A decade ago, influencing customers was magically done by A-list celebrities. However, times have changed; nowadays, anyone can be an influencer. This offers numerous opportunities for businesses to reach their target audience and goals. Scrolling through your favourite social app or platform like YouTube is nearly impossible without coming across an influencer marketing strategy in play. Developing a well-planned influencer marketing strategy is a great way to reach out to your target audience – building brand awareness, driving new leads, and improving purchase consideration.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is new and effective social media marketing that revolves around brand or influencer partnerships and is based on endorsements. Generally, influencers are getting endorsed are people with a large and engaged community of social media followers – but that might not always be the case. Influencers are considered subject-matter experts in the case of social media followers – as users tend to turn to their favourite Influencer to get more information or advice on a particular product/topic. Influencers get compensated or sponsored by businesses via perks or payments in exchange for an official endorsement that they share on their social media pages. If you need more information, get connected with an influencer marketing agency in Delhi.

What is the power of Influencers?

Nowadays, the social media landscape is majorly fragmented – it is becoming quite challenging for brands to drive customers’ attention, improve brand awareness, and capture the customer’s attention. As per a survey, 80% of users have purchased items or products in direct response to relevant content, and 35% of consumers said they trust social media influencers over businesses. This suggests that customers perceive tips from influencers that they consider trustworthy and credible.

What is an influencer marketing strategy?

An influencer marketing strategy relies on digital creators with a strong influence over a specific industry or targets audiences to make a buying decision. With an effective and successful strategy, your business can partner with strong individuals to promote your products, services, and brand via a well-thought message. Listed below are some of the benefits of an influencer marketing strategy:

– Builds trust & credibility among the audience

– Improves brand awareness via quality content

– Fills a gap in your content strategy

– Help reach an audience interested in your products/services

What are tips on setting influencer marketing goals?

Pick the Right Influencer: Setting goals help you identify specific features and qualities that you need in an influencer to achieve these goals. For example, for those with a goal for brand awareness, it will be beneficial to find influencers with a strong presence and reach within your niche.

Define & Measure Success: What does success mean to your brand? Is it the impressions, post engagement or amount of traffic to your website? Define which KPIs and metrics to track during and after post campaign to evaluate your influencer campaign’s performance. 

Keep everything on Track: When you have clear goals, the brand and the Influencer can work towards a common purpose. This simplifies effective communication as well as constructive feedback – saving everyone’s time. 

Hold Influencer Accountable: Establishing clear expectations and performance requirements is important to make influencers feel responsible. They know the outcomes they need to offer and, therefore, will focus on creating content that aligns right with the goals.

Why are businesses investing in influencers?

We have observed a number of external partnerships emerge over the last few months – some of the aspects that contributed to this were operational requirements, changing consumer behaviour, and the rise of the community of the influencers, and thereby, brands trying new approaches in an ambiguous world. As per a marketing trends report, the outlook amongst marketing executives is that 2020-born partnerships have ongoing potential – because of their success in the: 

– Addressing customer needs

– Consumer engagement

– Expanding product offering

– Entering into Geographic Market

– Entering new industries

However, with partnerships buzzing, many brands nowadays love to embrace a partnership and make it a part of their core marketing plan. Having facilitated a partnership with some of the world’s trusted and leading brands, transforming influencers into strategic partner help with making the right approach.

How to level up the influencer campaign strategy via partnership?

The Chief Marketing Officer can play a key role by spearheading the partnership’s success. Businesses become successful when it comes to partnerships. Collaboration amongst brands, influencers, and sponsorship managers allows clarity and the ability to act on growth opportunities. 

Listed below are five effective ways to game up your influencer campaigns into massive growth drivers:

1.   Influencers Affiliation: For incremental growth, prove return on investment and scale your marketing activity requires more than a comprehensive brand exposure agreement. A brand needs to look at its Influencer and sponsorships through the glass of affiliates. Transform these into performance partnerships and pay out when the desired results have been achieved.

2.    Strategic Commissions: One of the major capabilities of partnership automation is commissioning. This allows your team to incentivize partners, while commissions might vary based on the goals. When applied to your sponsorship activity, marketers look beyond the fee payments and implement architecture as per your growth objectives. This is a clever way to improve the profitability and revenue of the existing sponsorship and campaigns.

3.   Leverage the Tracking System: The key to investing in high-growth opportunities for a CMO is to have the ability to identify them. Fortunately, there have been many advancements in affiliate technologies, but there has never been better clarity in understanding influencer activity. You need to leverage tracking links to characteristics that drive your sales and the reporting suite of partnership or influencer automation channels to understand the campaign’s performance.

4.    Look at the Long Term: 20% of businesses find it easy to source influencers or partnerships that are matched with their brand. This matches right with the time and resource investment that goes into establishing and creating campaigns and highlights the requirement for long-term or ongoing sponsorship. Before boarding on the partnership, plan everything with your internal teams for every opportunity that can be leveraged, and make it known early on in your long-term partnership. 

5.    Keep Customers in Mind: For high-impact, innovation and growth this year, brands will be required to approach partnership opportunities with consumers in mind. 80% of CMOs expect growth to be driven by their existing customers. You must understand what is important to them and what kind of behaviours they might have adopted. Explore sponsorships and influencers that can address customers’ needs and challenges for your business. Keep in mind your influencers and partners can add authenticity to the campaign.

Takeaway

There are certain things to keep in mind; an effective influencer marketing strategy helps create engaging and authentic content for your target audience. Set a budget, goal, and platform to navigate the right Influencer, and choose the Influencer that makes the right match for your brand and its products. 

Looking forward to driving growth for your brand, consider the power of influencer marketing. You could be new to the marketing world or a pro – but there has never been a better opportunity to plan influencer marketing. We, Social Eyes are the best influencer marketing agency in India – we have a team of experts that plan out holistically influencer marketing campaigns and strategies where they handle social media integrations to influencer-led IPs.

Connect to know more!