How to Maximize Your Influencer Marketing

By Paiame Shalalvand

Celebrities and personalities have always been an important marketing channel for brands, even before social media. With the rising influence economy it’s easier for any brand to be seen with personalities. This makes it even more essential to work with the right personality that delivers authentic consumer engagement. The risk of wasting marketing efforts and brand damaging are higher in this space.

We’ve seen younger people shifting their attention from TV/News (traditional media) to social media like Instagram and Youtube (now Tik Tok rising). Brands realize the power of communicating with the consumer through personalities. “The 30 sec TV-ad to the mass won’t work...now we have the tools to communicate a specific message to the right audience.”

The effect of this shift is a lot higher budgets into influencer marketing. The result of increased sponsored content is increased “inauthentic” content. This is what makes the consumer more skeptical. And in the end brands ask the question, “is influencer marketing really worth it?”

Furthermore, brands are asking themselves if they should work with micro, mid, macro or Chrissy Teigen? How do we know if the campaign was successful? These questions come up regardless of the marketing channel. Ask yourself, did you get a return on investment in your first Facebook ads, probably not. There are no guarantees.

With this rapidly changing space I’ve summarized 5 insights that are essential to know to be successful with influencer marketing.

What’s the goal?

The first step is to know your goals with your initiative. A goal could be building brand awareness or positioning your brand through storytelling. Or for coming sale the focus is to drive sales. When you know your goal you know what to measure and what type of influencers to work with. Below you can see a chart of influencers...

Brand alignment

No one has the exact recipe of how to find influencers that will generate sales. But what you can understand beforehand is the brand alignment. You want the target audience to resonate with your brand’s values. The simplest way to understand that is to look for other brands the influencer has been seen with. You’ve probably already known other brands that you want to be associated with or have similar audience. Furthermore check how many times an influencer has mentioned a brand. A brand that focuses on ROI wouldn’t work 10 times if it didn’t give any results.

Long term collaboration

After finding the right profile, the next challenge is to collaborate and build relationships. “As influencer marketing has matured, influencers get more collaboration proposals. Influencers see this as an opportunity, as they quickly can get cash from brands that are new to the space and rely on one-off collaborations. Might sound obvious, but just like you wouldn’t buy a Maldive trip on your first date, it’s not sustainable,” says Sebastian co-founder of Scope. Read more how to build long lasting relationships with influencers.

Brand recognition is key

By knowing your goals with the collaboration you know what to measure. If brand awareness is the main goal, you should collaborate with a macro. If sales are the focus, 500 nano influencers is the way to go. Either strategy you have it’s important to understand other values beyond numbers. Brand recognition is hard to measure but crucial if you want to monetize a target audience. Think about it, do you think you’ll have higher ROI in your home market or new markets? People buy stuff they’ve seen or know about. So you can’t expect super high ROI from influencers in new market.

Give up control

You’ve probably heard that the ideal profile is genuine profiles. You want the influencer to be genuine when talking about your products. That’s why you have to give up control and let them promote you in their own way. The way the followers will “connect” to. If you moderate it will be like saying to your plumber what to do…

Let them do content that influence their following. That’s what you’re paying for and what will pay off in the end. Then it still could result in a “bad” campaign but in that case you probably have picked the wrong influencer.

Summary

In order to work successfully with influencers it's essential to find the right profile, set up sustainable collaborations and to analyze the result. This is the way to understand what works specifically for your brand. When you own that insight you'll know how to find the right profile for each campaign.

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