More than a third of buying decisions are now linked to an influencer post (source Gartner). Influence marketing is a massive opportunity for all marketing teams to drive more qualified traffic to their sales machine. That’s the point: touching a qualified audience.
Let’s check what the three keys to turning your influencer program into real success are.
First, only work with influencers sharing the same values as yours.
It seems to be obvious, but it’s a complete game-changer. Always keep in mind that influence marketing is linked to the permission marketing concept developed by Seth Godin. Interruption or intrusion is not definitively a good idea to capture people’s attention. Just think about the last message you received on LinkedIn. People you have never heard about before, are trying to sell you something…
“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.” Seth Godin
Influencers get permission to speak about some topics in which they have a specific authority. People connect with them because they like content they share and the way they communicate. In other words they’ve got the common values with their audience.
It works the same way with your brand. Influencers sharing your value are more trustworthy when they decide to engage with your company. Because of the COVID pandemic, authenticity has become the key to success. So when you want to work with an influencer, always ask these three questions: what I earn? What does the influencer earn? What Influencer’s audience earn?
Second, optimize continually the mix of influencers who can deliver a positive ROI.
To make a campaign successful, you have to take care of the complementarity between influencers’ audiences, and work on the audience overlap. Let’s have a quick example. Compare these two influencers’ combinations.
Influencer A has more than 50% of his audience in common with influencer B.
Influencer A has only one of a third of his audience in common with influencer C.
If you target to reach a large number of people, you need to work with A and B, or A and C? Due to the audience overlap, in order to optimize your reach, you have to work with influencers A and C. Reducing audience overlap is a real key to maximizing the results of your campaigns. It definitely seems trivial with this example. But keep in mind, that is a dynamic process. The selection of one influencer has an impact on the choice of others.
Finally, balance your budget though your social customer acquisition cost.
Two of the questions marketing teams always asked when they want to launch a campaign is: “What’s the right budget for this kind of campaign?” and “What kind of KPIs we can anticipate for this price?”. These questions are legitimate.
Influence marketing has to be seen as a part of your customer acquisition strategy. So you should challenge it comparing to the other elements of your Social Customer Acquisition Cost.
Fix the limit of your budget and campaign target with metrics that you have in mind. Based on that it appears that paying just for one social media post is most of the time an economic nonsense. Instead of that we prefer working on on-going compensation model. Remember, that at Foxy Nerds we are here to support the execution of your influencer marketing campaign. Book a discussion with one of our specialists here.
