An influencer is defined as someone who has the potential to sway your target audience on social channels. The trust and reliability they hold is down to the fact that they've done the hard yards. They've been producing quality content and growing their audience tirelessly over time. 

According to a recent survey conducted by Twitter, 49% of people place higher trust in influencers compared with family and friends. To pull an influencer strategy off you'll need a strong partnership, buy-in, and benefits for both sides. But how do you go about this?

Define Success

Like any marketing campaign you will have goals and outlining these is the first step. Who are you trying to reach? That will help narrow down your ambassador shortlist. What action are you wanting viewers to take? That will help when developing content.

Be Authentic

People follow influencers for their style so the worst thing a brand can do is try and change that. It means working collaboratively to decide how your product will live in their feed. This is why it's important to choose someone who has a feed in which your product will feel right at home.

Plan to Pay

Sometimes ambassadors are open to free product if their following is smaller. It is, however, worth remembering that it takes time and hard work to build up an audience on social channels and your brand is benefitting from this. Payment approaches also include commission based on sales, upfront and pay-per-click. 

Measure Success

It's crucial to track results and this is possible if you're specific about where an influencer should direct their audience. Supply unique links with UTM parameters, create a landing page for driving traffic to, monitor post engagement or provide special promo codes or downloadable content to promote. Audiences respond well to call to actions that are personalised to the influencer so that's another benefit to tailored links.

Stories

Instagram places value on accounts that utilise the app fully and Stories are huge for engagement. For those with over 10K followers a link can be added to each Story whether that is to your website, product or account. Creators often find this method allows them to tell a fuller story and demonstrate things in a less restrictive way. Conversation can also be created through polls, questions and rating scales.

In Review

After and during your influencer campaigns be sure to seek feedback to understand what has worked for both parties. You can share data such as followers, site traffic and sales. Your influencer can in return show you the data you can't see such as reach, story views, and interactions. 

These are just some tips. We're happy to help you understand how an influencer might work for your brand. Let's catch up in the new year for a coffee: hello@firebrand.nz