The interest in influencer marketing has been growing steadily over the past few years and more people are seeking to understand more about it now than ever before.
Just take a look at this Google Trends chart:
According to eMarketer, 48 percent of marketers decided to increase their budget for influencer marketing in 2017. And only four percent had plans to decrease their budget.
If you’re thinking of running an influencer marketing campaign, it can be a little daunting:
- How to do I discover the right influencers?
- What’s the best way to reach out to influencers?
- What does success look like?
We’d love to help you answer these questions and more…
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you run a social media influencer marketing campaign.
What are micro-influencers?
In this guide, we’ll focus on only micro-influencers — influencers with a niche engaged following.
A study by Dr. Jonah Berger, author of Contagious, and the Keller Fay Group, defines micro-influencers as:
Individuals who work in their category or are truly knowledgeable, passionate and authentic and are seen as a trusted source when it comes to recommendations for what to buy.
To illustrate how micro-influencer marketing works, here’s an example I found on Instagram where @amandafrederickson collaborated with Thermomix.
As you can see in the video below, Amanda shares an interesting and fun recipe with her audience and makes it using one of Thermomix’s products:
A step-by-step guide to running a micro-influencer marketing campaign
As this is a long and detailed guide, here’s a quick overview of the steps in this guide:
1. Plan and strategize
The first step is to set your goals and the metrics you’ll use to measure success.
Your goals will affect which influencers you work with and how you collaborate with them. And your selected metrics will help you assess the success of your campaign at the end of it.
Here are some possible goals and metrics you could consider:
- Brand awareness – Reach of the campaign, growth in social media following, number of social media mentions, etc.
- Increased sales – Growth in sales, amount of sales through a designated coupon code for the influencer, etc.
- Engagement and customer retention – Engagement generated during the campaign, number of repeat customers during the campaign, etc.
- Increased social media following – Growth in social media following
Once you have selected your metrics, record the current stats just before the start of your campaign. You’ll compare them with the stats at the end of your campaign.
Select your social media platform(s)
The next step of your planning phase is to decide where you want to run your social media influencer marketing campaign.
Each platform has its unique style, audience and works well for different objectives.
Here are some things you can think about:
- Target audience: Pick the platform where your audience is. For example, if you want to reach teenagers or young adults, you might want to go with Snapchat.
- Visual or text content: If you want the micro-influencer to post a photo, you might want to go with Instagram or Pinterest. For videos, maybe YouTube or Facebook. For text, maybe LinkedIn.
- Outbound link: It is slightly harder to drive people to an external website from Instagram and Snapchat platform. (A method is through Stories.)
You might also want to check out less-known and less-popular social media platforms as well. For example, musical.ly, a platform for creating and sharing short videos, has become very popular among teens. Other platforms you can check out include Anchor, Medium, and Tumblr.
If you already have a marketing persona, you can use that to guide your decisions. You should look to identify:
- The platforms your audience is already active on
- The type of content they would want to see
- Copy that would attract their attention
2. Find suitable micro-influencers
As this is a key step for running an influencer marketing campaign, this section is a little more detailed than the rest to help you find the best micro-influencers for your campaign.
3 ways to find micro-influencers
There are several ways to find suitable micro-influencers, depending on the amount of time and money you want to spend.
1. Manual research
The most affordable way is to research manually on each social media platform.
The major social media platforms all allow you to search for profiles. The best way to research users is to enter the keyword for your campaign such as “food” or “fitness” and use the filters to narrow down the search results.
Here are some examples:
For Facebook, you might want to only look at “Pages”. You can filter the results by category, if your friends have liked the Page, or if the Page is verified.
For Twitter, you would want to select the “People” tab. You can reduce the results further by selecting “People you follow” and “Near you” if you are looking for a micro-influencer near you.
Here are more tips on using Twitter’s Advanced Search feature.
For Instagram, you can search for “People”, “Tags”, or “Places”. Here’s more information on the five ways to use Instagram Search to find Instagram influencers.
For YouTube, the best method seems to be searching on Google. You can search for “(your keyword) youtube” such as “food youtube”, and Google will bring up YouTube channels related to your keyword.
The next step is to manually look through the profiles and take note of those that might be suitable for your influencer marketing campaign.
A quick tip is to keep an eye out for relevant keywords in the username or handle. Often, micro-influencers would include their niche in their username or handle such as @kellybakes.
The downside to this approach is that it can be quite time-consuming. But here’s a tip I learned from Shane Barker, a digital marketing consultant that specializes in influencer marketing:
2. Look through your follower list
Sometimes, the micro-influencer you’re looking for might already be following your brand on social media.
You could manually go through your follower list or use a tool like Social Rank to help you.
Once you connect your Twitter or Instagram account to Social Rank, you can filter by keywords in bio. For example, here are my followers who have “food” in their Twitter bio:
