How to start working in Influencer Marketing from scratch?

We've told you many times before on our blog about the peculiarities of Influencer Marketing.

One of our recent articles was dedicated to the process of complete surrender of traditional advertising to Influencer Marketing. A little earlier, we told you about how not to fall for the tricks of unscrupulous Influencers, and today we'll go even further, giving you a step by step algorithm of actions when planning a promotional campaign for your product through influencers!

We're often asked if there is a ready-made strategy that will help integrate with influencers from scratch.

And now, after spending dozens of sleepless nights analyzing our collaborations with influencers and agents of influence, we can finally answer: “Yes, there is!”

So, we’d like you to meet:

A strategy to get you started in Influencer Marketing!

However first, let's go back to the theory again, we have a step-by-step algorithm, right? The first step is the most important step, so we'll start again with the terminology!

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a symbiosis of old and new marketing. Its distinctive feature is that both the subject and the result of a promotional campaign is a collaboration between brands and influencers.

Most often the agents of influence are bloggers and celebrities with an audience in social networks or other platforms, for example: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitch Tv, and, more recently, the messenger Telegram.

Recent years we are inevitably witnessing a real boom in the field of Influencer marketing. Whereas previously the “help” of bloggers was used by super-niche brands that could not afford advertising in the media or on TV, now the largest brands in the market are unashamedly resorting to collaborations with Influencers (Audi, Coca-cola, iPhone).

Over the past five years, the global market for Influencer Marketing has grown almost tenfold, long ago leaving traditional advertising methods behind.

Since there has been such a rapid leap, we need to understand the general features of Influencer Marketing, after which the second question arises involuntarily:

HOW TO WORK WITH INFLUENCER MARKETING?

Everything is very simple here.

First, you need to figure out which group of Influencers you need to approach to promote your brand!

Yes, influencers are usually divided into five groups, depending on the size of their audience:

Celebrities. These are people known all over the country (or maybe the world), like movie stars, music stars, and sports stars.
The recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II promo campaign is a perfect example!

Millionaires. Bloggers with an audience of one million people or more. Macrobloggers. Audience of 100 thousand and more followers. Microbloggers. From 10 thousand to 100 thousand followers. Nanobloggers. Up to 10 thousand followers.
After you have decided on an influencer that will correspond to your financial possibilities, you should think through a promotion strategy, budget and content plan development.

It's important to understand that influencer marketing isn't just about finding someone who has a large audience. Yes, you can pay an influencer a certain amount of money and he'll talk about you on his channel. However, don't hope for a miracle. Influencers are not magicians, and no mission, no matter how high the audience's credibility with the blogger, a simple on-air mention (video/stories) will not be an effective way to promote. So in addition to carefully selecting influencers, you need to think about creatives just as carefully. Well, don't forget to thoroughly study the target audience of the influencer. I think ads for a new mobile game will not be particularly interesting to the audience of a food blogger, and vice versa!

Got it?

Let's move on!

Now we move on to the most difficult step at the stage of planning the promotional campaign, to the development of a successful strategy!

How to develop the Influencer marketing strategy?

Influencer marketing, exactly like any marketing tactic, requires focused targeting and planning. As we said above, just throwing money at a blogger will not be enough, even if it is a millionaire blogger.

So now, we're going to share with you the top tips when developing a strategy!

TOP 3 TIPS WHEN DEVELOPING AN INFLUENCER MARKETING STRATEGY.

1. How to start a partnership with Influencers

First, you need to choose a network or platform that you want to focus on. Because of the enormous variety of platforms, each has its own characteristics and specifics, and for example, advertising on YouTube will work very differently than advertising on Instagram or TikTok.

Among other things, you have to determine the industry in which you (and therefore your product) are right now, it also matters when you plan to use influence-marketing. Beauty and fashion brands shine on Instagram and YouTube. The video game industry dominates on Twitch.

2. Set a budget and management strategy.

Unlike an automated advertising campaign (contextual and targeting ads), influencers, just like us, are human, and humans are not immune to mistakes! Therefore, we need to carefully monitor and scrutinize the publications they make and have made before. We all remember how another tweet by Elon Musk brought down Tesla stocks, and now imagine that Musk is the blogger you want to collaborate with and Tesla is your product!

I don't think you want your product to be associated with failure for a long time after a reckless prank by an agent of influence!

3. Define your goals.

The two most common reasons to use influencer marketing are to increase brand awareness and increase sales. However, instead of using these broad goals as your primary goals, it will be more effective to execute your strategy by honing in on your brand needs. Perhaps you want to increase the number of young customers in your customer base, or you want to move into a new user group with a new product. Influencers have the ability to reach a very specific audience.

We've got the strategy figured out. And now we are moving confidently to the Finish Line, but before that there is the last and most important step of your whole strategy - choosing an Influencer for cooperation!

How do you choose a blogger to collaborate with?

There are two main criteria to rely on:

1) Target audience
Determine how much your target audience coincides with the blogger's audience. This is a very important point, because if your target audience is not the same as the blogger's audience, even if he has millions of subscribers, this marketing will not be effective, and it will not cost you anything but wasted money!

2) Involvement of the audience
It is worth asking the blogger for statistics on the coverage of his publications. A blogger with a large number of subscribers may have small coverage. This happens if there are a lot of bots subscribed to the account or the audience is not involved.

We told here how not to get caught up in the tricks of unscrupulous bloggers who use services for scamming. You are advised to read!

Now we need to decide on what specific area will be our promotional campaign!

The main sites for advertising and their features

In a recent article we told you about the features of YouTube and Twitch TV.

Now we tell you about the features of other sites to promote your product!

TikTok. Source of young audience, the most mass segment of users is from 12 to 24 years old. YouTube. A multifaceted platform: it has everything - from videos with kittens to scientific lectures, so it's easier to find your target audience there. Instagram. Predominantly female audience (the share of women is about 60%), for which the visual component is important. The most mass segment of users by age is 25-34 years old. Telegram. This platform is worth choosing if you want to work with text formats. Here you can find a reading audience and a lot of suitable channels.
Well, that's all, now you are ready to conquer the audience with your competent promo-campaign! Use this article as a tutorial and don't forget to share your brand promotion cases in the comments!

Well, you can find even more useful information in our author's blog, come on over)