Tag: blogging

Posted on

Powerup Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

Influencer marketing is not really new. People have been doing it for centuries. A popular person who inspires others presents a product or service to their followers in a good light, and boom, sales take off.

 

You really don’t need to work with the biggest names in the industry to make your mark. You can work with small influencers or big ones, but the main characteristics that spell success are personality, authenticity, and offering value. So if you really want to power up your influencer marketing campaigns, take note of these tips.

 

Add Your Own Personality

 

Remember that your brand has a personality too. Be sure to include that information about your brand voice and personality in all branding information you provide to each influencer who will work with you. When they understand who your brand is and who you are, they’re more likely to want to work with you. Likewise, encourage any influencer working with you to add in their own personality to promotions too.

 

Use and Study Your Competition

 

Look at your competition posting and read the comments to see what their customers are missing or liking. Then, find the content with the most engagement and figure out why their audience enjoys it so much. Then, take that information and find ways to add your own personality to it.

 

Look Out for New Platforms, Tools, and Social Media Channels

 

Part of running a successful business requires keeping up with industry standards. For influencer marketing, this also means being aware of all the technology, platforms, and channels that may appear. For example, TikTok was hardly used last year and is now about to take over YouTube and Instagram in top social media platforms used by brands and influencers.

 

Strive for Authenticity

 

Use stories, live videos, or even podcasts to share your content in different ways while also striving for authenticity. To be authentic, strive to be who you are, warts and all. If you ask that of all influencers you work with, you’ll end up a lot happier because it’s just easier to be who you are naturally than to fake it. Whether it’s you or someone you hire, you want genuineness to shine.

 

Know What’s Hot

 

Right now, for example, short-form videos are really hitting their will on YouTube and other video platforms. Because it’s working, you need to do it too, but always check your metrics. Do what’s hot but check the numbers to make sure it’s really delivering what you hope it will.

Why You Need To Mail Your List Regularly

Keeping track of trends is essential for any business owner, but if you’re working in a digital environment, what’s trending yesterday may be old news today. So it would help if you kept your ear to the ground in your niche and community to stay abreast of what is working now. It might be different than you think.

 

 

 

 

Posted on

Tips to Using E-mail to Work with Influencers

One of the best ways to contact influencers is through e-mail. Unfortunately, when it comes to content creation and content marketing, lines can often be blurred and disorganized due to all the information and different people required to run successfully. Here are a few tips for using e-mail to work with influencers and streamline the influencer marketing process.

 

Use and Create Templates

 

Don’t start over every single time you start a campaign. Instead, start using and creating templates for each type of action you take. Then, simply fill in the blanks to get it done much faster while not forgetting to include some information.

 

Make Goals and Intentions Clear

Email Marketing: What You Need to Make It All Work

When you communicate with anyone, remember that it’s your job as the sender of the message to ensure understanding by the receiver. To ensure that you do this, be very clear about your goals and intentions in each e-mail message you send. Even if it feels redundant, explain everything. E-mail doesn’t offer the ability of the reader to decipher your tone or body language, so clarity is a must.

 

Create Innovative E-mail Headlines

 

Creating subject lines or e-mail headlines takes practice and persistence. Instead of using the first one, you create, try creating 50 every single time you need a headline. Do it very quickly, within about 15 minutes, just writing down all the headlines that come to mind. This type of brainstorming will improve innovation and get more results.

 

Highlight Their Compensation

 

When you communicate with an influencer, make sure you highlight the compensation you’re giving them because that will help motivate them more. In addition, your campaign can be even more effective if you’re offering them affiliate marketing deals in addition to their flat influencer fee.

 

Keep it Personal

 

Don’t act too business-like. Influencers are all about building relationships, but, at the same time, you want to keep your e-mails and messages personal, so they don’t feel too spammy to the receiver. For example, mention something you like about them or point out a particular video or post they did to make them stand out to you.

 

As you can see, using e-mail can make the process of communication with different influencers easier.  Using e-mail to communicate with your influencers can ensure that organization and communication are clear before the campaign starts. It also streamlines the process and makes it easier to understand as it can be pretty tedious to outreach to many different influencers.

 

 

 

Posted on

Influencer Marketing Software Platforms to Utilize

You may feel slightly overwhelmed about finding the right influencers. After all, there are many blogs, vlogs, and channels, and platforms out there to search. But have no fear. You don’t have to search through the platforms on your own to find the right influencer, and you can instead use one or more of these options to help you find the right influencer for your business:

 

  1. Upfluence.com – This platform offers many tools for you to use to find and run profitable influencer campaigns. They keep track of each influencer you work with, manage payments, and even offer many tools for helping you measure campaign results. You can search for and work with many influencers using this tool with ease.

 

  1. Grin.co – This influencer marketing platform is built for e-commerce sites and offers search, discovery, relationship management, campaign management, and more through their platform. If you care about building relationships with your influencers in a trusting and authentic way, Grin.co will help.

 

  1. Influencity.com – This software is focused on managing many influencers for your marketing campaigns. They have a list of over 75 million influencers in all genres, and they are updating their database every single day. In addition, they offer a full CRM, content management, and more.

 

  1. Izea.com – If you want to do sponsorship marketing, this platform will work for you. You can contact marketers who wish to promote your offers for income. Just create a profile page today to find out how it all works.

 

  1. Linqia.com – Go to the next level with this influencer marketing software. You can run campaigns, communicate with influencers, compensate them, and so much more using this software.

 

  1. Theshelf.com – This software helps match social influencers with brands who want to collaborate on promotions. This is more useful for vloggers than bloggers who have a large audience.

 

  1. Awario.com – This tool is useful to help you find influencers who are already talking about you, your competitors, or a generic search term you choose. You can locate opportunities that already exist and put your products right in front of them.

 

  1. BuzzSumo.com – This software is top of the line for influencer locating, managing campaigns, and more. Whether you need content curation, a competitor analysis, or more, you can have it here.

 

  1. HypeAuditor.com – This is one of the better tools to find the influencers you need to run campaigns. Plus, there are many features that other options don’t have. For example, it’s a super-powered AI Instagram authenticity checker and more.

 

  1. NinjaOutreach.com – This blogger outreach software can help you grow your business online by allowing you to prospect, build relationships, analyze, and track metrics and watch campaigns too.

Sales Automation Tools and Tips

Before you start looking for the right influencers, set up a checklist with the desired criteria for the influencers to meet before using them, that way, you know what you want before you start looking.

 

 

 

Posted on

Seven Common Influencer Marketing Problems and How to Avoid Them

If you want to work with influencers to market your goods and services, you must be super familiar and aware of the rules, laws, and regulations surrounding this marketing method. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, someone else has already invented it, and it works great. All you need to do is get familiar with what the ins and outs are.

 

Here are the seven most common influencer marketing mistakes to avoid and what you should do to prevent them:

 

Not Understanding Your Target Audience

 

This leads to picking the wrong influencer, and choosing the wrong platform and social media channels.

 

Not Providing Enough Resources and Information

 

Don’t expect the influencer to do the job without the proper information. While they are great at what they do, they need solid information from you first to understand the expectations and goals for your business.

 

Remember, they are influencers because they marketed themselves as the product. Therefore, they don’t know anything about your business and what content needs to be created to get the conversions you are hoping for.

 

Thinking Too Short-Term

 

It takes work to find the right influencer and even more time to keep them accountable. Due to this, you should always think about forming long-term partnerships with your influencer. Over time, they can become even more of an asset as they become experts on your brand, products, or services. When you show influencers you truly mean business and value them as humans, they are more like to stay accountable and meet all your marketing requirements.

 

Prioritizing Conversions Over Quality Content

 

While conversions are what you want, you can’t expect that without creating good content. The right content and the influencer that actually fits well with that content make the engagement rate you need to be successful with the campaign.

 

Not Calculating and Keeping Track of Your ROI

what is return on investment

Return of investment can be tracked and should be during the entire campaign and from the very start. While it is not as easy to determine, like regular social media ads or other similar online marketing, it can be done.

Focusing Only on Vanity Metrics

 

When you only think about how many people are following someone rather than their level of engagement, it’s easy to get tricked into working with them without realizing it. Pay close attention to all the metrics that matter.

 

Ignoring Federal Trade Commission Guidelines

 

Ignoring the law is not the best way to ensure that you get what you want. Familiarize yourself with these guidelines and stick to them no matter what you feel about them.

 

There are legal requirements to follow before you can safely post influencer content. First, you must legally disclose whether or not a post is sponsored, for example, and whether or not links are monetized in order to keep consumers aware.

 

Ensure you read the information provided by the FTC guidelines and get to know them so that you don’t make these types of legal mistakes. Otherwise, working with influencers is a very profitable joy that you won’t regret doing.

 

 

 

Posted on

Four Influencer Marketing Myths Destroying Your Results

If you’ve been worried up until now about getting involved with influencer marketing, let me reassure you. There is no reason you can’t incorporate influencer marketing into your overall marketing plan regardless of your reach or budget.

 

Here are four influencer marketing myths stalling your results and hindering your ability to run and create a powerful influencer campaign:

 

You Must Have a Large Budget to Be Successful

Why Influencer Marketing Works

Unless you want to work with a mega influencer, you don’t need a large budget to get started or see results. A big budget doesn’t necessarily correlate to a successful influencer campaign. Choosing the right influencer with your specific and targeted goals in mind does.

 

Nano and Micro-Influencers Don’t Bring Conversions

 

Actually, nano and micro-influencers often have higher engagement rates. Virtually 22% higher than mega and macro-influencers. You may generate better results using smaller influencers than large ones.

 

High Popularity Means Instant Exposure and Success

 

The size of an influencer audience does not instantly equal success. Using audience size as your only or main factor to contract them is a major mistake. You should never discount influencers with lower audience totals as they can have a higher engagement rate than those with millions of followers. An audience can be bought, but engagement, the metric that matters most to your return on investment, is harder to fake.

 

Reach is More Important Than Relevant or Quality Content Creation

 

You must have relevant and quality content together to run a successful campaign. Again, just because an influencer has a high audience does not mean you will gain the same amount of reach.

 

Influencers that make the best impact create content their audience needs and wants. Meaning who they partner with should always be relevant, or they will likely ignore it. Their audience could also feel deceived or feel the partnership is ingenuine, further hurting your results.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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

 

 

 

 

Posted on

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.

 

 

 

Posted on

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.

 

 

 

Posted on

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.