The four keys to successful influencer marketing

The progression of influencer marketing from tactical to essential makes it all the more important to have the right tools at your disposal.

The past few years have seen the progression of influencer marketing from a tactical element to an essential part of an overall – and successful – strategy. This establishment of influencer marketing as a necessity is a direct result of the fact that it has proven its effectiveness time and time again in a variety of industries, serving a range of purposes. From improving brand awareness and reaching target audiences, to building brand trust and boosting conversions, the benefits of influencer marketing campaigns are seemingly endless.

While there is no doubt these days that it is a good idea to include influencer marketing in your strategy, there is also no doubt that to really succeed and achieve the desired objectives, you must have the right elements. to help you coordinate your campaign effectively. These elements help ensure that your return on investment meets (and hopefully exceeds) expectations; while empowering you to conduct ongoing review of activity during and after the campaign, so valuable learnings can be used in the future.

When it comes to the elements that drive successful influencer campaign execution, we’ve identified four key elements. These are:

1. Technology
2. Stock of influencers
3. Collaboration
4. Strategy

And here’s what we mean by each of them.

Technology

When it comes to technology, there are a variety of tools that can make preparing, implementing, managing, and measuring an influencer campaign easier and more effective. Such tools are increasingly important because the regularity and complexity of such campaigns can make their manual management a headache, leaving the company in a position where it must rely on the professionalism and transparency of influencers to obtain results. information, which makes it a bit difficult to obtain. a realistic review of the results and, ultimately, your return on investment.

It’s imperative to use a tool that allows you to find and connect with the right influencers that suit your brand and campaign goals. It should also allow you to communicate directly with influencers, in order to make them aware of the campaign and clarify what is expected of them, while allowing you to propose a contract stipulating the terms of the agreement. A benchmarking feature, which gives you a line of sight on influencer pricing, will also help you save time – and money – by ensuring everyone enters the deal by being fully aware of what is expected of each.

Two final considerations on the technology front are that it should be able to make automated payments to influencers at scale as the campaign progresses, and it should be able to monitor and measure the results of the campaign in a “live” environment in real time.

Stock of influencers

When it comes to technology systems, its ability to help your business find the right influencers. And find the right influencers depends on its stock of influencers. Gone are the days of agencies offering spreadsheet-based suggestions of the influencers they most enjoyed working with. The reality is that the key to the success of an influencer campaign is its authenticity. And that means influencers who are employed to represent your brand and advertise your products or services must be a genuine match based on real valuable data.

To that end, the stock of influencers that exists in the technology you are using needs to be verified from an audience and content engagement perspective. The integrity of the data collected on each influencer helps ensure that matching the right influencers with the right brand is not just a fluke, but a quantifiable goal. The larger the stock of registered and tech-approved influencers you use, the better results you can expect when it comes to taking your influencer campaign from idea to activation.

Collaboration

Paul Solarz once wrote that: “Collaboration allows us to know more than we are able to know for ourselves.” And when it comes to bringing a successful influencer marketing campaign to life, collaboration is a must.

The reality of such a collaboration is not always beautiful. It can take a lot of hard work, long hours and late nights – but the effort is always worth it because it always pays off in the end. Human involvement is what sets great work apart, because the more you are able to bring intellectual property and collaboration skills to the table, the better the end result will be.

Strategy

The strategy behind an influencer campaign is a determining factor in its success. It’s not enough to just send free products to influencers and hope for the best. Rather, the strategy should inform the who, how, where, when, what and why of the campaign, from training influencers to considering the platforms the content will live on; decisions on the objectives of success, on the best way to achieve them. The more detailed and thoughtful the strategy, the more likely it is to achieve what it is designed to do.

It’s not enough to know that you need to include influencer marketing in your strategy. If you want to succeed – and we know you do – you need to equip yourself with the right people and the expertise to run campaigns effectively. And these things can mean the difference between money well spent (and that’s money that does some sort of payback) and money wasted. So let’s do it smart.

Pieter Groenewald is CEO of Infinity, which builds brands using the power of influencers. TheSALT uses in-depth lifestyle insights to connect businesses and brands to the right influencers for their goals. With over ten years of industry experience, they have amassed a wealth of knowledge and experience when it comes to connecting brands with the real people who will create and distribute content that will result in conversations. positive and meaningful brands..

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