To understand influencer marketing, you first have to understand the term “influencers”.
Influencers nowadays are people whom you admire, sometimes they are like your best friend for advice.
When it comes down to advertising or promotion, these influencers are taking over traditional ads on print, radio, and television.
Why? It’s simple.
Think of traditional media ads as John. John likes telling people that he is the best.
Meanwhile, Jason is the person whom all your friends always recommend.
Who do you trust more? John who says he is the best? Or Jason who your friend recommends?
If you put ads on traditional media, you are promoting yourself like John. If you go with influencer marketing, you are like Jason, smart ;).
Can You Afford The Influencer Marketing Game?
If you have the time, knowledge and experience to do all these steps, sure!
Researching Influencers:
Let’s assume you know your customers’ demographics well, and you also know your campaign objective.
You will have to dig through the internet and find influencers whose followers could potentially be your customers as well.
During your research, you have to make sure the influencers don’t have a large fake following because their followers won’t become your customers at any point.
Also, you should find influencers with great Search Engine Ranking because having your website mentioned by them can boost your website’s ranking significantly.
Pitching To The Influencers:
If you approach influencers with a bland pitch, they won’t be interested in replying even if you offer money.
Weird? Yes.
In their perspective, though, their blog is what brings food on the table, so they have to make sure whatever they write is engaging and shareable.
They get many pitches every day, so they are numb to boring ideas. If yours stands out, you win.
However, thinking of a creative pitch is not easy.
The perfect pitch should be short and straightforward. It also needs to be relatable to the influencer, the influencer’s audience and consistent with the influencer’s past work.
In other words, you have to read through many articles and come up with different mutually beneficial plan for different influencers.
Influencers hate to be thought of as if they were commodities. Your message has to be specific to one influencer, so no BCC.
All of a sudden, it’s like you have another group of clients to take care of, but you don’t get paid.
Getting in Contact:
Let’s say you finished the last two steps, it doesn’t mean you got yourself an influencer.
As mentioned above, influencers get pitches every day. Most of the time, they will miss your introduction email.
Hence you have to follow up, usually emailing them 3 times in a 2-week span should get you a reply.
Campaign Curation:
Cool! You get some replies from your influence list.
Now, you have to know what kind of campaign to produce.
Brief the influencer on your objective, and let them take more control of it as they know how to communicate to their audience better.
Don’t piss them off; otherwise, your influencer marketing campaign might backfire.
An excellent article can be in different formats such as an interview, a review, or a documentary. Make sure you know which one is the best option for your campaign.
Oh, you have to negotiate the price and potentially give them some free services as well. At this point, you don’t have much bargaining power.
Delegate a schedule so both parties meets the deadline on-time!
Manage/ Track Campaign:
The campaign is executed perfectly. Now, what?
- How did the campaign go?
- How much traffic did the influencer bring you?
- How many phone calls did you get from this?
- How much SEO boost did you get?
- How much social signal did you get?
- How many backlinks did you gain?
- How much revenue did you make?
If you hired us to build your website, you get some of those questions answered.
If you have us doing your marketing, you get all the answers.
However, if you are doing your marketing in-house, make sure you have ways to answer those question.
Maintaining the Relationship:
When this is all done, you want your campaign to stay on the influencer’s website and you want them to continue recommending your service to his or her followers.
Hence, make sure you touch base with the influencer from time to time and give his or her some incentives to continue recommending your services.
So Is It Hard To Do It Yourself? Not really, if you have nothing much to attend to.
Want A Shortcut? Hire The Coding Bull.
As usual, The Coding Bull can take care of all these complicated tasks for you.
All you have to do is pick out the influencers whom you want to collaborate, and we will handle everything from there.
Yup, we have been spoiling the bloggers with dinners and free digital services, so they are less demanding, will always prioritize our clients; and we have more control.
Why are we offering this service?
We recently added a new team member. Her name’s Mo. She works as a PR executive in London Fashion Week and Vancouver Fashion Week, so she has done this many times.
