Don’t leave yourself behind without updating the way to build a good influencer marketing plan in 2021

Influencer marketing today is no longer a new brand or product promotion. It’s no coincidence that this type of advertising has become one of the most popular marketing solutions.

The following numbers have partly shown the effect of using influencers in marketing campaigns:

• Only 1% of customers trust ads when it comes to millennials, while 33% trust blog reviews.
• About 40% of the people said they bought a product from YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter after watching an influencer review that product on these platforms.
• 71% of influencers think that their audience remains engaged with them thanks to their honest and authentic voice.
• Influencer markets earn a return on investment (ROI) of $6,50 per dollar spent, according to a study by Tomoson.

However, have you updated the influencer marketing trend in 2021? And how can you take the best advantage of influencers to promote your products and brands?

Read on to find the right direction for your influencer marketing campaign in 2021.

2 types of influencer campaigns

1. Promotional codes and affiliate marketing

One popular example between brand and influencer is Audible and New York Times bestselling author and investor Tim Ferriss.

Influencer markets earn a return on investment (ROI) of $6,50 per dollar spent

During the Tim Ferriss Show, he gives users an overview of his partnership with Audible in about 30 seconds to a minute and directs users to his custom URL, where they can get a free ebook and a list of Tim’s favorite books.

This influencer marketing tactic strikes a strong balance between reviewing Audible’s service and allowing Tim to offer his favorite books.

Influencers are also working with brands to promote discount codes that are easily tracked and even easier to integrate into graphics, videos, and to share via mediums like podcasts.

2. Giveaways and contests

Depending on the price point of your product, you can quickly build a budget for giveaways every month to competition winners or influencers.

Influencers’ unboxing videos on their YouTube or Instagram live video help to bring your product into the focus, by showing it to the influencer’s audience at a minimum budget.

There are so many influencers who do unboxing videos about all the gifts they receive from brands on social media once a week. They can thank the brands who sent them gifts, and review these gifts on the platforms.

Moreover, engagement instructions are rules for entering the contest.

That might be something like:

• Friends tagging
• Liking the post
• Following the page
• Sharing the video/post/Livestream
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Creating original content

Ensure that the rules are transparent so that confusion doesn’t prevent the participants from entering the contest, and when winners are announced, there is no dissatisfaction among the audience.

How to build a good influencer strategy

The development of a successful influencer strategy is about targeting.

To achieve this, you must determine your goals and KPIs, also consciously make an effort to understand the influencer landscape.

1. Build up your objectives and key performance indicators

When brands first invest in influencer marketing, this indeed feels like a game – one which can or can never generate ROI.

However, it’s sad that for many companies, it’s a real gamble.

This is because they don’t invest the essential resources to prove it as a viable channel, and they don’t take the time to set clear objectives, to determine the suitable measures that need management to achieve these aims.

Setting objectives and key metrics

The three main objectives of influencer marketing:

Building brand awareness: You can base on comments, likes, followers, your hashtags use, and shares to measure the success of your brand awareness campaign.

A new target market attraction: Attracting a new target market includes everything about brand awareness, and an entirely new space or product line.

To make this plan successful, you need Influencers who can build buzz and drive win targeted traffic.

Lead generation facilitates: More sales are the final aim of every plan. Conversions and sales can easily track leads and customers, but sources can be challenging to track directly unless you use particular codes or landing pages for each influencer.

Knowing which partnership works and which doesn’t help you make the most use of your influencer strategy.

You should compare the influencer marketing results with the other marketing forms results to see whether influencer marketing brings ROI.

2. Knowing well the influencer landscape

A critical component of an effective influencer marketing campaign involves establishing a trustworthy relationship with a relevant influencer, who matches the needs and wishes of your audience, and who your audience will look to when they make purchase decisions.

Don’t focus on Instagram only

The main goal is to find influencers based on influence topics and audience demographics, who can perform all the key metrics.

You have to find one aligned with your brand’s vision, mission, and identity to find the right fit between your brand and influencer.

Instagram is typically the first platform to think of when you find top influencers.

In 2017, Instagram had a staggering 92% share, and it was the #1 platform of influencers.

But, why don’t you try to capitalize influencers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and YouTube this year to make a breakthrough?

Appear wherever your target audience is active and take advantage of the fact that influencers on other platforms than Instagram are currently more accessible and cost-efficient.

Micro-influencers are sometimes better 

As competition for influence is growing, we will mostly see more diversity among influencer targets, meaning that influencers at every level, ranging from high-follower elites to low-follower ups and downs, can attract attention from brands.

Brands also want to specialize too, which means some will work with micro-influencers who can accommodate specific niches and segments of the market.

It’s no surprise that the greater the influencer, the lower the engagement.

Those who have 1,000 followers usually receive likes on their posts 8% of the time, while ones having 10 million followers generally receive only 1.6% of the time.

In addition to tracking followers, the types of followers, quality relationships and overall engagement must be monitored as well.

Sophie McAulay at AND CO from Fiverr claims:

“The engagement of an influencer’s audience is important to consider,” she says.

“An influencer may have thousands of followers, but it’s unlikely that you will achieve significant reach by collaborating with him/her, if his/her audience isn’t regularly engaging with his/her post.

“Check some of the latest posts to see how much their audiences engage.

“The most important thing is to work with someone who has the loyal and relevant following in his niche, and who can talk about your product or service authentically, and not unlike the type of posts that they generate.”

It wouldn’t be a surprise to see qualitative assessment tools and software were introduced soon with influencer marketing making big waves.

Use tools to approach influencers

78% of the respondents said determining the ROI of the influencer marketing program was their biggest challenge, according to a survey conducted in 2017 by Linqia.

45% said that it is also problematic to choose which influencer to work with.

Therefore, you have to use the right tools to break down those barriers.

And Buzzsumo is the best platform allowing you to do this. Thanks to Buzzsumo, you can search for relevant influencers by topic, and analyze their reach by followers and engagement numbers.

After having a list of influencers, the next challenge step is finding their contact information.

Using Voila Norbert, you can easily upload your influencers list, and get all their contact information.

Then, you can start your strategy after you the list of influencers and their contact info.

The tool even tracks you automatically.

All you have to do next is checking who clicks on your email and who replies to it, and then you can start to create valuable connections with your new partners.

Determine compensation

Influencers haven’t gotten a fair deal until recently.

But it’s not a problem now, as 48% of marketers saying that they plan to expand their budget for campaigns aimed at influencers.

Fair compensation depends much on partnership terms, project scope, size/quality, and agreement length.

Some influencers are perfectly pleased to receive gifts, or free and exclusive products they present on their platform.

Others prefer to work on an affiliate basis, and receive a commission from their referrals on any product or service sold.

However, a one-time fee or a monthly fee becomes the norm quickly.

To show a typical pricing structure via Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, Buffer created the following graph:

Another practical tool is the Influencer Marketing Hub’s Instagram Influencer Earnings Calculator. It can break down the number of users, posts, likes, comments, the estimated earnings per post, and the extremely useful engagement rate.

Some hot influencer marketing trends

1. Work with influencers who use video

The last craze is video production, and you are already behind the curve if you don’t tap on this channel.

Four out of five millennia go to video content to search for a purchase decision.

As video content grows, brands withdraw their money from YouTube in record numbers, mainly because their ads are not in control.

Without that creative control, brands switch from traditional video ads to influencers who talk about their products in video content.

Teaser campaigns, unboxing videos, and exclusive reviews by key influencers all serve to build excitement early on and help crush marketing goals for the initial product release.

According to a survey conducted last year, some 12% of the influencers expected YouTube to be their main target network in 2018, up from 3% in 2017.

More interesting is that 70% of YouTube teenagers said they relate more to YouTube content creators than to traditional celebrities.

60% of all YouTube subscribers would buy something based on their favorite video creator’s advice, not on movies and TV characters’ advertisements.

Imagine how your marketing plan might affect these young people in the next five to ten years, when they enter the labor market and are your primary target audience.

And, YouTube is not the only platform worth investing in for videos.

Video marketing in social media has an enormous chance.

Instagram has live stories, and Instagram TV (IGTV) launched recently, which is essentially a channel for Instagram’s popular influencers to stream more content to their extensive follow-up.

Also, Snapchat and Facebook are good options for video content collaborating.

2. Enhance the clearness

The FTC sent a letter in April 2017, officially warning brands and influencers to reveal their working relationships more clearly has caused disclosure in the industry.

The government’s precautionary and its indication of the possible crack-down, is a step towards disclosing paid partnerships and support by major brands and marketing platforms.

Finding ways to share partnerships and sponsored posts which don’t let the audience down will help to keep customers’ trust.

As the advice of Brand24 Magdalena Urbaniak,

“Build honest and strong relationships with influencers as well as the public. It’s something you can’t overestimate.”

One of the easiest ways to tell an influence is promoting your brand is having them put #sponsored, #ad, or #[brand name] on their post.

With their branded content option, Instagram has taken this a step further, so that you can tag your company partner, to clearly demonstrate that it’s a sponsored post.

In order to reduce the risk to your brand, you should examine the positions and content of your influents often to ensure they follow the FTC guidelines.

Recall, trust, but check.

3. Quality content is better than ads

Content marketing is based on the demand for authenticity. Consumers have been tired of traditional advertising everywhere on magazines, radio, television, and billboards.

But, the digital age then brought a new wave of advertisement, raising the demand for more authentic content.

In this respect, the influencer you choose to work with must be able to balance non-commissioned and commissioned content.

If not, the trust is lost, along with the influencer’s followers and influence. As Buildfire David Zheng says,

“Consistency and genuine make the most impact. The more a post looks like a, the less effective it is because of its ‘salesy’ feeling.”

You can refer to Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab Right Hook, which tells you how to give your audience enough jabs, so that they’re not annoyed when you throw the right hook (going for the sale, asking for a subscription, donation, etc.).

The great thing about influencer marketing is that you can hit three targets with one arrow, including creating great content, creating credibility, and reaching customers through the influencer’s popularity.

Once these influencers’ community responds positively to their suggestions, it means you succeed.

Let influencers be creative and promote your brand, products the way they want. They are the only ones who understand what their public wants. 

As a result, you create a good relationship with influencers and easily achieve your desired marketing goals.

Take a closer look at influencer marketing campaigns, and immediately apply the tips above to your upcoming plans.

And incase you’re looking for a functional subtitling tool help bring your videos to a wider range of audience, take a look at Motionbear and see what it can do for you.

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