A successful influencer marketing is easy to implement, or so you thought.
Here’s the thing: With how prevalent ecommerce has now become, countless aspiring entrepreneurs have started their very own websites to jump in the ecommerce bandwagon.
Considering how e-retail sales are poised to grow up to $4.8 trillion by 2021, it’s only but natural for opportunity-seeking entrepreneurs to pursue their slice of the proverbial ecommerce pie.
Influencer marketing, on the other hand, has proven itself to be a tried and tested marketing method that yields real tangible results — and I’m talking about sales, truckloads of them.
Because of this, when you marry both ecommerce and influencer marketing, you’ll come up with a peanut butter and jelly-like combination that’s irresistible for entrepreneurs to pass up.
The question is, however, how exactly do you run a successful influencer marketing campaign if you’re wearing countless hats as an entrepreneur.
That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.
30,000 ft. view of the process.
Because you have several things on your plate, I don’t want to confuse you further by sharing the nitty gritty of a successful influencer marketing campaign.
I’ll just focus on the most important parts of the marketing method. (More like we’ll focus on all the “steak” while ignoring the “sizzle.”)
Here’s a bird’s eye view of how you can run a successful influencer marketing campaign:
1. Establish your goals.
2. Find the right audience and platform.
3. Find the right influencer
4. Engage the influencer (the right way)
5. Track your results.
6. Nurture your relationship with the influencers
7. Nurture your customer relationship.
Do you like what you’re reading so far? Then let’s proceed.
1. Establish your goals
Before you even think about the hows and whos of running a successful influencer marketing campaign, you need to determine your goals first.
Are you looking to get more sales? Obtain more sign-ups? Or, perhaps you’re just looking to remind people about your brand awareness?
The sooner you determine what your goals are, the easier it becomes for you to map out how you’ll run your influencer marketing campaign.
Remember, you need to align whatever process, method, or tools you’re thinking of using to your goals. If it doesn’t directly help you achieve your goal, then you need to start questioning if you really need to add the element to your influencer marketing campaign.
2. Find the right audience and platform
While there are countless online business models you can use to start making money on the internet, the success of your endeavor as an entrepreneur can very well depend on whether or not you’re using the right platform.
I mean, think about it, would it make sense for you to run your influencer marketing campaign on Twitter if you know for a fact that your audience are on Facebook?
To determine which platform is the right fit for your campaign, you need to determine if your audience frequents the platform.
In the example I shared above, if you’d like to determine if your audience are hanging out on Facebook, you can use the Facebook Audience Insights tool to determine that.
Supposing you’re in the trucking niche, then use Facebook insights to search for trucking groups or communities. If you find that there are bajillions of them on Facebook, then FB becomes a good prospect for your influence marketing campaign.
I did a search in Facebook Insights using the keyword “trucking.” This is what I found.
As you can see at the bottom, there’s even a “See More” clickable link. I clicked that button and saw several more groups.
We’ve barely scratched the surface with all the data that Facebook Insights showed us.
If you add one of the pages in the results in Facebook Insight’s search engine, you’ll come up with even more trucking groups.
(I copied “Go By Truck” and added it as an example.)
As I ran the search for “Go By Truck,” Facebook came up with several new pages.
Pretty awesome, don’t you think?
Because FB has validated that there are several trucking groups in the platform, you can certainly use FB as the place where you’ll run your influencer marketing campaign.
And so the question becomes, how do you know which influencer you should be working with?
3. Find the right influencer
When the word “influencer” is mentioned, what often crosses our minds are people with a huge tribe of followers — like life coaches, for example.
I mean, sure, considering all the certifications that life coaches had to go through to become one, the massive clout they possess in their industry, and the crazy amount of people following them, they very much fit the description.
However, even having said that, allow me to establish this early on that an “influencer” doesn’t necessarily pertain to a person.
An influencer can be a company, a blog, or a community owner, etc. — basically an entity or brand that has the capability to compel its followers to do something — to influence.
I mean, sure, in the end, you’ll end up dealing with a person, but you’re not exactly asking that person, per se, to promote your brand, you’ll be asking them to promote your brand under the company, blog, or brand that he personally owns (or manages) that has truckloads of avid fans.
That being said, rather than limiting the term “influencer” into a person, you’d be better off thinking of an “influencer” as an entity that has the capability to compel others to take action on your offers.
Here’s a basic strategy you can use to find an influencer.
1. Use Facebook Insights to determine if the entity has big enough followers. (How “big” of an audience is acceptable is going to depend on what your goals are for your campaign.)
2. Once you’ve found a prospective group or entity, you can check out their page to see if their audience are actively engaging the brand. (You can scroll through their posts to see if there are comments, etc.)
(I checked the trucking groups and found “Real Men Drive Big Rigs” to be a good example of a group where their audience are actively engaging. Check out how their posts have comments, shares, and likes.)
Depending on the goals you’ve set for your influencer marketing campaign, both steps can be good enough to find your influencer.
If you’re looking to determine whether the influencer has a good bit of monthly website traffic, you can also use a free tool like Similarweb.
I added Landingi.com in the online tool’s search box and hit submit. Here’s what the tool came up with.
With tools like Similarweb. It becomes insanely easy for you to determine if the influencer’s website has a decent amount of monthly traffic, and from which countries their traffic comes from (among other things).
If your goals require that you go more in-depth, I suggest you reach out to each of your prospective community, ask for their media kit, check out their statistics (e.g., conversions, sign-ups, comments, number of people in their email list, etc.)
4. Engage the influencer (the right way)
Just like in most things in life, there is a wrong and a right way of engaging influencers.
And you need to know how to do the latter, otherwise, all the efforts you spent looking for the right influencers will be for naught if they just ignore you.
And so the question becomes, “What’s a good strategy for approaching the influencers so they won’t ignore you?”
Instead of giving you the actual tips, let me give you something even better.
THE guiding compass.
Consider this bit that I’m going to tell you, and your chances of getting a positive reply from the influencer DRASTICALLY increase.
What guiding compass am I talking about? I’m talking about asking the one question that all the influencers are interested to learn about.
“What’s in it for me?”
That right there talks about value. And not just any value, something that your target influencer finds valuable — and not just some random thing that people, in general, find valuable.
Before you reach out to the influencer, take the time to determine what their needs are. From there, create your offer or pitch based on addressing those needs.
If you do that, your offer becomes highly relevant to them — let alone, irresistible.
For example, if you found in one of the influencer’s FB posts that he/she is a fan of Steve Jobs, then send him/her an Amazon ebook of Steve Jobs’ biography.
Doing that is a good “foot in the door” strategy. Once the influencer notices you, you can start opening the idea of how you can both collaborate.
In the end, remember that you need to offer value that’s tailor-fitted to your prospective influencer’s needs — and not just some valuable-looking, yet, generic stuff.
5. Track your results
If you are dead-serious about growing your business, then you need to be tracking the results of your landing pages or your overall campaigns.
You need to see how your marketing campaign’s results stack against your predetermined goals.
You need to see which among your marketing campaigns have poor results, so you can stop the losing campaign and transfer your budget to the winning ones.
You need to analyze what’s making your winning campaigns “win,” so you can build upon the idea and win some more.
Those are just some of the many things you can uncover (and benefit from) if you’re tracking your results.
And depending on which platform you’re running your marketing campaigns, you’ll gain access to varying data points.
If you’re using Facebook to run your ads, here’s how your reporting might look.
6. Nurture your relationship with the influencers
Considering all the hoops and struggles that you’ve gone through just to establish your relationship with the influencer, it makes perfect sense for you to stay in touch, and nurture your relationship with them.
If you let the relationship die down, you’ll end up having to go through the same struggles and work just to work with them.
The good news is, nurturing your relationship with the influencers isn’t exactly rocket science.
You can send them freebies from time to time, ask them questions, send them offers, feature them in your website, etc.
You can even refer a client their way.
Here’s a sample email that I once used to refer a prospective client to one of the influencers that I worked with.
The more established your relationship is with the influencer, the easier your collaboration with them becomes.
Not only that, but they can even refer other people your way or perhaps give you freebies — both of which can help you get more sales, or, at the very least, aid you in running as successful influencer marketing campaign.
7. Nurture your customer relationship
Did you know that it costs five times as much to attract new customers than it is to sell to existing ones?
The figure tells us why we should value customer relationships.
Not only is it costly to acquire new customers, but it’s far easier to sell to existing customers.
No matter which spectrum you look at it, you stand to gain from nurturing your relationship with your leads and customers.
Here are several ideas you can employ to do just that:
- Run a “Customer of the Day” post.
- Give discount.
- Give freebies.
- Run contests.
- Etc.
Conclusion
Regardless of the size of your business, you can bet your family jewels that influencer marketing has enough “oomph!” to take your business to greater heights.
You just need to run your campaigns the right way, stay persistent, and continue measuring your results so you can improve the weak parts of your influencer marketing campaign workflow.
If you have questions, suggestion, or even ideas that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below. Cheers!
