Tag: automate

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Seven Influencer Marketing Campaign Types to Know About

When it comes to influencer campaigns, there are several types that you need to know about. Most people do a combination of these in order to help get the word out about their products and services. Mix and match as needed to develop a fun and effective influencer marketing campaign that works for your needs and the influencer’s needs.

 

The following are seven popular influencer marketing campaign types to learn:

 

  • Sponsored Content – With sponsored content, you simply pay the influencer to create a post, a video, or both that works to promote your product or service. The influencer will reveal to your audience up front that it’s a sponsored post. Depending on the rest of the deal, you can get a sponsored post starting at about 50 bucks and on up.

 

  • Reviews – One way to have an influencer recommend your product is by asking them to do an honest assessment of it. At the same time, they will provide an honest review. You usually pay a set fee for the review and offer a percentage of sales for their unique link.

 

  • Giveaways – You can also give the influencer a free product to give away to their audience as a way to boost your own sales. Usually, they’ll provide a review plus do the giveaway and have a link to those who want to buy.

 

  • Guest Blogs or Collaborations – Working with several influencers or doing a guest blog on an influencer’s website or channel, if you’re also a vlogger or blogger, is also a great way to use an influencer’s audience versa.

 

  • Platform Takeovers – Some people give the influencer the ability to take over their own platform to get the word out.

 

  • Product Seeding – Having an influencer simply wear your t-shirt, use your product, or otherwise show themselves using it without talking about it is product seeding. Again, you’re most familiar with this happening in tv shows.

The Keys to A Successful Influencer Marketing Budget

  • Ambassadors and Affiliates – Working with influencers as ambassadors and affiliates is a great way to work with them, too, because you won’t have to pay them until they make a sale with this method.

 

There are a variety of types of influencer marketing campaigns. The above are some ideas to try for helping you get the word out about your products and services.

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Five Tips for Working with Micro-Influencers

When you start seriously thinking about working with influencers, your thoughts probably go to a huge influencer that you really love. You may imagine them using your product, and the experience goes viral, and you make a million bucks. This can happen but not without a good plan and a lot of money.

 

Top reasons to work with micro or nano influencers:

 

  • They are more affordable
  • They have a higher return on investment
  • Their audience is more loyal and targeted
  • They are more genuine and authentic

 

The following are five tips for working with micro-influencers to gain a higher return on investment:

 

Be Niche Specific

 

Because nano and micro-influencers have a specific target audience, you want to be sure their niche matches yours. In other words, their target audience must match yours for it to be successful.  

 

Always Allow Creative Freedom

 

Be sure to avoid micromanaging. Just because they are a smaller influencer does not mean they are not professional. Guide them with the proper product and business information and expectations, but always allow for creative freedom. They have the targeted audience and loyal following for a reason, their content. If you take over, it will quickly come off as ingenuine to their audience.

 

Research and Watch Their Engagement

 

Micro-influencers have more time to engage with their audience by responding to comments and offering a closer friendship-like experience for their audience and followers. Due to this feeling that the audience is close to the influencer, they are often more likely to take the influencer’s recommendations on what to buy.

 

Consider More Than One

 

When working with small influencers, one way to compensate for the smaller audience numbers is to work with more than one at a time for a rolling campaign. For example, choose five influencers with small audiences of 10 to 50 K each and have each influencer start their campaign on a slightly different date to get the ball rolling.

 

Compensate Fairly

 

Just because they have a smaller following, subscriber base, or audience does not mean they deserve to be well compensated. Avoid product-only compensation models if you can. Giving them more for sales and just for trying can really help encourage them to do more.

 

Working with micro-influencers may actually be more beneficial for you if you have a smaller budget. Plus, studies show that micro-influencers have more responsive audiences than huge influencers anyway.

The Do’s and Don’ts to Influencer Marketing

 

 

 

 

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The Keys to A Successful Influencer Marketing Budget

One of the first steps to running a successful influencer marketing campaign is to set up the right budget. However, a large budget does not translate to instant results or a high return on investment either. For influencer marketing to work, you don’t need an outrageous budget to get started. Instead, you need the right budget that includes specific key information depending on your goals; this will and should vary.

 

Here are the keys to creating a successful influencer marketing budget:

 

Understand Your End Goal

 

This is by far the most important step to your entire influencer marketing campaign. Without clearly defining your goals, you can’t know what materials you need or who you can hire for the project—leaving many costs unaccounted for.


Pick Your Influencer Campaign Strategy

 

Each influencer level comes with a different set of fees and expectations. Typically, the fewer followers you have as an influencer, the lower the rate.

 

The following are common set rates for each level of influencers for a single post on Instagram:

 

  • Nano – Influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers charge a rate of $10 to $100.
  • Micro – With 10,000 to 100,000 followers, they charge around $100 to $500.
  • Macro – They have 500,000 to 1 million followers and charge $5,000 to $10,000.
  • Mega – Over 1 million followers cost $10,000 and up.

 

These are just estimated ranges that many companies have reported. The numbers can still vary outside of these ranges due to their metrics compared to your specific campaign goals, what type of content they create, and the platforms they use. In addition, follower numbers do not automatically transfer into a positive return on investment. This means these numbers should just be used as a baseline or starting point.

 

Pick your Pricing Model

 

While many influencers will charge a set price, that doesn’t mean there are no other ways to do it. Here are some common pricing models to pick from:

 

  • Cost Per Engagement
  • Cost Per Acquisition
  • Cost Per Click
  • Cost Per Mentions
  • Set Compensation Package

 

It’s important to note that even if influencers charge a set price, you can use these payment models to determine if the return on investment is worth it. For example, if the influencer is charging 500 dollars for one post and your goal is to get at least 1,000 engagements, then the following formula can be used:

 

$500/1000 = 0.5 * 100 = 50%

 

For this example, your return on investment would be 50%. As long as the influencer can show supporting metrics or other information that the post will get that much engagement, this would be a great partnership and more than worth your money.

 

Determine Other Campaign Costs

 

Influencer compensation is not the only cost needed to run a campaign. Remember to highlight products used, travel expenses, tools, software, third-party services, and any other supporting material costs required.

 

As outlined above, your budget is determined and set by your campaign goal. Keep it specific and clear to easily determine the right costs and run a more successful campaign.

Define Your Influencer Marketing Goals

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Six Tips to Communicating and Collaborating with Influencers

Nearly 63% of top brand marketers have reported working with ten or more influencers at one time. Further making proper communication and collaboration paramount to your success. Every business should already understand the value of appropriate communication and take steps to learn how to do so for each goal and department of their organization, especially when it comes to marketing and communicating to your target audience.

 

Here are six tips to establishing proper communication with any influencer:

 

Keep Communication Type Consistent

 

If your influencer works mostly through e-mail, keep all the conversations there. However, if you work with several influencers, try to find one platform to keep everything organized. For example, you don’t want to talk to one influencer through Instagram directly while talking to another on Facebook directly.

 

Eventually, it will get too unorganized as you continue to add influencers to your team. Imagine if you had ten influencers on your team, each using a different channel or software to communicate. Over time this can get confusing and disorganized, easily providing an opportunity for missed information. Not a sustainable relationship for anyone.

 

Provide a Clear Plan or Roadmap

 

Tell the influencer exactly what you need and how their content can benefit your company. Highlight your goals and the metrics you are hoping to gain from the partnership. Be as clear as possible, ask questions and always follow up to ensure they know what the plan is or provide the influencer an opportunity to ask questions or offer suggestions.

 

Keep Communication Open

 

Allow space for your influencer to provide their opinion and be open to new ideas. The one thing that makes influencer marketing so great is its unique content. They also understand their audience and how they will react to certain information better than you would. They want to see success just as much as you. If they don’t produce the results needed, they will be without a contract or revenue.

 

Form an Authentic Relationship

 

Just because it is business does not mean you can’t form genuine and strong relationships with influencers—the more authentic the connection, the better the content. If you truly care about each other, you won’t have any problems working together and getting the results you both need. So start engaging with their content and following all their social media pages. Like and comment on their posts and treat them just like any other friend or customer. Not only will the influencer appreciate it, but their audience will too.

 

Schedule Content Creation Time Together

Important Questions to Ask Before You Work with An Influencer

Brainstorm new ideas or content to use for the campaign together. Be open to creativity and innovation. The influencer is here to create content, so be sure they are involved during this process.

 

While you need certain information to be shared with their audience, this doesn’t mean it has to be a sales pitch or read from a script. The influencer knows how their audience digests information so let them do the bulk of the content creation. Just be sure to provide them any supporting materials and information they need. You need to guide them and educate them on your products and services, not micromanage them.

 

Create Personalized Incentives or Gifts

 

Send products or create unique promotion codes personalized to each influencer. The more you treat your influencer as an individual with their own feelings and thought processes, the better the relationship altogether. Don’t treat them like a corporation and dehumanize them.

 

Overall, taking the necessary steps to communicate with your influencer properly is vital to your campaign and collaboration success. Use these important tips the next time you reach out to an influencer.

 

 

 

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How to Create an Influencer Contract or Agreement

Developing your influencer contracts isn’t as hard as most people make it. The truth is that it’s always a good idea to get a lawyer to help you create your contracts but signing a document that you create is also acceptable in a court of law.

 

The following are the basic requirements for any social media influencer contract:

 

  • Parties To the Agreement – Include the legal names of the people subject to the contract terms, including their business name and entity type and address and contact information.

 

  • Terms Of the Agreement – One way to put all the terms you’ve agreed to in the contract is to just list out by number each person’s responsibilities in order of importance.

 

  • Timeline Of the Campaign – Dates and the timeline are imperative inclusions into any contract if you want it to be enforceable.

How to Search and Vet Potential Influencers

  • Content Creation Expectations – Be very specific about what you’re expecting the influencer to create for your payment.

 

  • Compensation Amounts – Describe not only how much but what signals the payment to take place and how it’ll be done. For example, you might want to pay them half up front, half after the campaign, or some other schedule.

 

  • Advertiser Policies – Always include any policies that you want to have, such as not including bad language, grammar, and punctuation, as Facebook’s Advertising policy states.

 

  • Confidentiality Agreements – If you have one, put it in the contract and be very specific.

 

  • Non-Disclosure or Exclusivity Agreements – If there is something you don’t want to be disclosed, such as the private marketing stats you provided to them, make sure it’s in the contract. Likewise, if you don’t want the influencer recommending your competition, make sure to say so.

 

  • Breach of Contract Clause – What happens if either party breaches the contract? If you describe what should happen now, it’ll make it easier should something go wrong.

 

  • Governing Law – Always include which state, city, and county (or country) law’s will be the guiding force of this agreement should there be a disagreement.

 

  • Signatures of All Parties – Don’t forget to get it signed. It doesn’t have to be notarized, but this can help. Using software to sign is also helpful.

 

Lawyers aren’t required to make contract legal, but they are required to know what you are permitted to put in the contract as you cannot contract illegal things. If you write an agreement on a napkin and sign it, it’s legal as long as the items put in the contract are also permitted. A self-designed contract is better than no contract, but it is advisable to seek help from an attorney or paralegal to perfect your arrangements.

 

 

 

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Four Things You Should Always Provide the Influencer

When you start working with influencers, it can be tempting to keep it very informal, but the truth is, contracts and information help you avoid problems. This is good advice whether you’re working with influencers, service providers, or consultants. Contracts and clear information make all the difference.

 

Here are four things you should never neglect providing an influencer:

 

Contract or Agreement

 

Once you have hashed out all the responsibilities of each party to the contract, make sure to put it in writing. Don’t be scared of contracts. List each person’s information and list the responsibilities for each party to the agreement along with timelines, due dates, and any pertinent info needed to fulfill the contract accurately. Plus, describe exactly what you’ll want to do if there is a dispute to prevent any unforeseen problems.

 

Contracts need a starting and ending date, names of all parties involved, payment amounts and due dates, penalties, or changes if breaches, missed deadlines, or disagreements.

 

Clear Expectations

 

Before you even approach the influencer to work with you, develop your expectations to be clear to yourself. That way, it’ll be easier to communicate what you are expecting from them. Always ask them if they understand what you are saying and listen to them.

 

If you have formal meetings, record the information you gather at the meetings, and then agree to what has been recorded, it’s easier to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding expectations.

 

Compensation

 

Be very clear about how you’re going to compensate your influencers. Do what you say you will when you say you will. Don’t necessarily try to go for the cheapest deal when it comes to influencers. Instead, go for the best return on investment.

 

One way to ensure that you’ll receive a good ROI is to compensate influencers in multiple ways, from product sales, free products to a flat fee to commission as an affiliate.

 

Content and Other Supporting Materials

 

Once you’ve settled the contract and everyone is clear about what is expected, make sure you deliver the content and supporting material as soon as possible. Then, if you meet your deadlines, you will ensure that they meet theirs too.

 

Furnish your audience persona and other information you want to be provided to your audience through the influencer so that they can design the promotion based on the research you’ve already done.

Start with the Right Influencer and Target Audience

Influencer marketing is an effective way to get the word out about your products, services, and offers. But you must plan beforehand and do your due diligence to ensure that the people you work with are up for the task.

 

 

 

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Six Steps to the Influencer Outreach Process

In order to find the perfect influencers for your campaigns, it’s important to go through an outreach process that ensures you find just the right people. After all, if you do this with a plan in mind and seriously check your information and data for accuracy, you can practically guarantee that you’ll be successful. Truly, you’re not even taking that much of a risk when you do this work to get it right.

 

Step #1: Create an Influencer List

Define Your Influencer Marketing Goals

Form a list of the influencers you would like to work with the most. The bigger the list at this point, the better. Shoot for locating at least 20 to 30 potential influencers per platform. Focus on one platform at a time to streamline this process.

 

Step #2: Review Their Profiles

 

Find the information required to make decisions before reaching out to the influencer. Find their social media handles and business credentials. Many influencers include links and special e-mails for business inquiries. Avoid using their personal e-mail or profile when contacting them. Instead, follow their accounts and actually view their profiles and content for a period of time before reaching out.

 

Step #3: Develop a Brief Project Goal

 

Determine why you want to work with an influencer at all. What is your goal? Do you want to boost traffic? If so, how is working with them going to do that? Do you want to make sales? How will this influencer help you make more sales? Figure out the mechanism to reach the goal you’ve set by setting SMART goals to ensure that you have a plan going forward.

 

Step #4: Pick Your Medium

 

You may need to be flexible and communicate with each influencer in the way that they desire to. For example, they may choose to use e-mail, direct message, management contact, video chat, phone call, mail merge apps, sponsored product packages, or something else. Typically, the influencer will have guidelines on their business page about what they need from you. If not, choose what you want to present to them and how.

 

Step #5: Create and Personalize Your Message

 

Be specific, clear, and direct about your goals, what your products or services are and how you’re going to work with them on this project if they choose to work with you. Always make sure that you include follow-up information and server times that will work for you to get the collaboration started faster. Be flexible but only within the guidelines you’ve already set for yourself and your campaign’s time limit and deadlines.

 

Step #6: Edit and Review

 

Always edit and review everything before sending it on to a potential influencer. The clearer you are, the easier it’s going to be to work together. You want to be professional as possible when you reach out to them. The higher quality your reach out is, the higher quality they’re going to expect from themselves as they create your campaign.

 

Once you reach out, make sure you record how and when you reached out to them so that you can follow up quickly when needed. The more records you keep, the easier it’s going to be each time you set up a campaign.

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Affiliate Vs. Influencer Marketing: Key Differences to Know

While you will likely give your influencers an affiliate link to help them make money marketing your products and services, there are some differences between straight affiliate marketing and influencer marketing.

 

Let’s explore some key differences between affiliate and influencer marketing:

 

  • Costs – Most likely, it’s going to cost you slightly more to work with an influencer, at least initially. The main reason is that affiliate marketers do not charge anything up front, but influence marketers often make money both up front and per sale depending on the deal you make with them.

 

  • Compensation Models – You will pay your influencer a set fee according to their schedule to create the video or images or review for you. The cost depends on how many subscribers or followers they have, how much engagement they receive, and how motivated their audience is to follow them to purchase. You never pay affiliates anything unless they make a sale and how they make it is not usually your concern.

 

  • Marketing Goals – When you work with affiliates, you don’t involve yourself in their marketing or creation other than to provide the tools for them in your affiliate dashboard. Still, they promote when and how they want to within those guidelines. If you work with an influencer, it’s more likely that you’ll have more control over when they promote your products and services per your contract.

Are You Being Realistic About Your Goals?

  • Performance Tracking Metrics or KPIs – You probably don’t look at the stats of your affiliates as closely as you will your influencers. Mostly because you’re going to work with far fewer influencers over your business life than you will have affiliates, affiliate marketing is more hands-off.

 

  • FTC Guidelines Abidance – There are many guidelines for promoting products and services that you need to follow, and they all actually boil down to the same thing. Don’t lie, don’t mislead, and tell the truth. You may get away with an affiliate breaking a few rules against your TOS, but if an influencer you work with does it, it’s going to affect you more.

 

Both forms of marketing, affiliate, and influencer, can cross over. An influencer may ask for an affiliate link, and an affiliate who is doing an amazing job may actually be an influencer who found your product on their own. All types of marketing are essential to use, but the subtle differences need to be known.

 

 

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A Comprehensive Social Media Influencer Checklist

To make any new process easier, it is good to develop checklists and templates to streamline the process. Even experienced authors and pilots use checklists to ensure they don’t miss a step.

 

Checklist to develop a successful social media influencer campaign:

 

  • Defined Target Audience – Who are they, what do they want? Create an audience persona for each stage of the buying journey, so you know, and you can show the influencer who your audience is.

 

  • Outline Important Key Performance Indicators – Using the information in the blog post about the KPIs to track during your social media influencer campaigns, always set up a new spreadsheet to enable you to track the KPIs exclusively for each campaign.

 

  • Create Clear Influencer Marketing Goals – Your goals will include the specifics of what constitutes success for the campaign. For example, you may have the goal to get more follows, but you need to state exactly what you want. Remember, even if you’re working with someone else, the goals need to be SMART goals.

 

  • Choose The Best Social Media Channel – Do your due diligence to ensure there are enough of your audience on that channel to make it possible for you to reach your goals.

 

  • Choose The Right Influencer Campaign – Don’t just pick anyone. Take the time to get to know the influencer before choosing them to work with. Watch as many of their shows as you can to make sure you vibe.

 

  • Set A Budget – You must set a budget to have a guideline before searching for the right influencer. For example, if you know how much you earn per click, it’ll help you figure out a good budget.

 

  • Identify Your Influencer Type and Size Needs – What type of influence do you want? Make a list of the characteristics you want.

 

  • Influencer Qualities Needed – What do you want the influencer to be like. It’s fine to choose outside of the business model. Even if your product has nothing to do with the issues you care about, if you want to work with only redheads, that’s fine.

 

  • Influencer Outreach – You’ll want to track how you reach out to the influencers so that you can keep track of how it’s working.

 

  • Influencer Vetting – Always check out the influencer before offering them the job because you never know if they’re doing something in their personal life that would be off-putting or even career-ending for you.

 

  • Influencer Contract – Don’t do a single deal with an influencer without a written and signed contract.

 

  • Compensation Package – Spell out and define what the compensation package is for each influencer, and don’t expect it to be the same for every one of them. Tip: Let them tell you their fee. It might be cheaper than you think.

 

  • Influencer Brief and Training – Set up a package that explains your products, offers, and branding to the influencers so that they know everything they can about your product.

 

  • Remember FTC Guidelines – Familiarize yourself with the FTC rules for communicating on social media as a business. It’s important to follow these guidelines whether others do or not.

 

  • Plan, Publish and Promote – Set up a schedule that allows you to plan the campaign, publish it, and promote it simultaneously.

 

  • Track ROI – Nothing is ever done, as they say until the paperwork is done. While paper is not always necessary these days, you still need to do the math and track the return on investment to ensure you are making money the way you think you are.

 

When you use a process to get things done, it’s easier to figure out what went right or wrong so you can do more of what is right and less of what is wrong.

Define Your Influencer Marketing Goals

 

 

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The Do’s and Don’ts to Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is pretty straightforward. First, you want to find the right influencers who already impact an audience that will want and need your products, services, and offers. Even if you have zero sales yet, and no audience of your own yet, using influencers who already promote to an audience who wants what you have will substantially shorten your journey to success.

Start with the Right Influencer and Target Audience

Included below are the top five do’s and don’ts to follow so that you can run a successful influencer marketing campaign and repeat the success over and over again.

 

#1 Don’t: Focus on Follower or Audience Count Only

 

Remember, just because a YouTube star has a million subscribers does not mean they are ready to buy. Not all audiences are equal. Plus, often, a smaller influencer can have more sway over their audience than one that has grown really large. So you may get more results from a niched down small channel than a huge channel with wide appeal.

 

#1 Do: Consider Influencers of all Levels

 

When you try to find the right people to work with to promote your products, offers, and services, don’t just pick the big movers and shakers. Instead, look at smaller influencers that are more intimate with their audience. You may even end up making more sales due to the higher level of engagement many smaller audience influencers have.

 

#2 Don’t: Micromanage Your Influencer

 

When you finally weed through and pick the influencers you want to work with, avoid trying to tret them as employees. Your influencer likely already has a particular way of doing things, and you want them to stay true to themselves and their audience, giving them plenty of freedom. Avoid micromanaging them by giving too many guidelines and rules.

 

#2 Do: Allow for Creative Freedom

 

Creative people like to create. If you stand in their way, they won’t want to work with you, and even if they do, it might not work out and allow them total creative freedom. Of course, you can always include an option for approval to ensure nothing goes wrong, but if you do the research and choose the right people, letting them be themselves will work out best for you. Plus, it’s less work for you!  

 

#3 Don’t: Expect Non-Monetary Work

 

There are plenty of self-named gurus out there who will tell you to try to work with everyone for free, but the truth is, you really do get what you pay for. So instead, reward the influencers you work with according to what’s right and fair. Do not expect them to work for you for free because if you both get value from the partnership, you’ll want to repeat it.

 

#3 Do: Compensate Fairly

 

When you do work out a payment plan for your influencers, make sure you compensate them fairly. As mentioned above, you don’t want to expect them to work for free, but you also want to build a reputation as a great company to work with. So believe it when I tell you that word gets around. Ask them for their fee schedule instead of telling them what you’ll pay. Influencers will be happy with what they ask for, even if it is less than they thought it would be.

 

#4 Don’t: Only Use Instagram

 

It’s tempting to go to the number one social media platform and start using only that for your influencer campaigns, but the truth is, this is a mistake. You don’t even know until you do your research if your audience is on the platform, and if your audience is not there, neither is your influencer.

 

#4 Do: Consider Multiple Platforms

 

Find out what social platforms your ideal audience uses. Find out how many are on those platforms. Then look for the influencers you want to help you promote. Try doing a multi-platform campaign as long as your audience is there, and you’ll get amazing results because the more often you show up in front of your ideal audience, the better.

 

#5 Don’t: Create Deceiving and Generic Content

 

It can feel overwhelming to create all the content you need for your business, but you want to refrain from deceiving and generic content for your influencer campaigns. Remember, you have an influencer who is a creator who can give you amazing ideas on how to promote your product. If they love it, they’re going to be the best person to help you. Each time you promote something, you want the content to be unique and specific for the audience you want to influence.

 

#5: Do: Follow all FTC Guidelines and Plan Content with Your Influencer

 

Remember, when using the internet to communicate, you must follow the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines (and any guidelines in any country where you do business) to have no problems. Also, please work with your influencer to plan the content they will create for you but remember to give them creative freedom.

 

As a content creator, it’s important to stay aware of the dos and don’ts of using influencer marketing. The great thing is when you do engage in influencer marketing, you’re not alone. You have someone who is already an expert at creating content for their audience. Supply an amazing product, service, or offer and let them do the rest within the guidelines. To learn more about the FTC guidelines for social media, you can visit the government website here. (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/ftc-releases-advertising-disclosures-guidance-online-influencers)