Brands have realized how important influencer marketing could be when considering a cost-effective marketing strategy. However, what matters is how you implement the influencer marketing strategy. Many inexperienced marketers hire an influencer at the wrong time or hire a mediocre influencer which could sabotage their marketing campaign.
Many marketers amongst us try to DIY and fail spectacularly, potentially ruining the goodwill and brand reputation that has taken so long to gain. These marketers do not know how important and cost-effective it could be to hire an influencer from an influencer marketing platform for assistance in the marketing campaign and get the best maximize roi for their investments.
In this post, we’ll see how you can collaborate with influencers to maximize ROI.
Get your influencer to post unbiased ratings and review your product or service
Getting an unbiased review from a trusted source can attract a lot of attention from your target audience. It is a proven fact that such reviews can help you get 4x more conversions than otherwise. You could post this review on your website, social media, or a dedicated platform for reviews. In fact, you could hire an influencer mainly to get the reviews for each product or service.
Form a digital focus group
A digital focus group is a remote in-focus group that gives feedback on a product virtually. These focus groups help businesses get a third-party opinion of their products or services. Inviting an influencer to take part in a digital focus group helps the influencer know others’ views and create content that matches the expectations of his followers.
A/B creative testing
No matter how creative you are, not all ideas resonate with the audience. Influencers know this well as some posts do not work as well as others. To truly ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign, influencers first test their creative ideas before launching the marketing campaign.
This is why it is crucial for brands to have a well-thought-out and planned influencer marketing campaign where every aspect of the campaign is pondered in detail. Sometimes, inexperienced marketers hire influencers at the wrong time during an ongoing marketing campaign. This usually results in a campaign where you might not reach your marketing goals.
Repurpose influencer-created content on your website
To take full advantage of content created by influencers, many brands reuse it on their e-commerce websites or other marketing mediums. This helps brands give social proof to their website visitors of the authority and genuineness of their content. In fact, studies have shown how User Generated Content (UGC) made by influencers can help brands increase conversion rates by more than 3.6 times their investments. This is true for all kinds of content, irrespective of it being posted on social media or otherwise.
Make your customers your brand’s influencers
Though most of your influencers are hired from influencer marketing platforms, you can also make one of your loyal customers your brand’s influencer. You could add an ‘Apply to our influencer platform’ CTA on your e-commerce website- those who are interested will contact you.
As your loyal customers, these influencers can promote your brand better, they could help you target the right people through their followers. In fact, many brands also make their loyal customers affiliate marketers where a customized promo code or discount code helps track the number of conversions made by the influencer. Many small brands have achieved great success with this.
Add a special ‘influencer filter’ feature to your e-commerce website
Once all your influencers have activated their influencer marketing campaigns, you can assign each influencer a separate niche of products. For example, if you are a footwear e-commerce retailer, you could hire a fitness influencer for your sports shoes, a grooming influencer for casual and formal shoes, and so on.
With the increased traffic coming from these influencer’s posts, you can assign a dedicated online product catalog with each influencer’s product. This helps you to borrow the influencer’s equity and lets his influencers shop for the products that they were motivated to buy from the influencer.
Promote your brand on emerging channels
You could get your influencer to test their creativity on emerging channels so that you get a gist of what the customer thinks. This could include posting content on TikTok or Twitch to see how it works. Once you are sure about the response, you could permit your influencer to promote the brand on mainstream social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
Wrapping Up
An influencer marketing campaign is not as easy to implement as you see. You will need to coordinate with your influencer to come up with a strategy that not only interests your target audience but also gives you the conversions you expect.
