Influencer marketing is a key tool for many of today’s marketers and in the last five years has grown into a $5 – 10 billion dollar industry. Influencers help build brand awareness, boost engagement, and drive revenue and in many cases have a strong ROI with a fairly low initial spend. One of the challenges...
Influencer marketing is a key tool for many of today’s marketers and in the last five years has grown into a $5 – 10 billion dollar industry. Influencers help build brand awareness, boost engagement, and drive revenue and in many cases have a strong ROI with a fairly low initial spend.
One of the challenges many brands face after they start working with influencers is how to scale the influencer marketing model throughout the whole business. Ramping up your use of influencers means figuring out who the right influencers are, managing the logistics of getting products into their hands, and tracking everything from product delivery to influencer campaign performance.
How do you scale your influencer marketing plan for your business?
Identifying the Right Influencers
17% of companies are spending over half of their marketing budget on influencer marketing—which is a big investment. Making sure you get the most out of that investment is important, no matter how big your company or budget.
Finding the right influencers requires research and vetting. Do the influencer’s values and persona fit with your brand? Are they an authentic and ethical representative? If you’re looking to scale your influencer program, that means building out your bench with multiple influencers.
Once you identify some potential influencers, you need to send an initial outreach to gauge their interest and start building relationships. Getting contact information and following up to launch the relationship are key steps but can take a lot of time, especially if you’re reaching out to a large number of influencers.
When you start working with an influencer it’s important to keep in regular contact and to make sure all communications are transparent to make sure both you and the influencer are on the same page and that the relationship is mutually beneficial.
Streamlining Logistics
When you have your influencers lined up, you need to get your product into their hands so they can start reviewing it and marketing it. You may have products in your office, in a warehouse, or in another office across the country or even across the world.
Figuring out the logistics of shipping products and making sure they’re delivered can be the difference between keeping or losing an influencer’s trust. Fulfillment can be time-consuming if you’re trying to do it yourself and expensive if you’re trying to outsource it to a third party.
If you have a large number of influencers, it’s also challenging to assess how many products you need to allocate and to track how that all fits into your budget. Tracking which influencers have been sent various products or gifts and making sure they are delivered to the right person gets trickier when you’re trying to do it at scale.
Effectively Measuring Results
Influencer marketing has evolved by leaps and bounds compared to where it started and tracking needs to evolve too. Businesses want to see numbers, especially where there’s a large investment.
Your goals for an influencer marketing program may vary from year to year or even from campaign to campaign. Figuring out what kinds of results you want to see from your influencer marketing tactics and how to measure those are crucial for scaling at an enterprise level.
Some common goals for influencer campaigns are:
- Promoting a new product
- Raising awareness of a new program or update (measured by impressions)
- Driving traffic to your e-commerce store or website (measured in clicks)
- Growing your follower base
- Increasing engagement (measured by comments)
- Boosting SEO through earned media
Each of these goals is measured with different metrics and KPIs and knowing how to measure and communicate the success of a program is key to building out an influencer marketing program at scale.
Once you’ve decided on your goals and KPIs and have communicated that to your influencers, you can make sure the content the influencer is creating is a fit for your goals.
Making sure you get content from your influencers can often require manual follow-up, which can slow down your marketing calendar. Working with influencers means building relationships, and regular communication is an important component in keeping those relationships healthy.
Easily Build and Scale Your Influencer Program
With Octoly, you can see what the impact your influencer campaigns are having with live analytics and a real-time overview in a tailored dashboard.
Optimize campaigns and strategy by seeing all your KPIs and reviews in one place. Identify which influencers and platforms are yielding the best results so you can target your campaigns to the right audiences.
See which brands have influencer marketing down to an art in our monthly report of the top 25 best-performing brands on Instagram and YouTube.
Want to learn more about how Octoly can help you measure the success of your influencer marketing campaigns? Sign up for a free, personalized demo today!