How to make influencer marketing work for your business
Whether you’re considering your first influencer programme or your 100th, there are several key recommendations you should follow to guide your planning and execution.
Ensure your creator objectives align with wider business goals
Like any business-building initiative, your influencer marketing efforts should carefully align with your company’s larger objectives. While this may seem obvious, we’ve seen far too many initiatives in this space developed and delivered without adequate strategic consideration.
You can craft an influencer programme to meet virtually any business need.
Influencer programmes can be developed to achieve virtually any business goal. While the value of influencers for outcomes at the top of the marketing funnel is well documented, many creators are also great drivers of immediate sales because they offer such strong credibility. And with strong discovery and recruitment tools, you can find the right partnership to achieve virtually any business goal.
Quickly boost awareness
The most popular creators can reach audiences that rival the scale of large digital media companies. Further, because they have passionate followings, they can deliver your message in highly-credible and compelling ways.
Drive customer acquisition
Many influencers, especially micro-influencers, have highly-specialised audiences with unique product passions, lifestyles, life stages, and more. Strong creator discovery tools help you identify influencers with ideal audiences. Because they know their followers so well, these creators can deliver your brand story in formats most likely to drive action. And by offering influencers unique affiliate tracking links, you can effectively measure how many customers they are driving to your website and how many sales they’re generating.
Increase incrementality
Influencers are a great way for marketers to drive additional, new opportunities for brand awareness and sales generation outside of traditional promotional methods, such as coupon sites or cashback portals. Creators can also increase incrementality for brands as they produce content you can use on other owned channels (like your website and social accounts).
Reactivate lapsed customers
If your business has lost customers in a specific niche or segment over time, finding influencers to appeal to those lapsed buyers can help bring them back to your brand.
Boost average order value (AOV) and lifetime value (LTV)
Brands are increasingly choosing to form long-term partnerships with effective influencers to keep their brand top of mind with prospective customers. This approach also enables you to support your creators with promotions, early access to new items, and special offers like bundle discounts, to increase transaction size and frequency.
Have a clear data strategy
Data is the critical currency in influencer marketing. It helps you choose collaborators, measure performance, and optimise programmes. You can also test new messages, concepts and offers. The data you collect and use must be aligned with the objectives you’ve set for your initiative.
Track “hard” metrics, including the sales and profit impact of every influencer programme, in addition to “soft” metrics for awareness and engagement.
Most brands increasingly emphasise performance metrics in their influencer campaigns to measure impact and ROI. This is usually done with affiliate performance links, as they allow you to easily track an influencer’s sales and profit impact on top of “soft” metrics like impressions and engagement.
Even if your creators are focused primarily or exclusively on boosting awareness, using affiliate performance metrics is still your best resource to gauge tangible business value.
Understand creator motivation
It’s all about authenticity. If you are a marketer, you are likely used to collaborating with profit-motivated media partners willing to work with any reputable brand that has a budget. With influencers, things are a little more complicated as they are very conscious of their authenticity—it's key to attracting and engaging followers. You can’t simply buy your way into getting endorsed by creators. There needs to be a fit. Influencers bristle at the idea they are “hired-gun” salespeople.
Influencers usually won’t be interested in picking up and publishing brand-developed creative. Different influencers leverage their own mix of media types, from long-form blog posts to videos, Instagram images, text posts, and more. They may also emphasise different media types on multiple social platforms, and so they need the freedom to deliver your brand story their way.
For best results, give your creators the freedom to deliver your brand story their way.
While good influencers will respect your brand standards, recognise that engaging with them needs to be more collaborative than buying ads or offering an 8% commission on sales to a cashback site. Communication is critical. It’s just as important for your brand to be a right fit for the influencer as it is for them being a right for your business.
Think beyond follower counts
Some creators brag about how many people follow them. But how many people do they regularly reach and engage? How many people can they motivate to visit your site and buy? Based on your campaign goals (brand awareness versus sales revenue) another important metric to be mindful of is engagement.
Micro-influencers have become an integral part of influencer marketing because they attract super-passionate followers. A creator with 50,000 followers who can drive 100 sales is more valuable than one with 500,000 followers who can drive only 10 sales. They’re also a more cost-effective partnership option.
Partner with purpose
You have choices in how you collaborate with your influencer partners. Some brands prefer direct partnerships with creators, relying on PR and affiliate team experts. Others outsource influencer management to specialised agencies with skilled team members. Another effective option is leveraging a creator platform or services provider.
You have choices in how you engage with your influencer partners.
The best approach for your company will depend on your business goals, available resources, and channel experience. Consider the following questions to help determine the right path.
Questions to help you decide how to manage influencer initiatives
- Does my company have expert staff available to manage influencer relationships?
- Does our team have the skills and experience to manage influencer relationships? If not, can we get the budget to hire?
- Does my PR, affiliate, or digital agency have experts we can leverage for influencer management? What are the associated costs?
- What services do my influencer and platform solutions providers offer? What are the associated costs?
Many companies find value in starting with an affiliate platform or services provider. These platforms offer a range of tools and services that streamline influencer management, from finding the right creators to tracking performance and managing payments. This can be a cost-effective and efficient way to build and scale your influencer marketing programme. Over time, you may choose to transition to in-house management as your needs and capabilities evolve.
Ensure transparency
Always make your objectives clear for influencers. Don’t assume that they will understand your goals. Most are not marketers – they are entertainers and subject matter experts. So, if your goal is maximum brand awareness, make that clear. If you are focused on direct sales, spell that out in your brief so they can create posts and other content that will deliver the results you want.
The best influencer programmes leverage both affiliate measurement (clicks, conversions, conversion rates, AOV, etc.) and soft engagement metrics that gauge effectiveness at earlier steps in the customer purchase journey.
Your approach to measurement must encompass all the data necessary to measure effectiveness as defined by your business objectives. The best influencer programmes leverage a combination of affiliate-style performance measures (clicks, conversions, conversion rates, AOV, etc.) and soft metrics that indicate effectiveness at earlier steps in the customer purchase journey.
With affiliate measurement for influencer marketing, you can also review data and ROI in greater detail, perform advanced analyses, adjust spending, and have better visibility into payments. It’s important to understand that most influencer marketing networks and platforms cannot provide performance insights. They can deliver top-of-funnel metrics like impressions, shares, and post engagement, but not the critical performance data that will demonstrate ROI.
With the Awin platform, you can research and recruit potential creators, then track and report on performance. Leverage Awin's tracking links to give influencers unique offers and promotional codes for click-based and click-less tracking.
At Awin, we’ve unlocked access to proprietary tech solutions and strategic partnerships with top influencer platforms to offer additional relevant metrics and insights. Awin provides access to profiles of hundreds of thousands of vetted creators. Plus, data on past performance, automated recruitment and communications tools, and a metrics dashboard that unites data from every step in the customer purchase journey.
Don’t forget legal and regulatory considerations
Influencer marketing is an area of interest for many governments, and there are a growing number of laws and guidelines outlining how brands and influencers interact, and what disclosures are required. The primary consideration is that creators must prominently disclose their paid brand relationships. While most influencers understand how to comply with these rules, brands must ensure their partners consistently comply. Your legal team can provide more information and advice in this important area.
Get compensation and payments right
Most influencers are very interested in earning compensation from brands, often seeking flat fee payments upfront in exchange for those soft, vanity metrics. And while this is the preferred payment scheme, that doesn’t mean you can’t offer a different payment model. Using affiliate commission payments (where you pay a percentage of sales driven) or a hybrid payment (where you provide a partial payment upfront as well as an affiliate commission for any sales driven) ensures better ROI for your business and lets you fully measure success of your influencers’ efforts.
This model is a win-win for your creators, too, as it allows them to clearly prove their value to your business.
Using affiliate commission payments or a hybrid payment ensures better ROI for your business.
Whatever payment method you choose, it’s important to keep lines of communication open. In doing so, you and your partners can effectively discuss what is going well for your partnership, where improvements can be made improve, and how further focusing on performance-based compensation might help them boost their revenue (and your ROI).
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