The Top 5 Influencer Marketing Tips You Should Follow

Influencer marketing is an important pillar of customer engagement and conversion. Family, friends, celebrities, and key opinion leaders who share their knowledge or experience for a product or service have proven to be effective endorsements that people listen, follow, or subscribe to. Social media platforms, like YouTube and Instagram, are great examples of social media influencer marketing at play.

As a brand manager or a business owner, how can you leverage influencer marketing and do it right? To start on the right footing, here are five important reminders to keep in mind when working with influencers and your campaign:

1. Pay attention to your campaign objectives

What’s worse, a campaign with no objectives or a campaign with misaligned objectives? The first one leaves you blind in the dark and wasting resources without a good end result. The second one gives you nuances because the execution isn’t going as planned. When it comes to your objectives, having concrete and attainable ones will always be important, but communicating it clearly to the people part of your campaign, influencers included, is just as important.

2. Pick the right influencer for your campaign

The central part of an influencer marketing campaign is the influencer, and you need to choose an influencer that aligns with your campaign. We are not necessarily talking about the number of followers the influencer has. Micro-influencers have as much traction in their niche group as their larger and more famous counterparts.

How do you pick the right influencer? The first step is to create a pool of influencers that has clout and projects the same personality as your brand. The next step is to categorize these influencers based on your objectives. Picking the right influencer for a campaign boosts relevance and resonance with your audience.

3. Track results. Be careful of vanity metrics

What metrics should a brand pay attention to? There are a lot of metrics to consider when it comes to influencer and social media marketing, and they can differ per platform. The question is which ones are considered important metrics, and which ones are just for vanity? For YouTube, you can track video views and engagement (thumbs up, comments). For Instagram, marketers would rather pay attention to the average post engagement instead of the reach a post has.

4. Give enough lead time to create content

Short timelines and looming deadlines are not new to marketers. This applies to influencers too. They are content producers and giving them enough time to create content that will serve the campaign’s purpose is key to the overall strategy for success. Give influencers space to develop good content.

5. Collaborate instead of saying what to do

Influencers become influencers because their audience saw them as an advocate on a certain topic using their own authentic creative style to deliver their message. This is something both a brand and an influencer have to remember. Let the influencer have the freedom to interpret what you want to achieve creatively.

If you think influencer marketing is a key strategy for your brand, we invite you to join the CDM Social Media Program. The CDM Social Media Program will provide you with the right tools and expertise to maximize your brand’s social media presence and social media marketing success.