The power of social networks influencers continues to grow …
But in spite of its possible ROI and increasing interest, 67.6%of online marketers still find it difficult to discover relevant influencers for their brands. So what offers? How can you tap into the indisputable power of social networks influencers to generate a return for your organisation?
It’s complicated …
You see, influencer marketing is a maturing area. When this trend started to take shape things were reasonably easy. Discover somebody with a big social following, send them some complimentary items, and watch the sales roll in.
But as with any digital marketing technique, things adapt and alter at a rapid speed. Something that works today might not work tomorrow, so you need to be versatile.
As we peer over the ledge into 2019, influencer marketing is more popular than ever, and continues to trend upwards. This means that more brands are doing it, and the market is slowly however certainly getting watered down.
Arise from influencer marketing will become harder and harder to achieve. Especially, if you fallback on an old school “hit and hope” approach.
The only way to stay ahead of the curve with influencer marketing is to leverage data and innovation to make educated options. By running a keen eye over every influencer campaign you start and examine the metrics; pre, throughout, and post-campaign.
Today I wish to share a procedure for running influencer projects utilizing a tool called Lefty. Lefty is an influencer marketing platform, that huge brands such as Sephora, Louis Vuitton, and Guerlain have been utilizing to get considerable direct exposure and results. It is bleeding edge technology that helps you make choices backed by data. That makes it your competitive advantage.
With Lefty you can:
- Identify the most appropriate influencers by infiltrating over 2.5 million profiles.
- Produce lists of influencers, connect to them and pay them straight from the platform.
- Make data-driven choices by evaluating insights on your influencers’ audience.
- Track and measure your campaign results with analytics reporting.
It’s without a doubt the most robust platform I have actually seen on the market and well worth a look.
Sound fascinating? Let’s see how other huge brand names are taking advantage of this platform.
Have a look at the Lefty site today. How to run an influencer campaign in 5 steps
I had a chat with the group at Lefty and we put together a basic 5-step procedure you can follow for running an influencer campaign. Here it is.
Step 1. Define a strategy
A lot of brand names utilize a “hit and hope” approach to influencer projects.
They get on social networks, discover someone with a large following, some engagement, and what seems an active feed. Then they toss a few thousand dollars at them for a sponsored post.
This approach is predestined to stop working. You’re essentially swinging for the fences. There are no goals set, no responsibility for the influencer, no evidence that you are even targeting the right audience … it’s a great way to burn through your influencer budget plan without much of an ROI.
Instead of diving head first into a haphazard influencer campaign with the very first account you see, you need to define a strategy.
- Set clear objectives for your campaign. Do you want impressions, likes, fans, conversions, or sales?
- Develop essential efficiency signs (KPIs) that you can hold your influencer liable to.
- Identify the idea for the project. Is it an occasion? A flash sale? The distribution of a special coupon code? Or something else?
- Draw up essential milestones, deliverables, and responsibilities on a project calendar.
Once you have a technique in place, then you can start to recognize the influencers you wish to deal with.
Action 2. Find influencers
Now you are clear on your strategy for the influencer campaign, it’s time to discover some pertinent influencers. The Lefty platform has a robust influencer search that allows you to filter through a pool of over 2.5 million influencers by interests, place, language, engagement rate and much more. This makes it super-powerful for accelerating this part of the process.
Here are some tips for discovering influencers that will fulfill your requirements:
- Try to find influencers who have actually previously engaged with your brand, or with brands in the exact same space.
- Assess each influencers’ engagement rate. For example, the average on Instagram is 1%, so preferably they would have engagement higher than that.
- Inspect the audience demographics of their followers to make sure it lines up with your ideal customer.
- Ask the influencer for data and arise from their previous partnerships to see if it meets your wanted outcomes.
The search engine on Lefty makes it much easier to filter through this information because you can narrow down your search by choosing from their pre-set filter choices.
Below is an example of a search searching for Yoga influencers in the United States with an engagement rate of over 1%, a minimum of 10,000 fans, and a relationship to particular hashtags:
When you hit “Search” Lefty discovers 176 influencers who match these specific criteria:
Isn’t that a little easier than aimlessly scrolling through a search feed searching for influencers?!?
From the search area, you can easily add any influencer that sticks out to a campaign by clicking through to their profile:
On their profile screen you can also more closely analyze each influencer’s engagement and audience to guarantee they are a great fit:
Step 3. Directly manage the influencer relationships
After shortlisting influencers for your project, it’s time to get in touch with them and start the working out procedure. Each influencer will have their own method to pricing and running sponsored campaigns, so you need to interact with them to figure that out.
You can connect to these influencers straight on their chosen socials media, or you can handle all of your messages from within the Lefty platform:
When you reach out to your picked influencers, keep these things in mind:
- Personalize your message for each influencer and notify them about the campaign you are wanting to run.
- Understand the typical rate for influencer projects on social media. A good price quote is about US$ 15 per 1,000 followers or US$ 30 per 1,000 impressions.
- Always ask for outcomes and impressions from previous sponsored projects the influencer has actually run.
Step 4: Collect all posts and stories
When you are running an influencer project it can become frustrating finding all of the pertinent sponsored content being shared to track and utilize it the very best you can. Many marketers get on social networks and take screenshots of the influencer material they discover and repurpose that material in a typical feed! Traditional.
Luckily, Lefty enables you to rapidly browse for sponsored content on their platform and filter by stories, date, author, and hashtags. This is exceptionally beneficial for collecting all of the material released by your influencers and making the most of it throughout your campaign.
Step 5. Measure and optimize your campaign
Even after you have actually found your influencers, your work is only just starting. Now you require to guarantee you get every last drop of worth from your influencer project.
To do so, handle the development of your campaign, track essential metrics and results, and enhance your technique where possible.
If you don’t have a way of keeping track of the metrics of the influencer projects you are forced to make decisions based on assumptions, or a gut sensation. Inevitably, this will result in squandered money, time, and other resources. By determining your results you can determine what works, what doesn’t work and apply these learnings to future projects.
The cool thing is you can do all of this from the Lefty platform, in addition to identifying your best performing influencers so you can build long-term relationships with them!
Conclusion
The power of influencer marketing is indisputable. As more and more brand names jump on the bandwagon it ends up being more difficult to cut through the sound.
Unfortunately, there is also an unrestricted supply of less-than-helpful info available online that might lead you down the incorrect path.
The very best way to accomplish results from any form of marketing is to dive deep into the information, track appropriate metrics, test approaches, and enhance your efficiency in time. Influencer marketing is no different. All marketing decisions you make must be backed by data and information.
However, when it concerns influencer marketing metrics it’s easy to get lost in spreadsheets and wind up with information overload. The good news is innovation platforms like Lefty can assist you discover relevant influencers, quickly communicate with them, hold them responsible to concurred outcomes, and track and enhance your results.
It’s the smart option for staying ahead of the influencer curve.
