Tag: setting goals

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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.

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  • 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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Influencer Marketing Vs. Brand Ambassadors

It can be easy to think influencers and brand ambassadors are the same thing. They promote your products and influence your audience in some way. However, influencer marketing and brand ambassadors are not interchangeable as they have many key differences.

 

Promote Vs. Example

 

Ambassadors promote your products and are seen as the experts on the product. This is made into a full-time position for larger brands where the company provides them the details they need to know to become a master. They are the ones consumers can go to and get almost any question answered.

 

While influencers show your audience by being the example and sharing how and why they use your products or services, they may love your products and understand them quite a bit. Still, for the most part, they don’t have the extensive knowledge brand ambassadors gain when working with one or a few brands.

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Influencers tend to work with many different brands and campaigns over the months and years, making it impossible for them to be a real expert on all the information your brand has to provide.

 

Long-term vs. Short-term

 

As stated above, influencers typically work with more than one brand or company. On the other hand, brand ambassadors only work with your company to master the knowledge and understand how your products and services work.

 

Influencers may recommend your business once or twice while brand ambassadors repeated it daily. They are your brand loyalists or journalists and will find them at the top of the pyramid of influence right above influencers.

 

Audience vs. Experience

 

Brand ambassadors are sought out due to experience and devotion to the product. They are committed to your brand and truly believe in the benefits. They are likely coming to you or directly applying. On the other hand, influencers are contracted due to their audience, engagement rate, or other important conversions you need for your business. They do not have to have tried your product or care too much about it. These conversions give you a clear insight into what kind of return on investment you can expect to see.

 

Their Similarities

 

Both brand ambassadors and influencers want to promote your product and see you succeed. Each can be added to your marketing campaign to drive more engagement, traffic, and brand awareness. However, they both need to sign agreements to protect their rights and promote your product authentically and enthusiastically through unique and creative content.

 

Overall, it is important to understand the difference to choose the right person for your campaign goals. Each offers many similar benefits, but the type of relationship, compensation, and metrics needed will determine who is right for the job.

 

 

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Important Influencer Performance Metrics

When you begin an influencer marketing campaign, you must figure out what metrics to track. Part of goal setting includes identifying the tracking metrics, so it won’t be as hard as you think to accomplish as long as you take the time to set up your goals and objectives properly.

 

Here are the top metrics to keep track of depending on your influencer marketing goals:

 

Audience Growth

 

How has the influencer grown its platform over time? If you want to ensure that they are consistent in their efforts, you only need to check the metrics to find out. You can easily check by looking at their stats which they should provide to you, or you can use a third-party system to help like Socialblade.com but realize that these are only estimates.

 

KPIs to track for audience growth include:

 

  • Number of subscribers – How many subscribers are they getting each day, and how long did it take?
  • Social media followers – How many people follow them on other social networks, and how long did it take them to get to the level they are?

 

Brand Awareness and Reputation

 

While you aim to create more brand awareness for your brand and improve your reputation, you must ensure that the influencers you choose also have the same goal so you don’t accidentally select someone who doesn’t represent you properly.

 

KPIs to track to determine awareness and reputation:

 

  • Page views – How many viewers are going to find you on that platform potentially? You can find out by how many average pageviews the influencer is getting to find out how it might work out for you.
  • Impressions – Even if they don’t click, the information still shows and is called an impression. So the more people who view, even if they don’t click, the more awareness you’ll build.
  • Social media followers – How many followers does the influencer have now, and how many do you have now. Again, knowing how this grows during the campaign will help you see if it’s working or not.
  • Brand mentions – You can set up an alert with Google or use a third-party app like Hootsuite.com or Brandwatch.com to track who mentions your brand web-wide.

 

Engagement Rate

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One of the things that really help build your business online is engagement. So if you choose influencers who are good with engagement, it’ll boost your own engagement. Once the customer clicks through the influencer’s mention, they’re going to expect the same sort of engagement and personality from you.

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KPIs to track to ensure your engagement is what you want it to be:

 

  • Likes – Getting likes on your posts is one way to notice engagement and increase your reach. Ask your audience to like your posts to help.
  • Shares – When your audience really likes what you’re posting, they’ll do more than like. They’ll also share. Sharing will expand your brand in a multitude of ways that can’t be duplicated any other way. People trust their friends, and if a friend shares, it’s much more powerful.
  • Comments – This is a better form of engagement than the other two in many ways because useful comments increase reach and help you get to know your audience better.

 

Website and Social Media Traffic

 

You can’t get any type of engagement or sales without traffic. So one of your main goals and objectives is always going to be traffic generation. Of course, when you get more traffic, you make more money, but of course, you want the right traffic.

 

KPIs to track to ensure you are building your influence via traffic generation methods:

 

  • New users – How many new people visit that site, influencer, page, or product each day?
  • Session time – How long they are sticking around is also a good indication of whether they’re consuming the content or not. You want your pages to be “sticky” and keep them as long as possible.
  • Total number of sessions – How many times has that same person come back to your information?
  • Pageviews – How many pages views have you delivered for that campaign, product, or advertisement?
  • Click-through Rate (CTR) – This is how many times someone has actually not only viewed the page or info but clicked and followed your CTAs. If you get 100 page views and ten clicks, that’s a 10 percent clickthrough rate.
  • Cost per click (CPC) – Likewise, knowing how much it costs you to get those clicks will also inform how much you can afford to pay for advertising and influencer marketing. If you’re making $100 a click on average, you can reasonably spend 33 bucks to get that click.

 

Sales

 

Of course, all that work you are doing, the hiring and working with influencers and offering amazing value, is ultimately to make sales. So, therefore, of course, you must track sales. You don’t even have a business until you make sales.

 

KPIs to track to ensure you’re making a profit from your sales:

 

  • Sales conversion rate – How many clicks and views does it take for you, on average, to make a sale? Knowing that helps you determine how many touchpoints you need to create.
  • Number of sales – Finally, tracking how many sales you’re making during any period you want to follow can help determine the cause of those sales so you can repeat it.

 

Lead Generation

 

Did you know that most people will not buy anything from you by going to your website and clicking to buy unless you’re pretty famous, like Amazon or Etsy? But if you take that traffic, you receive it and turn it into a lead. Then, you can boost your conversion rate exponentially. After all, once a customer is on your e-mail list, you can now promote them and communicate with them anytime you want to.

 

KPIs to track to ensure your lead generation is working:

 

  • Signups – How many people have signed up for the freebie or low-cost offer you have promoted to them?
  • E-mail Subscribers – How many people subscribed to your newsletter due to the promotion you created?

 

Finally, track your return on investment or ROI for every KPI listed above. No matter your goal, you should always keep track of your ROI to ensure you are not spending more than the value you receive from the influencer contract. Again, it’s easy to determine by simply doing the math. You can keep track in a simple spreadsheet or use the platforms you have with their native tracking ability.

 

 

 

 

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Top Social Media Platforms for Influencer Marketing

When you start using influencer marketing, it’s important to understand that not all platforms will be viable for your needs. Only the platforms that have influencers who market to your audience will work for you. It will help you understand what the personality is and the audience is of each platform to make the right choices.

 

Instagram

 

This visual social media platform has grown so fast that hardly anyone hasn’t heard of it. Over a billion people use the platform at least monthly, and most of them are based outside of the USA, with 140 million residing in the USA. Even during the 2020 pandemic, Instagram grew by leaps and bounds. So if you have a visual product or know how to make your offers visual, this platform will work for you.

 

YouTube

 

It’s hard to imagine life without YouTube. It’s only been here since 2005, but it has changed the landscape of media. Anyone can truly get their “15 minutes of fame” by starting their own YouTube channel. YouTube is still growing its influence by expanding its member base by 14 percent in 2020, and it’s still growing. Today, there are almost 2 billion active users on YouTube. So there is no doubt that your audience is also on YouTube. Even if you don’t have a particularly visual niche, you can usually find what you need here.

 

TikTok

 

As a micro media visual platform, this social media network has taken off in a big way. Some of the explosion is due to “bad press,” which proves that there is no bad press if you’re ready to use it for your needs. This platform is in over 150 countries and is most loved by the younger generation.

 

Twitter

 

One of the most long-lived platforms on social media platforms has gone from a text-based solution to a multimedia solution used by millions every day. Many people use Twitter to get all their news and information. The audience on Twitter is mostly from the USA, and in fact, more than half of all citizens in the USA are using the platform regularly.

 

Blogs

 

You may not initially think of a blog as a social media platform, but it is because you can have plenty of engagement through the comment section of any blog. Influencers who have very popular blogs can help you get more views for your offer just as easily as a YouTube influencer can. If they have an engaged audience that needs your solutions, it will work for you.

 

Research each platform to see if you can find influencers who entertain or inform your ideal audience who wants and needs your offers. If so, you can surely work out a deal to get the word out that is beneficial for you both.

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Why Influencer Marketing Works

In 2020, Influencer marketing was worth more than nine billion dollars. It is now expected to grow beyond thirteen billion dollars. Showing you that it is here to stay and only growing stronger. Influencer marketing is a form of worth-of-mouth or online marketing using social media platforms and influencers who share content to promote products or services for companies with similar target audiences.

 

The goal is to influence their audience to increase their conversions, usually in increased sales, traffic, or engagement. Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are currently the top three social media platforms used by many influencers and companies worldwide to market their products, services, or ideas.

 

Here are the main reasons why influencer marketing works and why it is so beneficial to your brand:

 

Influencers Build Trust and Establish Creditability

 

Not only can influencers help you find your target audience more easily, but they can also help you connect and engage with them. An influencer has an audience because they have similar interests to them and appreciates their opinion.

 

Meaning the influencer already has established trust and credibility. When they partner with a company, that trust and credibility often transfer over. Without these two factors, you can’t expect to make a sale or increase your conversions. Customers need validity in exchange for their time and revenue.

 

Influencers Create Engagement and Long-Lasting Relationships

 

Along with trust comes needed engagement. What kind of engagement you need is up to you and your business goals? For many, that includes more likes, comments, shares, and clicks to their websites to make a sale and increase their revenue or exposure hopefully. Not only do they increase your engagement rate, the relationship is more personal too. Meaning they can form deeper and stronger relationships, further increasing the trust and loyalty to your brand.

 

Influencers Expose You to Larger and More Loyal Audiences

 

Establishing a relationship with several different influencers allows you to get in front of more people with the same target audience as yours, especially when comparing it to traditional online ads. In addition, your target audience is less likely to skip over it when an influencer is involved as it humanizes your brand.

 

As you can see, if you haven’t added influencers to your marketing strategy yet, then you are likely missing out. In fact, according to a Mediakix survey conducted in 2019, nearly 17% of companies use or will use half of their marketing budget on influencers alone. While that is a small percentage, many companies reported in the same year that they want to significantly increase their influencer budgets to keep up with the current demand for social media content. They believe influencer marketing is paramount to their success now and in the future.

 

 

 

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These Niches Benefit the Most from Influencer Marketing

Any product or service can benefit from influencer marketing. However, some certain niches or genres perform better and see far more success than others. This is likely because the content is easily shareable, visual, consumable, and in high demand.

 

The following are the most popular industries for influencer marketing:

 

Beauty and Fashion

 

This is probably the most obvious niche within influencer marketing as it makes up the bulk of it. Products and services within this niche are built on their ability to make bold, beautiful, and colorful works of art. They are highly shareable and consumable, making them a powerful product to influence. The Instagram platform is a visual social media that is one of the most used for this niche as the niche creates amazing visuals.

 

Gaming

 

Another niche that probably won’t come to you as a surprise. This industry is worth over 130 billion dollars. Those who love gaming thrive for information to learn how to complete their game or compete at the highest level against their rivals. Sharing reviews on the most anticipated game of the year or console or walkthroughs and guides on how to achieve the highest level in competitive play are just a few things audiences crave. You can often find gaming influencers on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and even Twitter.

 

Health and Fitness

 

Most people want to learn how to be healthy, improve their apparencies or maintain their weight. It is vital to your survival, meaning there is high demand for needed information. Weight loss how-to videos, advertising sportswear, or selling weightless programs are a few great things in this niche that influencers can promote.

 

Food and Travel

 

Mouthwatering dishes, videos on how to bake the perfect cake, how-to guides on traveling the world on a small budget, or simply sharing the meals you’ve tried while traveling to exotic places are just a few examples of content audiences crave within these niches. Many young adults have reported using Instagram as their source of information before they book their travels or YouTube to learn how to cook a new meal.

 

While these are the most common and successful industries in influencer marketing, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try if your niche didn’t make this list. You can be an innovator and start something new within your industry as long as you use the right tools and resources.

 

Find the right social media platform and influencer, and create the best content with your target audience and business goals in mind. This extensive list shows that influencer marketing will likely benefit your company as long as you can provide visual content that solves a high-demand problem. Influencer marketing thrives on high-quality visuals and in-demand content.

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Influencer Marketing and the Pyramid of Influence

The pyramid of influence is a great model or image to categorize your different audiences and the influencers who represent them. It’s designed to quickly show you who and what makes up the most of your engagement to create the right content and materials to develop and run a successful campaign.

 

To put it simply, a pyramid of influence is designed to allow you to quickly understand who makes up your community and how they each influence your audience. This way, you can easily develop content and strategies to reach your target audience more efficiently and ensure you get the right influencer on board.

The pyramid of Influence is made of the following levels:

influencer Pyramid

First Level: Brand Content Creators

 

They are the brand experts and make up most of your content that your influencers can’t wait to use, share with their audience, or use inspiration to make new content. The content is produced by your company, by those you hired, or even mega-influencers.

 

Second Level: Influencers or Leaders

 

This is where digital influencers come in and make up the bulk of the content and engagement. They spark interest within those who want and must get your products. They inspire and influence transactions and engagement. They are the ones that will do anything to get their hands on your product and share it with their audience because they love your products or services. They are the leaders of your content and mission.

 

Third Level: Prosumers or Seed Planters

 

Prosumers are active in the community consistently, usually using third-party platforms such as Facebook or YouTube. They are the ones that build groups and posts questions or spark interest in topics supporting your niche or brand. In other words, they plant the seed of interest and increase engagement and interaction.

 

Quite a few people in this level of the pyramid will eventually move on to the second tier as low level, or nano influencers can also be found in this level as they often plant the seed. They look up to those above them in the tier to help them create content, answer any questions, or sound the alarm to a common problem within the industry.

 

Bottom Level: Consumers or Readers

They consume content but don’t generate it. They are known as consumers and will make up the bulk of your audience and are responsible for revenue. They are the ones that are influenced by the rest of the pyramid and make purchases or other actions that can positively affect your conversions.

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Understanding the pyramid of influence helps you see how your customers, influencers, and content writers can influence different types of people. The ones on the top have the most impact, while those on the bottom make purchases and increase your conversions.

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Putting It All Together And Developing A Routine That Will Keep You On Track

Over the course of the past six blog posts, we’ve talked about the importance of consistency and how it can help you grow your traffic, your subscribers, your customers, your product catalogue, and most importantly your income. Now it’s time to bring it all together and create a daily, weekly, and monthly routine that will keep you on track to continue to grow your business.

 

Any online business can be broken down into three different areas that need your effort and attention. They are traffic, list, and offer. You need visitors to your website. Then you need to convert those visitors into subscribers. Finally, you need to make those subscribers an offer so you can make money. Keep this in mind as you build your routine.

 

Do something every single day to send more traffic your way. This could be content marketing. It could be social media. It could be tweaking your SEO. Or it could be paid ads. Start by making a master list of things you can do to get more traffic. Pick things you can quickly do and rotate through one or more of them on a daily basis. Things that take a bit longer should become part of your weekly and monthly routine. For example, you may choose to learn how to run Facebook ads this month as one of your bigger projects. The most important part is to do things consistently to drive more traffic to your website.

 

Next, think about what you can do to get more subscribers. Adding an opt-in box to your latest blog post is a quick task that could go on your daily to-do list. Setting up a new opt-in funnel with a fresh lead magnet may make a great weekly project. Writing a book to tap into a new market via Amazon would be more of a project that takes a month or more. Come up with a variety of different things you can try, tweak, and do more to grow your list consistently.

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Last but not least, you’ve got to make an offer. This could be something evergreen like crafting a new autoresponder email for your flagship product. It could be a daily task of running and tweaking ads. Or it could be a free SEO and social media campaign that you work on for a few weeks. Make a list of what you can do to get your offers in front of fresh eyeballs and get to work. And don’t forget to set aside some time each week to work on the next paid product as well.

 

Keep chipping away and continuing to build and fine-tune your routine. Your consistent efforts will start to pay off and more importantly, they will begin to compound as you get more traffic, grow your list by leaps and bounds, and add more products each new customer may be interested in. Keep at it. Consistency is the key to long-term profit.

 

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Work On Your Funnel Each Week And Continue To Branch Out

You should already have at least some very basic funnels set up for your online business. To make sure we are all on the same page, let’s quickly define what a funnel is when it comes to your website. It’s a way for people to work their way through what you have to offer. This could be going from the content of your blog, to signing up for your email list, receiving a series of emails and getting an offer for one of your products or services. That’s one simple funnel and I hope you already have that one set up.

 

While that’s a great start, it should be your only funnel. The goal for any business is to continue to find new ways to draw in more potential customers and engage them. That may mean setting up several new opt-in offers. It may mean sending out a monthly or weekly newsletter. It should always mean creating new products, or making offers for existing things. And of course it could mean presenting affiliate offers.

 

Funnels are great and they are never done. For starters, things change. Links break, you find better offers, and you learn more about your subject matter and have more or even better information to present to your audience. That’s why it’s a good idea to audit your existing funnels from time to time, updating, editing, and fixing them as needed.

 

It’s also a great idea to test and optimize your funnels. For example, you could split test two different lead magnets and see which one converts better. Test what product you present to your subscribers when. Tweak and test to improve your overall conversions, open crates, and click-through rates. Split test your sales pages … The sky’s the limit when it comes to testing and tracking your funnels. The goal will always be the same – try to do a little better than what you have been doing. Over time, you’ll make huge improvements that translate into a bigger bottom line.

 

In addition to improving your existing funnels, you also want to set aside some time each week to consistently work on expanding and adding new ones. This could mean adding a couple of new autoresponder emails to your first funnel this week. And it could mean creating a new lead magnet next week that attracts a slightly different audience into your circle of influence. The important part is that you work on your funnels every single week. Consistency here, like in so many other areas of your online business is key. Doing a little bit each week, will help you grow, expand, and improve your funnels.

HBA Funnel Builder…