucial step of any successful influencer marketing campaign. This decision is the backbone of the entire campaign, as the right influencer possesses the power to elevate your campaign to unprecedented success.
To make things easier and effective, partner with a niche influencer. A niche influencer is an influencer who already holds experience and has built a reputation for promoting specific brands related to a particular niche segment. When you collaborate with a niche influencer, they align with your brand in a better manner.
Also, don’t forget to figure out the audience for your influencer marketing. It would be easier to find the right influencers for your campaign if you have a clear understanding of prospects.
Once you’ve signed up with the influencer, the next step in influencer marketing best practices is keeping transparent communication with the influencer and their PR team.
3. Establishing Effective Communication With Influencers
It’s crucial to establish communication with influencers so they can adhere to brand-specific guidelines. These actions could involve incorporating particular hashtags, mentioning your brand's social media account, or posting a sponsored post. You can also ask for a specific call-to-action, emphasis, or specific links or discount codes to include in their post.
Moreover, clear communication facilitates conveying creative expectations, sharing key performance indicators, and many more. Building trust between the brand and influencers is another vital outcome of transparent communication, which leads to successful campaigns.
4. Prioritize Engagement Stats Over Follower Counts
Engagement statistics are one major thing you need to watch before hiring an influencer. These statistics reflect engagement, giving you a hint about the fate of your sponsored post.
Collaboration with macro-influencers may provide a competitive advantage, but it often comes at a substantial cost. However, it's essential to recognize that achieving desired outcomes is not guaranteed in every instance. It's crucial not to be enticed solely by their large follower counts, as their followers may or may not have a genuine interest in your product, even if the influencer promotes it.
Numerous successful influencer marketing campaigns have been executed by micro-influencers, even those with just 200-300K followers. The pivotal factor behind their successful campaign lies in their exceptional engagement levels. They maintain a consistent posting schedule and actively interact with their followers. These influencers are deeply connected with their audience, often providing better engagement while remaining cost-effective.
5. Allow Creative Freedom To Influencers
Certain companies attempt to exert excessive control over their influencer campaigns. They expect influencers to function merely as content delivery channels.
But that approach doesn't work with influencer marketing. Influencers builds their online presence by sharing content that their followers love. They're favoring you by sharing their followers. These followers don't follow them to hear about your stuff; they follow because they like what the influencer says.
Therefore, to do well in influencer marketing, let influencers do their thing in their own creative way that their followers like. Trying to control them too much won't work and can damage your relationship.
However, you can specify the number of posts within a timeframe and require them to mention the product, brand, and campaign hashtags. If your goals involve your website or company's social accounts, provide influencers with the necessary links to include in their posts.
6. Use Influencers’ Data Analytics To Measure Return on Investment
As of now, you know that goals should be SMART. The second M stands for measurable– which illustrates the necessity of measuring data analytics from the campaign.
To figure out if hiring an influencer was a good deal, just look how much money you made from them compared to how much you paid them. In easy words - measure return on investments.
To measure ROI, It becomes important to analyze the influencer’s sales data. You can simply monitor your influencer marketing campaign's performance based on metrics like sales revenue, goal conversions, and cost per click.
7. Keeping Check on Influencer's Impact
An influencer holds the ability to enhance the authenticity of your brand, thereby significantly influencing the purchasing decisions of prospects. Hence, keeping track on influencer’s impact is equally important and one of the good influencer marketing tactic.
Often, Influencer asks the buyers to check your product through their affiliate link. However, many of the times the buyer isn’t convinced. They do their independent research about the product from the search engines before purchasing –making it as an organic sale.
If this is happening, your investment in influencer marketing doesn’t makes any sense. Because you are making nothing or very little out of your investment.
As a marketer you should often keep checking the influencer’s data if they are impactful enough to makes sales.
8. Getting Input From Influencers
Taking ideas from the influencers for your new product promotion is certainly a cool approach for influencer marketing. When you work together with creators to come up with new ideas, it makes them feel like they're part of the project. They get invested in the new release, and that's a good thing.
Also, these creators bring their own unique perspectives to the table, and that's super helpful. They can tell you what their audience likes, what they need, and what's trendy right now. So, it's like a win-win situation. Creators get excited, and you get valuable insights to make your new product even better. It's all about teamwork to make the best stuff for your audience.
9. Sharing Your Brand Story
People do easily get influenced by stories. You can leverage this tendency to humanize your brand by creating a story around your brand, the people behind the product, and the influencer’s affiliation with your brand.
Here is how influencers can help you create a story around your brand.
- An influencer’s own testimonial could help their audience associate with that. It includes how they discovered the brand, why they are associated with it, and how it has positively impacted their life.
- BTS Tours can help consumers see your product development in action. This makes a positive perception and helps consumers feel connected to your brand.
- Hosting a podcast with influencers will help you connect with their audience. This way their audience can ask Q&A about your brand and feel a direct association.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is often opted for its potential to use the credibility and reach of influencers, deeper connection with target audiences, create genuine brand endorsements, and ultimately drive engagement and conversions, making it a valuable strategy for promoting products.
However, sometimes it falls short of delivering the expected results for several reasons like partnering with an influencer who doesn’t align with brand identity. If you are not sure about the influencer selection, influencer marketing platforms are here to help you.
Our mentioned influencer marketing best practices can significantly increase your return on investment (ROI). These practices emphasize long-term collaboration with the influencers allowing for the development of deeper connections and a more consistent brand message. This, in turn, can lead to increased trust and higher ROI over time.
