Influencer marketing is rapidly evolving and is one of the best ways to extend your brand’s reach.  And to no surprise, it is actually Growing Faster than Digital Ads.  

To give you a quick recap, Influencer Marketing is using influencers to spread the brand’s messages and product/service information to their existing audience.  Their audience (loyal fans aka followers) is built through creating content on social media.  Influencers would post a specific niche such as beauty, fashion, healthy & fitness etc.  and share the knowledge of that specific topic to their followers.  Through sharing information on a deeper level and creating engaging content, they eventually become the go-to source in their specific niche.  

In simple terms, influencer marketing is word of mouth marketing and it’s the kind of publicity every brand strives for.  The beauty of it all is that you have the opportunity to target the influencers’ existing audiences and increase your brand’s awareness .  All you need to do now is to create a strategy plan where you can establish a win-win situation where both you and the influencer can bring value to the audience.  

Let’s dive into it! 

Creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy

Similar to making the perfect pumpkin pie, it requires a recipe with specific ingredients.  And by following the steps, your end results will be quite rewarding.  

Although the plan may slightly change during the course of the campaign, just remember to always refer back to your strategy plan.  It’s okay to go off track, or even backtrack - use this as a road map to bring you back on track. 

1. Set Your Goals

Like all strategy plans, it always begins with setting your goals.  Doing this will help you structure your plan and maintain your focus on the end results.   When you know what your end goal is, it will help you determine what metrics to use to measure your progress.   

Setting your goals also helps the influencers get a better understanding of what you need from them or how they can help in order to achieve your goal. Different influencers campaigns will give you different results. The following list of goals would give you a positive result with influencer marketing.  Depending on the length of your campaign, you may want to choose some or all as your goals. 

• Boost Traffic: Driving traffic means to increase the number of visitors to your website.  The more visitors come to your site, the more chances of potential buyers, hence increasing your profit
  

• Generating Lead: Lead Generation is the process of generating consumers' interests for your product or service with the goal of turning that interest into a sale.  Being said this would allow you to engage and build a continuous relationship with your consumers. 
  

• Increase Conversion Rate: A conversion rate refers to any desired action that you want the customer to take.  Influencer marketing can assist with conversions to achieve your desired outcome
  

• Increase Brand Awareness: What every brand craves for.  To increase its presence and to make an impression in the social world.  By doing so, it will lead to purchases or repeated purchases from the consumers. 
  

• Increase Engagement: Engagement is interaction between the brand and the influencer with the followers. Engagement includes likes, shares, comments, and conversations.  With engagement, the audience feels a sense of importance and closeness which will lead to loyalty.  This would increase the brand reach and awareness.
  

2. Identify Your Target Market

Before starting your campaign, you need to identify and understand your target audience.  Who are the audiences that you would like your brand’s message to reach?  Target audiences are often divided into different demographic factors.  Take your time to determine what audience group will best suit your campaign.  If you haven’t already, this is your chance to create your buyer personas.  Some key questions you should consider:

• What is the age group and gender?
• Where do they live?
• What is their occupation and income level?
• What is their level of education?
• What are their hobbies and interests?
• Why/ How would your brand (product/ service) benefit them?
• What / How does your brand frustrate them or What are their frustrations?
• What are their main social media platforms?
  

Determine the most common characteristics out of the personas you created and identify your primary persona.  Then, focus your attention toward his/her personal characteristics. 

3. Set Your Budget 

There’s never a perfect number to set and it really comes down to how much your company can afford.  Start from looking at your overall budget for Marketing.  The easiest way is to dedicate 15% of your marketing budget to Influencer Marketing.  According to a recent survey, 11% of respondents intend to spend at least 40% on Influencer Marketing, 19% intend to allocate 20-30%, and the majority which is 30%, plan to spend 10-20%.  So with 15%, you’re in a good spot! 

"Influencer Marketing is the process of identifying, researching, engaging and supporting the people who create the coversations impacting your brand, productsor services."

We can’t stress enough, but Influencer Marketing should definitely be in your Digital Marketing Mix.  Follow the recipe we shared, and we promise you will get rewarding results! 

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