Beginning Steps 

Before starting an influencer campaign, there are a few things to consider for the influencer to represent your brand successfully. Within the last few weeks, we’ve begun an influencer campaign for one of our clients, and we wanted to share some of the best practices we’ve learned along the way.

Define Your Audience 

First, you need to define your audience. Your immediate thoughts may be to first look into who you want to represent your brand. However, before you begin looking for an influencer, you need to truly understand your audience. Considering these few questions were highly beneficial to us: 

  • What is your audience’s age range? 
  • What is their demographic? 
  • Who is your audience following on social media? 

Once you’ve determined your audience, finding an influencer should be a piece of cake. Your audience will lead you right to the perfect people – influencers who are actually engaging with those you want to reach. 

Define Your Outcome

Being able to define your outcome is something that we took into consideration when searching for our influencers. Setting goals for your brand and your campaign is highly important, so you know where you want to be at the finish line. “Big picture” is something we like to say when working closely with a client on a campaign!

Consider the Three Rs of Influencing 

The three Rs of influencer marketing are great words to keep in mind when developing your campaign. According to Hootsuite, Relevance determines how relevant the content is that your influencer is posting. Reach is defined as the number of people who are being reached based on the influencer’s following. Resonance shows the engagement and how it’s relevant to your brand. 

Create a Hashtag That You Can Track

Creating a hashtag that your influencer can put on all their posts for your brand is one interesting way to track your influencers and their content. Searching or clicking on the specific hashtag makes it easier to see how posts are performing, gather basic vanity metrics, and see if other people are using that hashtag. 

Measure Your Progress

Finally, there are multiple ways to measure your influencer’s progress, you just have to find what’s best for your brand. One metric to look at is the post insights from your influencer’s content. Another metric is the conversion rate which helps measure your brand’s ROI (return on investment). One metric that we thought would be most beneficial for our client is audience growth. With this, we would be looking at how big the audience is before the influencer campaign and how the audience evolves after the campaign is complete.