Everyone dreams of starting a business, if you also want to start your own business then our blog on “how to start a successful business?” may be beneficial for you.

Let’s assume after following every step of the blog, you’ve established a business of your own. You’ve developed your products and are ready to serve your services.

But, how do reach audiences?

What are the ways?

There can be many different successful ways to reach out to target audiences such as we, Digiavtar at Gurgaon, have enlisted more than 40 marketing strategies in the blog “Marketing Made Simple”.

But nano influencer marketing can be most successful and cost-effective for your brand if your business is in just the initial phase.

Many brands have already adopted this marketing strategy, and more are still adapting and making it a part of their comprehensive marketing strategy.

Most marketers think that working with an influencer is enough for boosting awareness and drive traffic, but it’s not completely right.

Working with the right influencer should be your goal, and we’re going to discuss in this blog what kind of influencers will be the right fit for your brand.

But, first, let’s get to know about influencer marketing

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing has been made by combining to words “Influencer” and “Marketing”. You already have an idea what is the meaning of both of them, but let’s discuss it for more clarity.

An influencer is a person who’s the power to control the behaviour, interest, and beliefs of the followers. They’ve so many followers who follow what they do and trust what they say. They’ve earned this reputation and trust in people with lots of dedication, effort, and hard work.

Earlier only celebrities were considered the true influencer, and celebrity endorsement was a true form of influencer marketing.

But, not now!

It’s evolved so much, now anyone who has a good following, and engages his/her target audience can be an influencer. Any content creator can provide so much value to brands that are engaging with niche audiences.

We’ve understood the word “influencer”, now let’s understand “marketing” in a single line. Marketing means promoting your products and services through various means such as traditional ways or modern digital ways.

So, influencer marketing is the form of marketing in which a brand collaborates with influencers to promote their products and services to the target audience an influencer is engaging with.

Before moving ahead let’s have a look at some of the statistics;

73% of marketers allocate a budget for this marketing strategy.
49% of consumers depend on recommendations from influencers
86% of B2B are getting success in their marketing campaigns by incorporating influencer marketing.
40% of the customers make a purchase after viewing it used by an influencer on SMM platforms such as FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat etc.
9 out of 10 brands are using some kind of influencer marketing.
Generate 18-20x more revenue than earned media on the same budget spent.

Now, let’s get to know what different kinds of influencers we can collaborate with.

Different Types of Influencers

When we talk about influencers, then one name comes to our mind Instagram. Instagram is the most popular platform for influencer marketing so far. Do you know, “Instagram is used by 67% of brands for influencer marketing”

Influencer marketing can be so much value if it’s understood well and implemented properly, according to one of the surveys, 89% of marketers tell influencer marketing better ROI generator than others.

Influencers can be classified into different types, but we’re defining influencers today on the basis of their fan following. On the basis of the number of targeted followers, there are 4 types of influencers that are following;

Nano Influencers

Influencers who have a small following on their platform but with highly engaged audiences. The focus of nano influencers can be on non-traditional topics, interests, products, causes and services but their audiences are always looking for relevant content.

If we work with a nano influencer then our brand can be seen by a small, highly targeted niche at a small cost. The audiences of nano influencers are highly targeted in a particular niche with a good engagement ratio.

Most of the influencers are considered nano when the number of their followers is 10,000 or fewer. It can be from 1000 to 10000. But it may vary, it’s an estimate.

Working with nano influencers has so many benefits;

They have a highly targeted audience, so you don’t waste your money.
And second, they’re not so big, so their charges are also lower than others, completely in your budget.

If you’re just starting out, then we would suggest you work with nano-influencers.

Micro-Influencers

The target audiences of micro-influencers can differ between 10000 to 100000. Subject matter experts (SMEs) or Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are granted as micro-influencers.

They also have a good engagement ratio with their audiences. Micro-influencers can work on a variety of topics, industries and niches.

Once your business has started generating a good amount of money, you can go for micro-influencers. Micro-influencers charge a decent amount of money as fees for partnerships but in return, they can cultivate real relationships with their followers.

Let’s move ahead and understand Mega Influencers!

Macro Influencers

Macro influencers’ fan following can differ between 1 lakh to 1 million. These influencers charge more than micro-influencers. They can be established thought leaders in their domain.

Mega Influencers

Any influencer who has a 1M+ following is called a mega influencer. Other influencers can be any normal people who are showing expertise in their fields. But mega influencers are trendsetters.

These are the best for big brands to partner with who already have a great reputation and generate a big amount of revenue in the market.

Any A-list celebrities and other well-known public figures are considered mega influencers such as Salman Khan, and Jaya Kishori.

Most of the brands, they’re out of budget because of charging a very much big amount of advertising fees. So, only established business for several years higher them as their brand ambassadors.

After discussing all this, you should have an idea of what types of influencers you should go with. In the starting, it is best to work with a nano influencer and test if this strategy works out for you or not.

Now, the question is how to book appointments with influencers and make them work for the brand by creating a successful marketing strategy with them.

How to create a successful Influencer Marketing Strategy?

Elaborating something in steps makes our work easier and less time-consuming. You need to first decide on which platform your audience is spending time more on, and start with just one platform at the beginning, you can move on to another later on. Just take this whole strategy to work on a single platform such as Instagram, and then further you can replicate it for other platforms.

So, let’s understand step by step process of building a successful influencer marketing campaign;

Determine your goals

Determining goals beforehand keep brands and influencers on the same page. With any marketing strategy, you can’t directly make so many sales in the starting. So, don’t make sales your first priority instead reach new target customers through influencer marketing.

We all know that influencer marketing is all about promoting the products or services to the followers of influencers, it just simply means that expanding the brand reach is the first goal.

So, increase your brand’s followers and make it more reputable with increased awareness with the help of influencer marketing.

Keep only one primary goal aligned with your one influencer marketing campaign, don’t confuse your audience with so many calls to action in a single campaign.

Know Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is better to make contact with the right influencer and promote the right products at right time.

In the first step, we defined a specific goal we want to achieve with the help of an influencer marketing campaign, but if we want to achieve that specific goal then we should have a specific target audience.

Don’t we?

Yes, we need, and to define a specific audience we can build buyer personas based on different pain points and wants of the audiences.

After creating different user personas, we can decide which persona we want to target users.

Now, we need to find the perfect influencer to partner with, so without wasting time, let’s move ahead and find the best-fit influencers for our marketing campaign.

Research Influencers: Compile a list of influencers with their pay

After thoroughly researching the market or Instagram profiles, you can make a list of the Influencer according to their fan following and previously mentioned charges if they’ve been mentioned somewhere. If you’re not able to find suitable influencers then you can try out these platforms to directly connect with the influencers;

After building the list, you need to filter out the influencers based on several factors such as;

Is the influencer targeting the audiences that you want to target according to your user persona?
What is the type of influencer from the aforementioned 4 types?
Can the influencer fit into your marketing budget?
Has the influencer worked with brands similar to your brand?
Are your brand and influencer sharing the same shared values?

On the basis of these factors, you can choose the most suitable influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns.

Influencer Outreach: Reach out privately, and personally

After building a list, it’s time to reach out to them, and see if they’re willing to work with your brands. You need to figure out a way to reach out to influencers in a right and effective way.

First thing first, while reaching out to them, don’t make use of the word “Influencer”, most influencers take themselves as content creators, and they can be offended by the word “influencer”. It may seem to them that you’re belittling their content, efforts and work.

I remember we’ve discussed this thing earlier also that if you are a small brand or start-up, you should go with nano influencers. Because they’ve highly engaged target audience in economical price to your brand. So, they can be the best fit for your brand, the rest depends on you with whom you want to go.

When you want to connect with the influencer, you should check out their profile, most of the influencers don’t prefer DM (Direct Messages) instead they themselves provide some contact details to connect with them.

Successfully connect with them whichever way they’re comfortable with talking to you.

Collaborate with your influencer to define the rules

After making a connection with your desired influencers you can discuss everything, that you want to achieve with your Instagram Campaigns.

It’s time to provide them with information about the brand and what you stand for. As we’ve already discussed influencers want to be called themselves content creators first. So, you need to make sure that your Instagram Marketing campaigns will not only provide them with a chance of getting a paycheck or free products but it is also aligned with what content they’re developing for their audiences.

The influencer may agree to work with you on the following collaboration;

Paychecks for sponsored posts
Provide reviews on their account in exchange for free product samples
Providing affiliate links for them and special offers, discounts or coupon codes for their users so may be valuable for both influencers as well as the target audiences.
Or collaborations on some other mutual interests.

So, you can decide now, how you want to collaborate with your desired influencers. Influencer marketing is a win-win-win situation for Fans, Influencers as well as Brands. Influencers get their paychecks or a free product or any other favours, target audiences get discounts as coupon codes, and likewise, a brand gets new highly engaged niche target audiences.

Now, once you’re agreed on how you want to go with each other’s, It is time to decide some rules on what your influencers and brands need from each other and at what moment. Sign a contract with the influencers including every tiny detail such as;

Frequency of the posts.
Permissions for reposting.
Compensation amount if it’s decided.
Other important aspects such as what’s your goal and how you want your campaign to look.

It’s better to have everything on paper rather than in dialogues. You’ll need permissions for reposting to share the sponsored posts across your online presence and brand channels such as website, SMM platforms, emails, advertising copy etc.

Develop effective content and message

After putting down every term and condition on paper, it’s time for brands and influencers to develop effective content and messaging for the influencer marketing campaign.

You can provide them with what your content should look like a little bit. But, it would be best if you give them the freedom to provide their unique creative spin to the whole influencer marketing campaign for promoting products or services.

They know their audiences better than you do, and it’s not about brands or influencers, but it is completely about the target audiences.

You can develop the following different types of content for your influencer marketing campaign;

Blog Posts
Social Media Posts (Such as Instagram Posts)
Stories
Testimonial Videos
Unboxing Videos of a Product
Webinars
Recorded Videos
Interviews
Case Studies
Audios that can also be used in Podcasts.
Infographics
Live Interactions with Consumers
Any other interactive content that depicts that the influencer is so much a fan of the particular product or service, and recommends to others to go for it.

You can see how many options you have to build effective content and messaging for your influencer marketing campaigns.

You should focus on giving your brand messaging a personal touch with personalized marketing and make it conversational with conversational marketing. Also, you should try to represent it as a personal narrative with the help of storytelling marketing with keeping the brand voice consistent all over the marketing channels of a brand.

You need to learn how to manage everything and make a unique marketing campaign incorporating these strategies, they’re not one but still, they overlap with each other. As you also know, you can’t get anything with just a single marketing strategy in this competitive world.

You should have an understanding of what to use and where. You should know to a couple of different marketing strategies for achieving a single goal. Along with all of this make the list of tags you’re going to use in your marketing campaign.

Defining the messaging and content will also help influencers in posting relevant content without making so many efforts. They can easily provide their specific creative unique spin to the campaign to promote the products and services of the brand.

Create budget and management strategy

Well, influencers and you’ve decided what the influencer marketing campaign should look like, and how the communication will be. Now, you need to set a budget for the whole campaign so that later on you will not run out of money.

You can create a budget now as you know now what will the paychecks of the influencers, are and how much it’ll cost to develop content along with the complete advertising. Decide a budget and management strategy, how you’re going to spend it, where, and when!

So, when the time will come, you’ll need not worry about what will be spent, and how you’re going to manage it.

Execute the Campaigns

You’ve come to a stage where you are ready to execute the marketing campaign. You’ve performed market research, defined your target audience, defining your platform, contacted influencers, signed contracts with them, build a strategy with them, and created a budget and management strategy.

Don’t think so much you’ve covered every aspect so precisely!

Just go for it!

Measure your results

You can measure your results in different ways, and UTM parameters can be one of them. UTM parameters include campaign source, campaign medium, campaign name, campaign term, and campaign content.

UTM parameters are called Urchin Tracking Module. It is a simple google analytics code that can be attached to any URLs to generate Google Analytics data for any digital campaigns.

You can provide each influencer with a unique link to share with their target audiences. After the end of the campaigns, it will provide you with a clear view of the results. With the help of this method, you would be able to check which influencer is producing promising results and is good for long-term partnerships.

In the same way, to measure sales, you can provide each influencer with a different discount code or coupon. This way it’ll be easier for you to track the sales.

Apart from getting the reports on reach, engagement and sales from influencers, you’ll have your own reports. You can decide on your own which one is just boasting and which one is really delivering promising results.

Now, you’ve chosen your long-term partner to perform influencer marketing. So, without further ado let’s review and refine the strategy of our long-term influencer partner.

Review and refine your Marketing strategy

You’ve already reviewed and analysed the campaigns of every branded content creator. But as of now, you need a more refined influencer marketing strategy for that you need to have a look closely and precisely at the strategy of our chosen long-term influencer partner.

After reviewing it, wherever you need improvements, you can perform the needful actions to make it better for the next time.

And you should repeat this after every successful campaign.

This is just the beginning of the success of your brand!

Now, let’s move ahead and have a look at some tips to build a killer influencer marketing strategy!

Best Practices for building a Killer Influencer Marketing Strategy

Best practices make you remember those things you’re forgetting because of the pressure of the work. These are like a small checklist to check whether we’re doing it the right way or not. So, let’s discuss some of the most successful tips to remember;

Only work with experienced social media influencers that are sharing the same brand values as your business is
Using UTM or Urchin Tracking Module Parameters to track influencer marketing results
Always be organized and structure everything from strategy to budget, time spent etc.
Incorporate Conversational Marketing, Personalized Experience, and Storytelling in Branded Content and Brand Messaging.
Document your goals such as building brand awareness, targeting new audiences, and lead generation along with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Don’t expect quick results with this, it’s a process you need to follow just like content marketing and social media marketing are.
Work with nano influencers if you’re a start-up or business in its initial phase.
It’s necessary to understand the landscape of Influencers rather than imposing our own thoughts.
Don’t look only at the popularity of the influencer but also see authority, credibility, and their relationships with their target audience.
Always keep in mind the 3R of influencer marketing; Relevancy, Reach, and Resonance
Always measure the metrics and keep refining your strategies

We’ve discussed the 3R’s of influence in influencer marketing along with 9 tips, where relevancy depicts if the audiences provided by influencers are aligning with the target audience, Reach and Resonance respectively are the follower base we can reach and engagement we can get with the help of an influencer.

Now let’s see some of the benefits of Influencer Marketing.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

As influencer marketing is about targeting a new follower base with the help of a content creator or an influencer so benefits of it would be aligned to that. Advantages of influencer marketing anybody can get are;

Target new target audience
Spreading brand awareness
Less time in reaching the audiences
Cost-effective if we’re working with nano influencers
Generates sales with the help of provided discount coupons to the target audiences by the brand through the influencers

We’ve seen the main benefits we can get from influencer marketing. Now, let’s wrap up the blog!

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, the power of influencing the buying decisions of others is influence, and who yields it is called an influencer.

Influencers get this power because of their hard work, authority, expertise, knowledge, position, or relationship with their niche audiences. It takes a lot to become an influencer or I should say an authoritative content creator.

SMM works if you’re having a good interaction with your target audience, content marketing works if you’re providing genuine information to your target audience, and influencer marketing work when both Social media Marketing and content marketing are working in an alignment. Last but not least, it’s relevant to both b2b and b2c businesses.

If you want to scale your brand and reach a broader new highly dedicated, engaged target audience, then influencer marketing or I should more precisely say nano influencer marketing is for you.

Planning to launch your influencer marketing campaign? Please let us know by dropping a comment below.

For more similar blogs, visit our blog

Influencer Marketing: Win-Win-Win Situation For Fans, Influencers & Brands