How to Plan a Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy in 2019

Nov 6, 2018 5 min read

We’re almost at the end of 2018 and this is a good time reevaluate your marketing strategies to make sure that you’re all set for next year.

Influencer marketing has evolved a lot in the last few years. And by 2020, the global spend on influencer marketing is expected to reach $5-$10 billion. This is a clear indication of the popularity of influencer marketing.

You need to reconsider your marketing strategy for 2019 if you haven’t yet incorporated influencer marketing into it. However, it’s important to plan your strategy well before you kickstart your campaigns.

This post will guide you through how to plan a successful influencer marketing strategy.

1. Identify your Target Audience

It’s crucial for the success of your influencer marketing campaign that you identify your target audience. This might sound like a very basic thing to do.

However, a clearly defined target audience will help you find relevant influencers. You’ll need to make sure that the followers of your potential influencers are essentially the target audience you want to reach.

Knowing your target audience will also help you understand which channels and content formats are likely to be the most effective for your campaigns.

2. Determine your Goals

Why do want to run an influencer marketing campaign? What do you want to achieve for your brand through these campaigns?

Before everything else, you need to find the answers to the above questions. If you want to run a successful campaign, you need to have a clear list of goals in mind.

In 2017, 94% of marketers aimed to improve brand advocacy through influencer marketing. And 92% of marketers aimed to increase their brand awareness.

Influencer Marketing Statistics

Image Source - Statista

Also, don’t focus on too many goals at once. That will create more confusion rather than helping you. It’s always better to focus on one or a couple of goals to get the desired results.

3. Identify the right Social Media Platform

There are many social media platforms to choose from. 91% of marketing professionals prefer to use Instagram for their influencer marketing campaigns. But how do you know which one’s right for you?

Identify-the-right-Social-Media-Platform--min

Image Source - Bloglovin’ Marketers Survey 2017

Your choice of social media platform should depend on your target audience. You need to find the social platform that’s most used by your target audience. The selection of a social platform will also depend on the type of message you want to share with your audience. The sentiment analysis can give you an edge to find out what people are thinking about your brand and on which socal media platform you need to invest more time.

Each social platform is better suited to certain audience demographics and certain types of content. So you need to be careful when selecting social media platforms for your influencer marketing campaigns.

4. Find relevant Influencers

This is the most important aspect of running a successful influencer marketing campaign. It’s the job of the influencer to reach your target audience and talk about your brand. So it's your responsibility to find the perfect influencers for your brand.

As important as it is, it's equally challenging to find suitable influencers. 67.6% of marketers agree that their biggest challenge is to find a relevant influencer.

Make sure that you consider your campaign goals when you begin your hunt for relevant influencers. Your potential influencers should have the following characteristics:

Your potential influencer should be an expert from your niche and have a decent-sized following on their social media accounts.

They should have a high engagement rate. This indicates that their followers are interested in and love their posts.

Ensure that your potential influencer’s follower demographics are similar to those of your target audience.

Your potential influencer should have genuine influence over their followers and their authenticity should reflect in their posts. Otherwise, it can negatively affect your entire marketing campaign.

It can be difficult to search for influencers manually. So, you can use platforms like BuzzStream or BuzzSumo to make your job easier. You can filter influencers by niche, social platforms, engagement rates, or locations to make sure they’re relevant for your brand.

5. Create quality Content

After you select your influencers, it’s time to collaborate and create quality content. Quality content is a very important ingredient for a successful influencer marketing campaign.

Your influencers might have thousands of followers who trust them. But that’s not enough to get them to invest their money into your brand.

You need to make sure that your influencers create and share valuable yet entertaining content on their social platforms. Make sure that the content is not boring and doesn’t appear salesy.

If your content is not good enough, no matter how popular the influencer is, they cannot guarantee a successful campaign.

However, make sure that you give your influencers the creative freedom they need to come up with quality content. Nearly 40% of influencers say that providing overly restrictive guidelines is the second biggest mistake brands make in their collaborations with influencers.

So you need to provide a healthy environment so that they can create quality content.

6. Monitor and Evaluate

It's important to monitor and evaluate your influencer marketing campaigns. This gives you an opportunity to check if the campaign is generating the expected results or not. If it isn’t, you can make the necessary adjustments to generate successful results.

a) Performance of your influencers

It’s important to track the performance of your influencers to see what sort of results they are generating for your brand. To track the performance of influencers, you should collect data such as engagement, follower growth, sales, and/or views generated.

You can include any other parameter which helps you track the performance of your influencers.

b) Overall performance of the campaign

It's quite a challenging task to monitor, evaluate, and measure the overall campaign results. 78% of marketers consider measuring the ROI as one of their top influencer marketing challenges.

Influencer Marketing Compaign

Image Source - Linqia

However, you need to keep a close watch on the performance of your influencer marketing campaign. Otherwise, you’ll have no way of knowing if it was successful or not, or what you might need to do to improve.

So you need to measure your campaign results against the goals you had decided at the onset of your campaign. It can be difficult to do this manually. But investing in a good influencer marketing platform that can help you measure your results efficiently.

Final Thoughts

It’s not an easy task to design a successful influencer marketing strategy. You need to take care of many aspects. It's important to find relevant influencers, identify your target audience, and clearly define the goals for your marketing campaign. It is also important to select the right social platforms on which to run your campaigns.

You should create interesting and engaging content to get the attention of your target audience. Don’t forget to monitor and evaluate the performance of your campaign. This will give you an idea of what’s working and what’s not.

Can you think of any other tips to plan a successful influencer marketing strategy? Please feel free to comment below.

Shane Barker

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant, named the #1 social media consultant in the nation by PROskore Power Rankings. He consulted with Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

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