5 Ways To Become An Influencer Marketing Planning Superstar - 10 Yetis Insight

As the team here at 10 Yetis Digital continue to work on the PR outreach for a wide plethora of national brands and introduce relevant ways to engage and communicate with existing and potential audiences, a growing number of clients are now exploring the benefits of working with social influencers.

Be it through a sponsored blog post, online review, social media post, YouTube video or brand partnership, the ultimate aim of any influencer marketing campaign is to deliver a change in attitude towards your client’s product or service. So, how can you effectively plan and devise a winning influencer marketing campaign guaranteed to showcase the desired return on investment?

Here are our five top tips…

1.Lay the groundwork with influencers

Here at 10 Yetis we’ve been working on a range of influencer marketing campaigns for the likes of Optical Express, Ray-Ban, Superdry, MyProtein and Huel for a good few years now. As a result of this, we’ve been lucky enough to build up strong relationships with many UK influencers.

It’s a lot easier to convincingly recommend bloggers and influencers to clients that you have an existing knowledge of, an awareness of their likes and interests, and the kind of posts and coverage they are likely to give your clients. After working with an influencer that we know delivers strong content and has the ability to please our clients by driving new audiences to a brand, we are MUCH more likely to want to work with them again in the future.

Subsequently, if there is ever an opportunity for an influencer to need the assistance of a digital agency further down the line, we like to think we’re at the forefront of their mind!

2.Identify your campaign goals & set realistic targets

It’s all very well and good setting aside a healthy budget for the execution of an influencer campaign, but without a clear plan that identifies your clients’ goals and objectives, you’re wasting a golden opportunity.

Whether your campaign is set to coincide with a brands event, product launch or service offering, there is a strong chance your client will already have a set idea of what they want to gain from an influencer campaign. Whether these are achievable or not, it’s important to listen and set realistic expectations of the results you can attain in a certain time period.

Many influencers are bloggers during their evenings, weekends and time off, and don’t spend full-time hours checking emails or liaising with marketers. Therefore, it’s important for your clients to know that securing a partnership or feature with an influencer can be much more of a drawn-out process than it can be with a journalist. On the plus side, it can be much more rewarding for everybody involved.

3. Identify your clients ideal influencers

The number one rule to remember when drawing up a ‘wish list’ of potential influencers to contact for a client campaign is, whilst important, follower numbers are NOT everything.

As well as being able to charge higher prices for sponsorships and paid-for content, influencers with larger numbers of followers don’t always necessarily run social media accounts with the most engaged followers. In fact, Digiday previously ran a study which highlighted that influencers with the most interactions from audiences have between 10,000 – 100,000 followers, rather than in the millions.

More important than follower numbers are ensuring that influencers are offering content relevant to your clients customers or the audiences they want to target. Influencers should also be authentic and honest, in a tone and style that mimics those of your client.

4. Know the best ways to find and communicate with influencers

Unfortunately for us, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to researching and finding influencers that are going to be effective at promoting your clients brand. Whilst there are a number of different software options you can invest in to help your search, it’s probably best to take a structured manual approach.

A good place to start is by taking to social media and undergoing a hashtag search of your client and its direct competitors to see what kind of influencers are already known amongst industry audiences, as well as the types of content that are working the best in terms of likes, shares and views.

Another way that building and maintaining ongoing relationships with influencers can be such a fundamental part of influencer marketing is for introductions and recommendations. Previous bloggers or vloggers that you’ve worked with in the past might not be the right fit for a particular client campaign, but social influencers work and communicate in very close circles and should be more than happy to offer up suggestions of peers that they believe would add value to a brand.

5. Realise influencer marketing is not ALL about financial incentives

It might be a bit shocking to hear, but there is a truck load of evidence to support the theory that money and financial incentives are NOT the only way to persuade a well-known influencer to work with you or your client.

According to a previous study of influencers by Augure, there are in fact lots of motivators that outweigh being paid to promote a brand, with ‘increasing/growing an audience’, ‘creating quality content for an audience’, ‘shaping their personal image’ and ‘ the perks of discounts/free samples’ all ranking higher than the desire for money.

It’s important to bear in mind that, although you might not have the highest budget for an influencer campaign, with creative ideas and a product, service or brand able to assist in the formation of engaging and exciting content, influencers will still be up for working with you!