How to take your influencer marketing from zero to hero

Seems obvious enough, however, we often see that brands aren’t getting the results they want simply because they’re not setting the right benchmarks for what they consider a successful campaign. When setting your campaign objectives, try to separate these from your overall business objectives and in spite, consider why you want an influencer campaign in the first place. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, drive purchase consideration, or grow your own channel audience, it will undoubtedly impact your next steps and campaign success.

2. Choose people over numbers

Reach matters, but it shouldn’t be your only metric when finding influencers to work with. Whether your objective is increasing brand exposure or growing your engaged users, there’s many other factors at play when choosing the right creators for your brand. Start by looking at their content and what it says about them (they will be promoting your brand, so make sure it fits in), look at how their audience interacts with their content and how engaged they are (is the sentiment positive?), and always check what other brands they work with. There’s no need to go down memory lane to find out about every partnership they’ve worked on, but knowing what other brands they’ve recently worked with might save you time and work along the way. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, will they be able to deliver on your objective? They might be great for your brand aesthetic, but essentially it all comes down to what it is you’re trying to achieve.

3. Long-term really goes a ‘long’ way

After defining what you want to achieve, it’s time to determine the ‘how’. This is where you’ll outline how many influencers are needed for the project, their content frequency, and their involvement with the brand. Once again, it all comes down to your objectives (step 1), but the creator’s involvement with the brand should be continuous and long-term rather than just post/content-based. Creating a relationship and involving influencers throughout your planning will most certainly impact their content and its authenticity. Often, they might even post more than the agreed terms simply because they too are now emotionally involved in the process.

4. Creativity is key

Briefs are important, but the same goes for letting your creator have room for creativity. Make sure they know what your objectives are and what you aim to achieve with the overall project. That said, authenticity is important so make sure you’re not outlining exactly how you intend content to look. Being overly constrained not only restrict creativity but also causes content to seem out of place if a creator is not being themselves on their own channel. It’s hard to let go of control, but it’s great once you see the results. Not only will every piece of content be different and unique, but it’ll also be authentic to each influencer and their audience.

5. Always look back

Not at life but definitely at your campaign’s success. Were the objectives met, and if not, what could you improve next time? The most important thing here is to measure your objectives and take any learnings with you.

If you’d like to find out more about our influencer work and what we can do for your business, get in touch and our team will be happy to help.

Rita Martins, senior account manager at Threepipe Reply.