4 Essential Steps to Influencer Marketing Success

Influencer marketing is an almost $14B industry with no signs of slowing down. This is because influencers provide brands with an opportunity to create a personal touch, at scale, for a relatively low cost. It’s the next best thing to word-of-mouth marketing, allowing brands to showcase their product to the most relevant audiences without directly “selling” to them.

There are four basic steps to ensure success when investing in influencer marketing: strategic campaign planning, efficient targeted search, streamlined outreach that focuses on connection, and accurate reporting to measure ROI.

1. PLAN better

The more specific you get about the goals of your campaign ahead of time, the more successful your campaign will be. To the best of your ability, define your target audience, affinities, and campaign KPIs, then narrow the focus around your goals and targets as much as possible. Unfocused, ambiguous plans will get you unfocused, ambiguous results.

Don’t forget to plan ahead and set KPIs for what you want visitors to do after they’re exposed to your brand. Be sure to share this goal with your team as well as the influencer(s) you work with.

2. SEARCH smarter

WIth the technology available in today’s market, you should never settle for a contract with an influencer who’s a less-than-perfect fit for you/your brand. Stop wasting valuable time on hashtag searches and spreadsheets and instead opt for a technology platform that lets you apply multiple search filters to efficiently whittle down the talent pool to the most relevant influencers for your brand campaign.

3. CONNECT consistently

Now that you’ve found the perfect influencer, you need to have an effective, easy communication strategy and workflow in place to ensure there’s no communication breakdown. Keep everything like back-and-forth messages, negotiations, contracts and documents in one place to ensure nothing gets lost in the dreaded ether of the email inbox.

Streamlining all your influencer communication on one platform allows you to manage and track all your various campaigns at scale, while still maintaining a personal touch with each individual influencer.

4. REPORT your results, your way

Understanding what’s working (and what isn’t) comes down to accurate and specific data reporting. Ditch the old-school spreadsheets in favor of customizable reporting templates created directly from your marketing platform. This is the only way to see the actual impact of each data set on your ROI.

Influencer marketing success is about so much more than just measuring engagement rate. True success comes from understanding the impact of each individual data set at a granular level, then seeing how it all comes together in the big picture of your brand’s social health and campaign ROI.