We were fortunate this week to host a webinar featuring Umair Tazeem, the owner of Embold, on Influencer Marketing – Finding the Right Influencers and Measure Success. Umair did an incredible job of walking us through all the key steps to ensure a successful campaign; here are some key takeaways to help you shape your next Influencer Marketing Campaign.

Types of Influencer Marketing Campaigns

 The possibilities of working with an influencer really are as creative and innovative as you want them to be, but typical partnerships fall into one of four categories:

1. Product Launch – working with an influencer to promote a specific product to their audience
2. Brand Ambassador – a longer-term campaign where influencers act as a messenger for your brand as a whole for a selected period of time
3. Lead Generation – used to achieve goals like building a new mailing list or waitlist or increasing customer consultations
4. User Acquisition – working with an influencer to promote your brand to new customers by showcasing their experience; the influencer provides a clear path of conversion and a strong call to action is present

Choosing Your Influencers

No matter your industry, there are influencers uniquely positioned to benefit your campaigns. First step? Develop a presence on the channels you’re looking to partner with influencers on. Spend some time on platforms like TikTok and Instagram and develop a baseline for what’s popular, what’s trending, and the type of content that is already resonating well.

Influencers come in all sizes – there are nano influencers which typically have 1,000-10,000 followers, micro-influencers with 10,000-100,000 followers, and macro influencers with anywhere from 100,000 followers to 1 million. Over a million followers and you’re typically looking at a celebrity or someone with social media celebrity status.

These influencers typically target under 50-year-olds, but the specifics can change based on niche. For example – a 20-something TikTok influencer in a fashion niche and a 40-year-old home baker on Instagram will have wildly different followings so it is critical to do your research.

Creating a Successful Campaign

There are some steps you can take right from the get-go to ensure your influencer marketing campaign is as successful and effective as possible.

1. Work backwards and first decide what success for this campaign looks like. Identify your key outcomes before doing anything else.
2. Develop a detailed campaign brief but let your influencers have creative control; they know their audience better than anyone and will be your best resource for ensuring success
3. Monitor and optimize the content throughout the entire partnership; either you, your team or your influencer should be paying attention to the content and continually checking in on it.

A quick tip – when you’ve found some influencers to work with, ask to see their analytics and remember your ABCs:

Active – check how actively engaged their followers are; look for influencers with high engagement numbers

Boosts – be wary of influencers who show huge spikes in follower counts; these can be caused by purchasing likes from “like farms”

Countries – where is their audience located? If they’re a YYC influencer, their followers should mostly be based in Calgary or the surrounding areas. For nano and micro-influencers, high amounts of followers from around the world can be a red flag.

Once you’ve identified your end goals and found some influencers to work with, now it’s time to talk content. You’ll want to ensure your influencer is making a combination of posts, stories, and reels and that the focus transitions as the campaign goes on. Start with awareness messaging and then move into conversion-focused posts; also make sure your influencers are layered – you don’t want everyone posting at the same time.

Once the content is live, interact with it on your company profiles – show off that beautiful partnership you’ve developed!

The Six Steps for Working with an Influencer

1. Campaign Creation – Create a detailed brief including a timeline, target customers, and identify influencers in your niche
2. Influencer Coordination –Contact those influencers and ensure you have a contract in place to work with them. You’ll want to include specific mention of content – typically the influencer will own the content but grants the company social media, digital, and print rights.
3. Content Creation -Your influencers will get to work crafting the agreed-upon content based on your creative brief and submit everything back to you for approval
4. Approval – This is a great place for a check-in; take a look through the collateral and make sure it aligns with your brand, messaging, and goals for the campaigns.
5. Delivery – Your influencers will post their content across platforms (making sure they’ve indicated it’s a paid promotion) and now you can interact with it from your company’s social handles.
6. Reporting – Have your influencers send back screenshots of post analytics or use a third-party reporting platform to gather reports on the campaign; analyze for effectiveness against the goals you set at the beginning of the campaign and then start the whole process over again

Measuring ROI

If you’re going through all the work of developing an influencer campaign, you want to ensure you have things in place to track how successful this partnership will be. There are your typical marketing KPIs of impressions, reach, engagement, etc., which you’ll want to consider during the planning phase of developing the campaign. You can also set up a trackable link to a specific landing page that you can track analytics for; use this for all links over the duration of the campaign to see directly how much traffic your influencer is generating.

Is your influencer promoting a specific product to drive sales? Consider setting them up with a unique promo code or coupon that can be tracked through eCommerce platforms or in-store at checkout.