5 crucial tips for planning your first influencer marketing campaign
by Startacus Admin
Influencer marketing remains largely unchartered territory for many businesses, so here are some tips for getting it right on the first go.
If you have seemingly exhausted all of the obvious marketing strategies for your business, your thoughts could understandably have turned to influencer marketing.
Though "influencer marketing" might look like a scarily technical term, the principles of this approach to marketing have their roots in celebrity endorsements. Still, it remains largely unchartered territory for many businesses, so here are some tips for getting it right on the first go.
Be transparent with stakeholders about influencer marketing's risks
There's no getting away from it: the prospect of you handing off promotion responsibilities to an influential public figure on social media could worry your content stakeholders. 
After all, what that person says about your offerings would not be entirely under your company's control.
However, to allay stakeholders' fears, you could point out encouraging statistics. As the Content Marketing Institute reports, 92% of marketing professionals deem influencer marketing effective.
Decide exactly what you want to achieve with influencer marketing
What would your definition of success be when it comes to influencer marketing? Also, with what metrics will you measure that success? It would be crucial that you find answers to these questions when setting your goals, as a PRWeekarticle explains.
You could opt to measure your brand's exposure and reach, keep track of engagements and interactions or count sales - if not do all of these things. It's ultimately up to you.
Track down suitable influencers who also have the right followers
Finding the right influencers can require a lot of legwork, as both the influencers and their followers would need vetting for suitability. You could look for influencers by perusing relevant blogs and corners of social media, or perhaps ask an influencer marketing agency like Socially Powerful to help.
Whatever you do, seek out influencers with the right type, rather than simply a high number, of followers. As warned in an Entrepreneur article, many followers of bikini-clad models are probably there just for bikini pictures rather than to actually buy anything!
Take note of disclosure requirements
If an influencer fails to adequately flag up certain content as advertising when that is indeed what it is, this situation can have adverse repercussions for the trust this 
influencer may have developed among their followers. Therefore, you should be careful to heed disclosure requirements...
The US Federal Trade Commission has compiled a list of guidelines to which influencers are expected to adhere if they don't want to risk disapproval from this agency.
Allow your influencers to enjoy creative freedom
Whatever "winning formula" got an influencer to their current level of prominence on social media, you should encourage the influencer to stick to that formula even when they advertise your offerings. After all, meddling too much with that influencer's usual strategy could result in content that fails to resonate with their audience.
Ultimately, this influencer will know what kind of thing pushes their audience's buttons. Therefore, you should leave them to do the button-pressing, so to say; as a result, the content will come across as more organic and authentic.
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Published on: 15th August 2019
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