HOW TO GET STARTED WITH INFLUENCER MARKETING

Influencer marketing can be radically effective, regardless of whether a brand is a single-product “kitchen table” business, or a multi-national group with several brands and uniquely corresponding audiences. The key to success is planning beyond the surface level exercises, and while there are general best practices we implement, it’s essential to create unique strategy tailored for each individual client.

Since we’re always online (more than ever during 2020 and 2021), the mentality of a digital-first brand virtually dominates new businesses launching now. While traditional marketing practices can be prohibitively expensive for young brands, focusing on a digital presence at first means audiences are still accessible. The genius of exploring influencer marketing at a sustainable rate means that it can grow with the business. Influencer marketing does not guarantee return on investment and can’t be modelled in the way performance or digital marketing is. However, building it in as a manageable, calculated risk that costs little more than the product and time allocated means that the role of influencers can be seamlessly ingrained.

Being able to start from scratch means the ability to find a receptive audience base AND the right circumstances for influencers to interact, so they can grow and complement one another as the business grows. If you look at some of the most successful brands on social, their influencers and consumers are the very same people (Glossier, Sezane, Charlotte Tilbury, H&M, Ganni). Consumer and influencer habits should be considered as one strategy – offering them unique products, problem solving (where your brand is the solution), great customer service – and identifying these qualities will influence your appeal to content creators.

One Roof Social would be a very wealthy business if we got a £1 for each time we’ve heard abbreviations of the scenario “we gifted/paid an influencer with a million followers and saw nothing, so it failed and we’ll never work with them again.” On almost all of those occasions the error lay with the brand rather than the influencer, who simply did not do their homework before engaging with the talent.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen many businesses that traditionally wouldn’t rely on digital marketing taking risks, experimenting and embracing new ways to reach their target audiences. Influencers are amongst the best ways to connect, share information and create real fans of a brand – it’s all about positioning. If you haven’t already, here are some steps to get started.

Image credit: @charlottejacklin

Preparation

·         Establish a robust social media presence, with community management and a tone of voice that reflects the brand’s unique stylings. Ensure that conditions are optimised for influencers to discover the brand, or identify themselves as existing fans. It may go without saying that a social media presence is necessary, but getting the best practices right for each platform means that there is no doubt who they should be tagging and interacting with. Bear in mind that community management extends to influencers as well. If this is done correctly, rather than having to make exhaustive talent searches, brand advocates (whether influencer or public) should be able to identify themselves to you. They are the starting point for creating a basic strategy.

·         Understand the unique purchase funnel your business needs to create sales and strategise over how influencers can play a role in accelerating audiences to progress through it (culminating in purchases, repeat custom and advocacy).

·         Understand what can and cannot be achieved with influencer marketing and let this advice your goals with your influencer strategy.

·         Understand what it means when an influencer can move the dial – vanity metrics like engagement rate aren’t a robust indication of how they will perform for your brand, and we advocate for more detailed analysis of what talent bring to their audiences. Our categories are Sales, Halos and Curators, each of which have their own distinct styles of content and value to a brand when connecting with them.

·         Create a calendar of launches, events and activations that influencers could integrate into, and ensure that you aren’t asking too much for influencers to push your brand without payment if paid campaigns are not an option.

·         Look to partner with influencers who would be the most effective for your brand; rather than ones you follow yourself. Your key influencers should be representative of your target consumers. Invest time into thinking about diversity and inclusion for your brand, and how influencers can represent that.

Creating a Foundation

·         Relationships with influencers should be built over time on a foundation of organic content. This stage of the process means prioritising 1. genuine self-purchases and 2. gifting sample product to create that foundation. Small businesses can use the basic tools at their disposal to discover who they can target, searching through customer transactions and mailing lists (just remember to check GDPR permissions!), and publicly available data like brand Instagram followings and tagged images to identify existing interest, and even better, who has already sampled products or services.

·         From there, question what relationships the names you’ve found have with their audiences – are they there to take recommendations, find new brands, get inspired? If so, they could be a perfect fit. This is why we don’t advocate for the use of profiling tools like SocialBlade to dictate influencer talent searching as it can’t replace this kind of granular examination.

·         We detail more in our consulting (and up-coming eBook) influencers cannot all be treated the same way. We group them into 3 categories, and only one of those is purely Sales (the other two contribute at other integral parts of the purchase funnel). Some influencers offer the equivalent effect to a double page spread in a magazine, others are more akin to being a word of mouth recommendation. The important part is to realise their value before getting started.

·         Furthermore, with gifting (and this is the step many forget), before any gifting leaves you make sure you understand what you’re looking for in terms of “success” in order to progress an influencer relationship. An influencer merely “featuring” or “sponsoring” a brand doesn’t really give a sense of how effective they could be as part of a paid strategy. Make sure you give them all the insight and tools to be able to impress (i.e. if you will be judging them on traffic, gives them the links – and tell them before they accept the gifting).

Differentiation

·         Take advantage of any unique resources, including legacy or heritage of a brand to connect with talent. This could be the history of a storied brand, or access to events and retail locations if there are brick-and-mortar shops. The value of a household brand name can have great impact, particularly when an established brands has charitable or ethical commitments, values and actions that can be part of the mission statement to share with influencers.

·         When creating relationships, we would also advise connecting with influencers directly where possible – this means you can share the brand story in an engaging way. If you want influencers to tell the story for you, they need to be aware of what’s really special.

Outreach

·         Goodbye round-robin and copy-and-paste emails. With the blossoming of influencer marketing, the rush to connect with talent has led to a lack of care when initiating a first approach. Messages should be as unique and enticing as possible, written to appeal to an influencer’s own interests, expertise and audience. As already established, the USP that appeals to your customer base are the same reasons to incentivise influencers – just be sure not to overload with information. Be completely transparent about your strategy with influencers; if you won’t ever have budget to pay them (in that calendar year), make that clear so that influencers can decide themselves whether they want to be a part of your brand.

Conception, Execution, Repetition

·         The next stage is not necessarily to jump immediately to paid, you may need to do a couple of gifting rounds to really understand which influencers drive impact for you. Indeed this goes for any kind of influencer marketing – paid activations should only be done with existing fans of a brands, whose audience are already invested in their journey with a brand via gifting or purchasing habits.

Consolidation

·         So long as expectations have been managed when forming relationships, paid campaigns don’t have to be an essential part of a small brand’s strategy. However, it’s important to explore ways to give back to the influencers that lend their support, beyond seasonal gifting (which is ultimately a transaction, designed to also benefit the brand in question).

·         If it makes sense, explore migrating influencers that move the dial into a paid capacity. If you have lent on influencers to support you, it is reasonable for them to expect to be compensated at some stage. This is crucial for established brands – the simple rule is, don’t take advantage. Big names carry clout in the world of influencer marketing, but don’t expect coverage off the brand name alone.

·         Influencer marketing shouldn’t be considered in isolation, but to complement wider strategy. We advise integrating your influencer processes so that it doesn’t become an afterthought – alternatively explore integrating an agency to make your influencer marketing an effective resource for all your strategic goals!

If you want more detail on establishing the steps above or tailored strategy for your business, get in touch with the team at hello@oneroofsocial.com or look out for our upcoming e-book, The Foundations of Influencer Marketing. Sign up to our newsletter here for more updates.