Influence Marketing: How to Build an Effective Strategy? Part 5
Building a Strong Influence Marketing Strategy in 6 Easy Steps (continued)
2. Define the target audience for your campaign
The very nature of the tactics and tools available means that you are able to market your products to very specific audiences while knowing how to identify them.
Remember you can be very specific; you don’t need to try to target, and you probably should not have to target your entire audience with one campaign or one collaboration. Instead, you need to focus on segments of people who will be highly engaged.
With your goals in mind, identify who you want to target, including specific demographics.
3. Define the message and missionof your campaign
Just like you need to know your audience and your goals, you need to identify your campaign message before you start connecting with influencers. This can vary greatly depending on the objectives and purpose of the collaborations.
- Are you looking to make your business known to new audiences?
- To promote the launch of a new product to those who may already know the brand?
- To highlight a new functionality of the service?
- To generate direct purchases around a sale?
Campaign messages should be closely related to the objectives, but until you define the scope of your campaign, you will be hard pressed to define an effective strategy.
Focus your efforts on crafting a campaign brief that clearly states your goals and the areas where you want an influencer to work with you. The clearer it is, the more effective you will be in securing these valuable collaborations.
4. Set a budget
One of the most common mistakes is not budgeting.
And let’s make one thing clear: almost all influencers (even micro-influencers) will want to be compensated for their efforts. Gone are the days when collaborations relied solely on product donations. To work with these highly engaged influencers, you need a budget (as well as products or services to offer).
When setting an overall budget, you should keep in mind the split between paying influencers and covering the cost of products or services.
You won’t enter into negotiations with influencers (or contact them) until you know your budget. Without it, you will have a hard time making a plan to address them.
To budget, you need to have answers to questions like:
- What is the main objective? Targeting or return on investment?
- How many influencers do we want to work with?
- On which platforms is our audience active?
- Is our engagement or targeting a priority when it comes to audiences?
At this point, you will probably want to understand roughly what it costs, on average, to work with influencers on each platform. And thanks to the statistics of WebFX, we can reveal them to you:
- Facebook: $ 25 for 1,000 subscribers
- Instagram: $ 10 for 1,000 subscribers
- Twitter: $ 2 per 1,000 subscribers
- YouTube: $ 20 for 1,000 subscribers
- Snapchat: $ 10 for 1,000 subscribers
- Blogs: $ 60 for 1,000 visitors
Once you have established a budget, you can figure out how to use it most effectively.
