Want to increase sales? In 2021, one of the best ways to do this is to find influencers to promote your brand on social media. This strategy is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that is a great trick to attract more customers to your business.
But how do you go about setting up your influencer strategy in order to actually see results? Here are three actionable steps you can take to make sure your campaign starts out strong.
Table of Contents
1. Prepare your own social media accounts
The goal of influencer marketing is for influencers to attract their followers to your brand. And what good is that if your own social media accounts aren’t up to standard? Your Instagram account or YouTube page needs to make a great first impression if you want to push visitors along in their purchasing journeys.
Therefore, make sure your account is complete with information and content. Assign someone from your team to monitor and respond to DMs. Some customers may reach out to you directly on social media, and in order to keep them engaged, you need to reply to their questions or concerns.
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks to use in influencer marketing. If you’re using it too, set up Instagram Shopping so that people can browse your products directly within the app.
With Instagram Shopping, you can tag products that appear in your brand’s content, and users can click those tags to go directly to your shop’s product page. And as of recently, you can also approve Instagram influencers so that they can tag your products too.
2. Find influencers who connect you to your buyer personas
Understanding your target audience ensures that you’ll be able to find influencers who connect you with them. Before you start an influencer campaign, remember it’s not the same to activate Youtube influencers or Tiktok influencers, you need to know who your buyer personas are and what types of demographics they belong to and which social media they use more.
Later, when searching for influencers, look into the demographics of their followers. This way, you can see if the influencer’s audience shares the same age, gender, interests, etc. as your buyer personas. You can get this information by either using an influencer marketing platform or by asking influencers for their media kits.
In addition to verifying that an influencer helps you reach your buyer personas, you want to check that they have healthy performance metrics in general. Take a look at:
- Follower count – The higher it is, the more an influencer will charge for their services.
- Follower growth rate – Sudden jumps in growth could reveal fake followers.
- Engagement rate – Get a sense of the connection an influencer has with their followers.
- Post metrics – How many likes, comments, etc. do they get on average?
- Audience Authenticity – What portion of their audience may be bots?
Bear in mind that choosing influencers with millions of followers isn’t always the best strategy to drive sales. For example, on Instagram, nano and micro influencers have the fewest fake followers.
They also tend to have the highest engagement rates across social media. So despite their lower follower counts, these influencers may be more successful at getting your brand in front of real people who are interested in it.
Finally, before choosing your collaborators, reflect on if influencers align with your brand. Choose influencers whose voice and style match your brand’s own voice and aesthetic. If your brand promotes certain values, select influencers who uphold them.
The link between brand and influencer should be clear so that the collaboration comes across as authentic to followers.
3. Set up influencer discount codes
To bring in sales, you should give your influencers unique discount codes to promote to their followers. An American study shows that 70% of consumers value discounts more than they did a year ago. So it’s more important than ever to incentivize sales.
Influencer discount codes are great for another reason, too: They let you track which influencers bring in the most sales. You can identify the influencers who do particularly well and collaborate with them again in the future.
When creating discount codes, keep these best practices in mind:
- Every code should be easy to identify. Use the influencer’s name or social handle.
- Use block capitals to help the code stick out among other text. This also helps avoid confusion between some lowercase characters.
- Keep them short and simple. Most people can copy and paste, but you don’t want to deter those who can’t.
Conclusion
If you want to drive sales with influencer marketing, keep these three tips in mind. And remember to approach your campaign from an analytical perspective. Find what works, what doesn’t, and alter your strategy accordingly the next time around.
