Businesses are always looking for ways to stand apart from the competition.

It can be increasingly difficult to do this in a crowded market. But brands are increasingly moving on to newer marketing methods. And this is where influencer marketing can make a difference.

Influencer Marketing is all about leveraging the power of influencers to empower a brand. Influencers exist across all domains and niches.

They use multiple social media platforms and have a huge audience following. The key is to find the right influencer for your brand.

Let's look at how you can improve your influencer marketing methods for your business.

Identify Key Touchpoints In Your Business

Any business will have several touchpoints for interacting with customers. This can be through services or products or even their brand message. Identifying these points improves how your brand can use influencers effectively.

Strategies To Improve Brand Interactions

With more discerning customers today, it is all about how brands interact with their customers. This can become daunting when a brand deals with hundreds of thousands of customers daily.

One way to improve interactions is to direct them to influencers. They are much more engaging than brands and can help build relationships. In fact, as per the stats, the projected growth through influencer marketing is going to reach $16b by 2022.



Also,

• Studies have shown that influencer-created content has a lot more engagement.

• Influencers can promote brand authenticity, improving relationships between the brand and people.

• Highlight the appropriate brand message to your influencers so they can propagate it.

Highlight Long-Terms Targets And Milestones

Brands must improve their understanding of brand targets and milestones.

These can help keep your marketing aligned to the right path rather than going wayward. You should ensure that your team has a good understanding of them before communicating with influencers.

Strategies To Improve Brand Interactions

Any brand marketing campaign has several goals available, depending on your needs. It can be website traffic, engagement, sales, or anything else.

The key is to select the most critical goals to help your brand and stick to them through the campaign. If it’s brand awareness, getting more views will be your milestone.



Also,

• Goal-setting is something that has to be done as a team. Understand what your brand vision is, and then move forward.

• Ensure that your goals are well-defined. The best way to do this is to add numbers to goals. For example, improve revenue by 100% by the end of the year.

• Your goals should always cover the capability to run your business profitably.

Categorize Your Target Audience

For any business, its audience comes in different categories.

If you want to be successful, learn to understand how to split them into different groups. And not just that, but analyze their specific needs and requirements. This can set you up for a successful marketing campaign.

Recognizing Different Demographics

Since most brands are becoming global businesses, brands need to work on categorization. For businesses today, it is important to understand how each demographic works.

An effective way to do this is to ensure that you have unique buyer personas. It can help businesses get their customer insights in order.

• Google Analytics is a great tool to help analyze your demographics to target the right gender and age audience.

• Create unique buyer personas through Make My Persona by HubSpot. It has detailed tools and applications.

• Most social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have analytics tools that can help.

Gather The Right Selection Of Influencers

One of the most important parts of influencer marketing is opting for the right influencer. The influencer must align with your brand and their experience.

As a business, there are several things you should factor in before selecting an influencer.

For example, measuring if audience behavior on influencer posts falls in line with your target audience. Some of the metrics you can measure are as shown in the screenshot.

Finding The Right Influencers

The crux of all types of influencer marketing is getting the most useful people for your brand. This is not a simple task - there are several things that you should analyze.

This includes simple things like follower numbers to more complex decisions like if they are good for your audience.

• Getting the right influencer for your brand saves you time and costs down the line.

• Tools like Awario and Upfluence are really popular for this use case. You can adjust several parameters to find the right people.

• Also, keep in mind the choice of social media platforms. Some may be popular on one but not on others.

Research Into Smaller Communities

A mistake brands make is considering only singular influencers to carry their branding. Smaller communities in your niche can also be valuable additions to your marketing process.

You can opt to spread your brand message through these niche communities for improved coverage. Sometimes it can turn out to be better than popular influencers.

Tips To Leverage Smaller Communities

To succeed with a brand, you must use as many marketing avenues as possible to succeed with a brand. While influencer marketing is about getting premium influencers talking about your brand, you shouldn't neglect community engagement.

These communities can sometimes have even better reach than the influencers themselves.

• Opting for smaller communities can let you access a more niche crowd.

• Using platforms like Reddit and Slack can give you significant coverage. These also cater to specialized sub-groups. Take a look at the below screenshot showing the user base of Reddit.

• There are also paid and curated groups that use different social media platforms. A good example is Swipe Files.

Brainstorm Different Marketing Approaches

As with all types of marketing, it pays to have different insights into your marketing campaigns.

Each business is uniquely different, and adopting the same approach will not work well. The key is to take into account several aspects of your brand. This includes your audience, niche, and age to develop a solution.

See the screenshot below showing how to market your business based on target markets.

Experimenting With Different Strategies

Finding the right marketing method can be tedious if you don't know what you're doing.

As markets and customers become more diverse, one strategy does not fit all needs. You must be diverse in marketing strategies to get the most out of your process.

• Strive to understand the relationship between the market and your brand. Take stock of what you are offering your audience.

• Formulating strategy also depends on the influencers you have for your campaign.

• Find the right brand positioning and ways how you can improve it.

Ensure Your Marketing Is Organic

Every business needs to ensure that its marketing doesn't look paid for. This means that your marketing strategy should be faithful to your brand.

Choosing an influencer because they have followers but aren't aligned with your brand is a bad decision. It can seem artificial to your audience, prompting negative responses.

In the below screenshot, a clothing brand has Messi promoting their hoodie by wearing it. If any lipstick company tried using him as their influencer, it seems forced advertising as lipstick is a feminine material.

Ensuring Your Marketing Is On-Brand

A rule of thumb for branding is that people want to interact with brands with a strong core message. Organic marketing ensures that all the wheels are turning in the right direction.

In short, get influencers who are popular in your niche. Simply opting for large follower numbers can be more harmful than good.

• The more organic your business marketing is, the more successful it is.

• Audit your marketing process and your influencers extensively to match them.

• Use BuzzSumo to create campaigns focused on topics of interest. This will help keep it more organic.

Align Audience Expectations With Influencer Capability

A huge part of success for a brand is the ability to manage expectations.

People today have an ample amount of choices in the market. This means their expectations for your brand grow as time goes on. The key to managing expectations is to be creative and authentic about your brand.

Choosing The Best Alternative

In any niche, there are several different influencers available for your brand. As a company, though, the choices are difficult because your audience is also involved in the marketing.

You need to pick an influencer that the crowd will love. This can be more than a bit challenging.

• The follower count is not a metric for selecting the right influencers for your brand. The engagement rate on their posts is valued above it.

• Analyze chosen influencers and check if they align with your brand's positioning.

• Use tools like FollowerWonk to help you align your influencer's positioning.

Create Customized Campaigns Based On Influencers

To make optimal use of influencers, you must also tailor your campaigns. Simply attaching influencers to an existing campaign rarely has the intended impact on your brand.

Building a new marketing campaign ground-up can considerably improve your marketing strength.

Using Influencers To Tailor Your Campaign

Brands need to understand that every influencer has their "own" group of people. While this group might be using your products, they align more with the influencer. To get maximum exposure, you should create a campaign featuring them prominently.

• Creating influencer-themed campaigns can help improve brand reach. Take a look at the below screenshot, a score-updating app partnering with a sports person to increase the downloads.

• This type of content has more chances of being shared by followers of the influencer.

• A good example of influencer marketing done the right way is Loki the wolfdog and Mercedes Benz.

Create Marketing Collateral For Influencers

To improve the chances of a successful marketing campaign, you need to have command over all aspects of marketing. It is also a good idea to create marketing content for your influencers.

More often than not, influencers might be unable to create premium branded content.

Leveraging Branded Content

If you want to get the most out of your branded campaign, opt for customized content. Since you have access to a bigger team, creating marketing content at your end is better for the campaign. Getting pointers from influencers, you're creating content for help.

• Create and deliver marketing content with your team. You will have much better quality control over it than influencers.

• Ensure that you capture the essence of the influencer in your branded content.

• Influencers have a unique perspective and voice for their content. To be successful, you should stick to it.

Focus On Relationships Rather Than Metrics

While metrics are an important part of the process, building relationships are crucial to branding. Brands should not just look at influencers as a way to get better metrics. The focus should be on getting better relationships from the process.

The reason is relationships have a lasting impression on a brand. The best example is Nike’s partnership with NBA star Lebron James. They partnered back in 2003 and later signed a lifetime agreement between them.

Improving Relationships Through Influencers

Businesses these days opt for stronger brand messages than simply better metrics.

The reason is simple - improved relationships lead to better ROI. Building strong relationships with your audience can mean better sales over longer periods. Influencers can help build that with your audience.

• For brands, relationships are important - both with influencers and their audiences.

• The best advice for improved relationships is to ensure listening to your audience.

• Another tip is not to leave unanswered messages, especially those asking questions.

Listen To Your Audience For Feedback

While collaborating with an influencer is good for your brand, you need feedback to improve. This is where your audience can come into play.

As part of a pilot program, run an initial marketing campaign with a few influencers. Your audience will weigh in with their opinions on them.

Work On Audience Feedback

The crux of all marketing processes is the audience. Any marketing process, especially influencer marketing, must align with user expectations. Brands need to keep lines of communication open to ensure that people can leave you feedback.

• Audience insights can be invaluable to your marketing campaign.

• Don't respond to feedback because it can affect the integrity of your brand.

• Subarus' #MeetAnOwner campaign is a great example of influencer marketing. They listened to their audience, and the campaign was a success. Take a look at the below screenshot showing the response from the audience.

Not Being Clear About Your Brand Message

When it comes to brand positioning, the message you send out to people is critical. You must be clear about what you're trying to tell your audience. This is especially true in today's day and age.

You need to be extremely careful about how you express your brand message. It most likely will be if a brand says something that can be misconstrued.

How To Avoid It

• It's always better to get a professional agency involved. They have the experience and the knowledge to curate your brand message.

• Ensure that your team curates every message on your feed through an influencer. There are chances that your message might not translate well to the influencer's audience.

• Some influencers try to get in on controversy for better exposure. It's best not to do this as it can be detrimental in the long run.

The screenshot below showed the same when an actor tried promoting tobacco.

Not Being Relevant To Your Audience

Relevance is a big part of what makes content successful and appealing to users.

Ideally, any content you put out through your influencer should resonate with your audience. It should make them click or interact with it and share it if possible. This can only happen when the content is relatable to them or the people around them.

Take a look at the below screenshot showing Ronaldo advertising for a facial cream, which is quite weird.

How To Avoid It

• The easiest way to avoid this is through research. Identify content online that most people are interacting with. A bit of creativity and reverse engineering can help you come up with your own.

• Monitor how your influencer is using your content. If there is a certain way you want it to be shown, they should respect that.

• A good example of this in action is Motorola's Moto Z launch.

Not Having The Right Influencers

This is one of the more serious problems plaguing influencer marketing campaigns. Regardless of the product the brand markets, without the right influencers, there are chances it will fail.

Based on the brand, the choice of influencers needs to align perfectly. The reason is that people are going to identify them with the brand.

How To Avoid It

• You need to curate influencers right at the start of your campaign. Getting the right checklist when it comes to selection is critical to weed out influencers you don't want.

• Some research into how influencer presents information to their audience can be helpful. Understand their pros and cons. For example, Huda Kattan, a makeup influencer, posts videos of using beauty products to show her followers.

• Be transparent about what you want them to do with your product or service. Understanding this can help all parties involved align to campaign goals.

Not Considering Current Market Trends

Today's market is a dynamic and complex ecosystem.

Depending on your niche, it might have trends that change quite quickly. Something that might be trending today might drop out of favor quickly. As a brand, you need to keep informed of these changes. And not just you; your influencers should also take notes.

How To Avoid It

• Start with solid ideas that have worked well for a long time. These can be a foundation while you work on new trends.

• Keep your ears open to different trends circulating the market. Social listening tools like BuzzSumo and Buffer can help you find the right trends to focus on.

Take a look at the below example.

• Don't be afraid to experiment but ensure that your team and the influencer are on the same page. This can increase your chance of success.

Not Having Genuine Followers

A huge problem that has been prevalent in the social media niche is fake followers. Sometimes, influencers try to pad their follower numbers with fake accounts. This can be a huge problem for brands.

As shown in the below image, some people buy fake followers to show off, which will have a negative effect in the long run.



The reason is that influencers can and do get banned from social media platforms when doing this. If an influencer is banned, it can reflect badly on the brand.

How To Avoid It

• Researching influencers online can help you understand how they accrue their followers. It would be good to investigate if there are rumors about a particular influencer.

• Check high peaks in their follower count with tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. Analyze these data points and discover how they got a sudden influx of followers.

Not Curating Content On Your Feed

It has been established that content is a huge part of marketing. Brands need to focus on creating curated content on their feed.

With influencer marketing, businesses sometimes forget to tailor content to their influencers. Not customizing content to your influencer's style can sometimes not connect with their followers.

How To Avoid It

• Have a team to improve how your content connects with the influencer. Content pieces need some work to adapt to an influencer's audience.

• Discussing it with the influencer can help them, and you understand how to go about content creation. Set clear goals and targets with your content creation.

• Finally, ensure content has been put through a detailed review process—Edit textual content with tools like Grammarly. It helps improve the quality of the content with insightful suggestions, as shown in the below example.

Use Adobe Creative Suite as a platform for image and video creation.

Not Analyzing Your Marketing Metrics

It is important to be analytical of your marketing process. Statistics and metrics can tell you much about how your brand is progressing.

You must ensure that your influencers follow a similar analytic approach for their marketing. Only when both parties are aligned will you get good results for your marketing campaign.

How To Avoid It

• Before commencing the engagement, discussing with your influencers is a good idea. You need to be on the same page regarding analytics and metrics.

• Opt to have your influencers send you reports over some time about their metrics. This can help you track and keep abreast of your campaign.

Take a look at the below screenshot showing the sample influencer marketing report.

• If they don't have access to analytics, sharing the tools you use with them is a good idea. Sprout Social and Bazaarvoice are great tools that they can also use.

Not Enough Engagement With Followers

Brands and influencers are guilty of doing this to their followers. It is important to keep your audience engaged. This is especially true when dealing with comments and queries on your feed.

The influencer and your team should reply to messages on your feed or DMs. People appreciate a brand that connects and keeps in touch with them.

How To Avoid It

• Responding to your audience is a critical part of marketing. Ensure you have teams in place for both your brand and the influencer. In the below screenshot, neither the influencer nor the brand responds to the user comment.

• Run regular contests, promotions, and giveaways to engage your audience. Your influencer could also share these events on their feed.

• Novel tools like QuickMobile and Angage help people engage with your brand.

Aspire (Formerly AspireIQ)

Pricing

About

Aspire is the go-to tool for marketers to learn more about influencers on several social media platforms. It was niche-independent and powerful enough to highlight the right people for your marketing needs.

They've revamped their core engine, which enables easier discovery of people. It is also one of the more popular platforms around.

Features

• Discover Engine 2.0 - They've revamped their discovery engine to enable people to find their influencers quickly and more accurately.

• Detailed Insights - They are compatible across several social platforms, and you can draw valuable insights from them. They're also working on delivering even more accurate results to specific questions or captions.

• Frequent Updates - There have been a lot more updates per time frame since they were AspireIQ. Their customer support is also a key purchase decision-maker for your brand.

Awario

Pricing

About

One of the most featured social and web monitoring platforms, Awario has set new benchmarks for the tool. It can help you do almost everything you need for an influencer marketing campaign.

It can track competitors, monitor brand mentions, discover sales and branding opportunities, and more. This is a great tool to have if you need just one platform.

Features

• Social media listening - One of the platform's best features is the ability to tune into online conversations. It can pick out trending topics or things of interest to your niche.

• Detailed Research - Several people have discussed Awario's ability to deliver in-depth research. It can help with topics and influencers, making it an invaluable tool for marketers.

• Easy Dashboard - It has an easy-to-use dashboard from which you can access many features.

Upfluence

Pricing

About

Upfluence has been a revelation when it comes to discovery tools. Users can access a massive database of influencers spread across several platforms.

Choosing the right people for your brand with your data becomes easy. It is one of those platforms which can scale well for SMBs and enterprises.

Features

• Extremely Precise - One of the most repeated comments on its features has been its accuracy. It can deliver the right results regardless of your domain or the social platform you use.

• Clear Workflows - Talking about important features, Upfluence can help brands with clear pipelines for their goals. It can get a bit complex when you deal with bigger campaigns.

• Flexible Tiers - Choose from a range of working tiers for your business. You can opt for various pricing options depending on your need.

trendHERO

Pricing

Unbox Social offers custom pricing based on your choice of products and business size.

About

trendHERO is all about maintaining a healthy social profile online. It has many tools that can help you with influencer discovery and analytics.

You can also highlight fake followers in your account and get rid of them. In the long run, trendHERO can save your business a lot of money.

Key Features

• Highlighting influencers - It has a powerful influencer discovery module that can highlight people suited to your brand. You can sort them according to the audience, follower growth, and domain.

• Forecasting - Get accurate forecasting of influencer numbers with statistics and insights. It can help you plan your campaign better and ensure profitability.

• Solid Reporting - Recording and tracking insights is another important part of campaigns. You can also import your reports to multiple formats for other applications.

Neoreach

Pricing

About

The goal for the creators of Neoreach was to create a platform that could act as a liaison between influencers and brands.

Communication would become a lot more streamlined, and both parties could do away with the middleman problem. It allows for a more hands-on deal-making process and better outcomes for everyone involved.

Features

• Influencer Data Points - Neoreach has a huge database of millions of data points for influencers. This can help improve results for your brand over time.

• ROI Focused - ROI is a key brand metric, and Neoreach has a clutch of statistics to increase revenue.

• Automation - The platform has key automation features that can help you increase your brand reach with influencers.

Julius

Pricing

About

Julius was a niche influencer platform when it started. It was a way for brands to connect with American Football players and work with them.

As time passed, this became one of the most popular influencer platforms today. Brands can choose from a variety of criteria to choose influencers. The best part is that influencers can choose the brands they want to work with.

Features

• AI-Powered - This platform uses AI to ensure that brands get the best results. But the key fact here is that people also curate influencer choice.

• Compare Influencers - It also gives you an option that can help you compare different influencers. This further improves decision-making.

• Unlimited Users/Messaging - Unlike other platforms, this doesn't have a limit on the number of users or messages. It's a good deal for large collaborative teams.