Influencer marketing is without a doubt one of the most powerful tools for brands looking to effectively reach their target audiences and scale their businesses.
Why? Through its process, you acquire a unique opportunity not unlike getting your brand featured on the front page of leading newspapers. After all, you’re leveraging the influence of big, reputable and relevant names on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Spend just five minutes on socials and you’ll find it’s become quite commonplace in the modern marketing strategy – and it’s easy to see why.
In short: Consumers love Connection.
They love to feel like a brand truly understands them and their desires, so when a brand partners with an online personality (especially one they’ve come to enjoy for their authenticity and opinion), it’s like being approached by a loved one they trust.
Fact: 84% of shoppers trust online reviews as much as they do their friends.
So, you want to start influencer marketing, but don’t know the first thing about where, how or what to begin with? You’ve come to the right place. Here’s the 411.
Influencer marketing has evolved in the past decade – let’s call it the social media era – to now involve two distinct camps:
For the purpose of this blog, and in line with Sticki’s services when we refer to Influencer Marketing specifically, we’ll be talking about the former.
The formula might look something like this: Your Brand + Your Product + Your Chosen Influencer + The Influencer’s Audience = Happy Days
When fleshing out an influencer marketing strategy, the essential first step is to consider the distinction between micro- and macro-influencers.
Micro-influencers, being those who typically have smaller but highly engaged followings within specific niches, offer a more targeted approach and might generate higher ROI.
On the other hand, macro-influencers have a broader reach but may lack the niche specificity and engagement of micro-influencers. They will, however, get substantial eyeballs on your brand and product if awareness is the objective you’re more leaning towards. Opting for macro-influencers can also be costly, so if you’re in the market for a long-term brand ambassador (and have the budget to), we’d take this route.
Step 1: Identify Campaign Objectives
Before diving into influencer outreach, define clear campaign objectives. Whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or promoting a new product launch, having specific goals is the necessary foundation that will guide your entire strategy.
Step 2: Audience Research
You know who your target audience is, and you’ve spent time identifying their wants, needs, desires. Now, it’s time to identify suitable personas and creator types (e.g. what niche are they in, their viewer demographics, their specialty style of content).
What types of content will resonate best with your customers? Our take on the best method of research here is fully hands-on. Get on TikTok and Instagram and find what hooks, find what’s trending, find what you like, and we can help iterate it for your brand.
Step 3: Influencer Research & Shortlisting
Whether or not you already have the perfect creator in mind from your research in Step 2, the next touchpoint would be conducting even more of a deep dive – now with intent to identify potential influencers aligned with your brand values and target audience.
Our innovative Sticki Discovery Tool is designed to deliver just that with ease.
Look under the hood of Influencer Marketing through a tech stack that allows for shortlisting of creators via hundreds of granular filters, from interest segments to creator attributes to hashtags to audience demographics to location, age, gender, etc.
Then, unpack each of their account performances through a score that measures their engagement rates, credibility and estimated post price. All within seconds.
Step 4: Influencer Outreach
Craft personalised outreach messages that demonstrate genuine interest in collaborating.
Explicitly outline the partnership benefits and offer compelling incentives that align with the influencer’s interests and audience. No time for this? No worries!
The Sticki team is able to vet and review talent for you, then connect both creator and brand. Think of it like a mutual friend linking you up with the potential love of your life.
Step 5: Negotiate Terms and Agreements
Once influencers express interest, we’ll negotiate terms and agreements that outline campaign deliverables, timelines, compensation, and any exclusivity clauses, ensuring transparency and mutual understanding to foster a successful partnership to come.
Step 6: Content Collaboration
All the boring bits of contractual agreements done? Our team will then thoroughly brief and collaborate with influencers to develop authentic and engaging content that seamlessly integrates with your messaging.
Hot Tip: Try to avoid a level of scripting that borders on micromanaging.
Your chosen influencers have risen up the ranks in the TikTok / Insta-sphere themselves because of their own talent, creativity, ideas, opinions, personality and unique tone of voice – which their audiences recognise and love them for. So, when briefing content, provide broad guidelines, your objective, and outline a vision.
Just make sure you’re providing creative freedom while still ensuring alignment with campaign and brand messaging. We’ve got a tried and tested recipe for this, so get in touch.
Step 7: Monitoring & Optimisation
Monitor campaign performance in real-time and leverage analytics tools to track key metrics such as reach, engagement, and conversions. For influencer marketing, optimisation could come in the form of weighting more spend towards highest performing pieces of content, or repurposing it on other platforms knowing for certain it works.
The same way you would re: Paid Advertising, use subsequent campaign insights to optimise your content strategy and refine future influencer partnerships.
We won’t deny that a lot of consideration and work goes into pulling off an effective influencer marketing strategy. Fortunately though, we do have a team whose roles are to accomplish exactly that – and are keen to speak about taking your campaigns to the next level with the help of TikTok and Instagram’s very best.
Make those seven steps just one by chatting with us today.
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