How to plan a promotional strategy with influencers

How to plan a promotional strategy with influencers. Influencer marketing is not a novelty, since it has been in use for a few years. After all, both large and small brands understood that the so-called influencers run social media. In other words, they’re the leaders of the space where millions of people search when they need a product or service. That’s why knowing how to plan an influencer marketing campaign can help a lot.

Those who haven’t yet dared to use influencer marketing are mostly afraid of their efforts not paying off. This can happen if you don’t how to carry it out, however. That’s why we created this post to help you avoid this! Today, we’ll teach you step-by-step how to create an effective promotion strategy with influencers. Are you ready? Let’s go!

How to do influencer marketing?

Now, hiring an influencer is not the only step you must take to promote your brand. Influencer marketing goes much further and requires very concrete steps to be able to plan an efficient strategy. So, besides taking into account the characteristics of influencer marketing, pay attention to all the following steps. This way, your brand will be able to create a successful campaign:

Defining the objectives 

We start with this point as it’s the most important when starting a marketing campaign. After all, without clear objectives, we cannot start. For this, you will need an experienced marketing team. They will provide excellent ideas to align an influencer marketing strategy with all your objectives.

What objectives should your campaign have? This question will be key to creating a successful campaign. During the creation process, you must establish some objectives such as:

• Increase engagement and social interactions.
• Create brand awareness and strengthen it at the same time.
• Obtain valuable information from customers.
• Improve conversions, whether through purchases, free trial registrations, etc.

These 4 objectives are highly relevant to creating an influencer marketing campaign. Similarly, for your brand campaign, you can include all of them or at least one of them.

Another important fact is that as soon as you define your objectives, you must ensure these are identifiable and measurable. This way, you won’t waste your time.

Selection of the group of influencers 

Do you have clear objectives? If the answer is yes, then we are ready to continue with the next step. This is where you must figure out the kind of influencers you want to promote your brand. In this sense, whoever you choose must be able to help you achieve all your objectives.

Most often than not, companies talk about celebrities and how they stay out of their marketing budget. However, big-name brands can afford to hire well-known athletes, singers, or actors as representatives of their brand.

To start you can opt for a group of influencers adapted to a smaller budget. In fact, in many cases company employees can be excellent brand advocates, as long as they know how to do it.

But since every big or small brand works in pursuit of success, the best option will be to start with micro-influencers, who unlike celebrities have a smaller group of followers.

What advantages can micro-influencers bring to your brand?

In reality, micro-influencers are likely to be more willing to respond to comments than celebrities, and this is a great advantage for users to be encouraged to interact with content related to your brand.

So, if you have a well-defined target audience, you can choose influencers more related to day-to-day life. Besides, micro-influencers can be the most loyal customers because in addition to becoming familiar with their products, they will be content to be representatives of your brand, and in turn, involve other people to achieve greater visibility.

Specify a budget 

Determining the budget for your influencer marketing campaign is more important than you can imagine.

After all, it depends on all the decisions you can make regarding your brand.

That is why in addition to defining your objectives and selecting the influencers with whom you will work, your budget should also be allocated to the following elements:

• Creation and distribution of content.
• Planning and content strategies.
• Influencer compensation or other rewards.
• Offline marketing.
• Advertising on social media, or other promotions.

Your budget must be well used, so you do nothing when paying an influencer to mention your brand, your products, or share your image on Instagram because it will not be a guarantee of your success. Instead, creating a good marketing strategy with a monthly budget is a great option to align with your goals, and thus, Instagram influencers advertising will be beneficial.

Select communication channels 

What social channels to use? You must decide which platform you want to include in your influencer marketing strategy. Here we will show you a list of the great variety that exists:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• Many more

As you can see there are many social channels, however, you will not need to use all of them. Ideally, you should make a selection of those that may be most relevant to your brand, that is, those where your current and potential customers are. Also, you must select the channels where you and your influencers can publish content that attracts the audience.

Select the most useful tools 

In addition to choosing the appropriate social channels, it is also important to make a good selection of the tools that will be used to make the management of the influencer marketing campaign easier.

Today, there is software such as Buzzsumo where marketers can find what are the most searched topics on the internet. Similarly, many other platforms offer this option.

Similarly, once your brand content has been created with the influencers, the next step is to make it impact the social channels you are using and on the web. The content should be inspiring so that visitors stay longer on your site and can drive traffic to social media.

As for social media, some tools work as aggregators to store and display publications automatically. Similarly, if you have left your marketing campaign in the hands of professionals, you will get the best recommendations to know which of all the tools you can use most efficiently.

What strategies do influencers use?

The steps that we have explained so far are practically mandatory if your goal is to do good planning for the influencer promotion strategy. Besides, other points cannot go unnoticed and we will also explain below:

Creating guidelines

One of the keys for your brand to be successful is authenticity, so when creating content for influencers, some guidelines must be determined:

• The objective of the activity, as well as the scope of the work.
• Examples of templates for publications.
• The tone and voice of the brand for the campaign.
• Contact person to clarify doubts immediately.
• List with informational topics that are not may be shared publicly.

To facilitate the creation of the campaign, a general template can be included that can be modified depending on the campaign that is carried out and the influencers with whom they work.

Similarly, if the collaboration is with a celebrity, guidelines or a formal agreement can also be added to allow the scope of content to be expanded.

The campaign launch 

If we have reached this point, it is because the entire promotional campaign has already been planned, so the next step will be to launch. We recommend making that day a very special moment, and even for the week, and do not forget to create a shared competition calendar for a better organization.

It’s also important to know that the first few days of the launch can be critical in setting the tone of the campaign, so long-term results can be seen.

That is why a good idea is to launch a competition on Facebook to create a greater commitment, although you can also organize a party with the participants since at the time of promoting many actions, they are valid to maximize ROI.

Promotion and distribution 

No doubt creating a strategy with influencers requires a lot of effort and dedication, so once the campaign is ready, you have to start promoting and distributing it.

In fact, 20% of your time should be for content creation and 80% should be spent on distribution. We can say that this is the most important part of the development of your marketing strategy. As a result, you must think about the form of distribution you will use very carefully.

The good news is that there are many ways to promote your campaign:

• Paid ads on social media.
• Organic actions.
• Show content on your website.
• Email marketing.
• Much more…

The rewards 

When promoting and distributing your content, the best thing you can do is thank your community for their efforts. That is why interacting with them is so important. For this, you can add a comment or interact in their posts to make them feel appreciated.

Also, for your audience to stay connected with your brand, you can republish your follower’s content.

The reward will be very useful to identify which are your most active fans, and then surprise them with discounts and promotions.

Measurement and analysis 

When launching your promotional marketing campaign, you must remember the first step we talked about before. In other words, you have to review your objectives to analyze how they are responding to your strategies. In the same way, to analyze metrics you can use many tools such as Flocker.

On the other hand, you will also need to analyze your website. For this, you can use the Google Analytics tool to easily see where your traffic comes from.

Also, to achieve the objectives set at the beginning of the campaign you must remind your influencers to use analytical tags on the links. This way, you’ll be able to track your traffic.

The use of social data

Once your audience feels engaged in creating content, your brand reach will soar and it will also be a great opportunity to gain insights from your customers.

This data is relevant so that you can customize your content and know how to target the advertising displayed on your social media based on the interaction that followers make with your content. Besides, from social data, you can also get many ideas to create fresh and related content for your brand.

BluCactus, your ally in Digital marketing

BluCactus international marketing agency serves clients all over the world. Our specialty? The creation of web designs and SEO positioning in online searches. Our group of experts focuses on helping businesses and brands succeed in one of the most competitive sectors in the market, the digital world.

BluCactus will accompany you in every step that your brand takes. This goes from the creation of the branding of your business to the creation of content. Our focus is on supporting you with the creation of your website or the administration of your social media accounts.

This online marketing agency, based in Dallas, TX, seeks to strengthen your image as a brand and take it to the next level. Don’t wait any longer to get the help of the best specialists in digital marketing. Contact us now through our social media or website!

If you want to keep up with the world of digital marketing, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter.