Influencer Marketing Tips + Tricks

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, businesses are earning $5.20 for every $1 they spend on influencer marketing – but you probably already knew that. In 2020, everyone is fully aware of all the benefits influencer marketing can reap, so let’s focus less on the why and more on the how and jump right into it.

Here are some tips on how to run and execute the perfect influencer campaign:

Develop clear campaign goals with corresponding KPIs.

It is important to understand the purpose of the campaign. Spend time clearly defining who the target influencers are, what style of content is on-brand, what the call-to-action is, what the overall budget is and other such parameters. Make sure to do some research to compare campaigns carried out by competitors and develop appropriate benchmarks to have a realistic idea of what to expect from the campaign.

Build a research-backed, ideal influencer list.

Use the Instagram platform itself as well as influencer data platforms with search filters such as Influence to develop a list of all the ideal influencers for the campaign. Make sure to note down as much of their information as possible to refer to later, including their location, email address, and most importantly engagement rate. You can use platforms like Phlanx to automatically calculate that for you, or you can manually calculate it yourself (average engagement [likes & comments] / total followers x 100). The average engagement rate stands at 3%, so aim to work with influencers that are around that value as this ensures their audience is active and authentic. Remember to always have a higher number of people then you actually need, because not all will be secured for the collaboration.

Influencer Marketing Tips

Prepare outreach templates, campaign briefs and contracts.

To ensure this campaign runs smoothly, efficiently and at a reasonable pace, it is important to create supporting documentation for everyone to refer to. Firstly, create a standard outreach email template which you will use to make the first point of contact with influencers to gather their interest in working together—make sure to slightly customize this when you actually send them out, including the influencer’s name and handle to ensure it feels more personal. This email should have a brief summary about the brand and products/services, the campaign overview and the deliverables. Then create a campaign brief with more detailed information including moodboards, key messages, timeline, hashtags, and anything else. This will be sent to the influencers alongside the contract, once they show interest and their rates have been negotiated and approved. The contract should consist of agreed compensation, clear deliverables, dates to post, handles to include and any other agreed upon notes.

Go live, while carefully tracking and monitoring.

Consider creating a master spreadsheet to track all things influencer related for the campaign. Include a budget tracking tab, outreach and response status tab, mailing information tab, and so on. For large campaigns, it can be hard to keep track of everyone, and relying on going through email threads can end up taking a lot of time. As you carry out the different stages of the campaign, update the spreadsheet with any notes and updates in live time. This will also allow other people in the team to jump in and check how things are going, making collaborations easier and more efficient.

Collect metrics.

In the contract, make sure to include the collection of metrics, post campaign as one of the deliverables required from the influencers. At the end of the campaign, make sure to follow up with all the influencers for links to their posts as well as screenshots of their analytics for their in-feed posts as well as stories to include in your campaign wrap report. These metrics are important to establish the overall success of the campaign, as well as to guide future ones.

Jive PR + Digital is a full service digital marketing agency that has been managing influencer campaigns for 10 years now. We support these partnership projects with ambassador relations as well as digital romancing. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you collaborate with creators, feel free to contact us today!