How to Make Influencer Marketing Work for Your Startup

Overview

According to Nielsen Consumer Trust Index, 92% of consumers trust influencer marketing over traditional advertising. It’s this level of trust, along with creative innovation, that has driven growth in this marketing channel over the last decade.‍

What is influencer marketing?

‍Influencer marketing is a strategy that companies use to increase brand awareness or conversions among a specific target audience by partnering with influencers on social media.

Influencers were born as TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter users became content creators themselves, curating and crafting their own stories, photos, and videos to share with their followers. In doing so, they quickly attracted the attention of marketers.

Today, influencer marketing is a powerful tool that when executed correctly can reach niche audiences to help you accomplish many goals, from building brand awareness to increasing sales.

Whether you’re new to influencer marketing or enhancing your influencer strategy to take it to the next level, you’ll want to maximize your efforts and avoid rookie mistakes.In this guide, we’ll take you through:

1. Defining your goals
2. Researching the right influencers for your brand
3. Considering your budget
4. Exploring 3 influencer marketing strategies
5. Creating a content strategy to help guide influencers
6. Tracking your metrics
7. Hiring an influencer marketing agency
8. Keeping up with emerging platforms and trends

Read on for the dos and don’ts of influencer marketing.

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Defining your goals

Before developing your influencer marketing strategy or creating a campaign, think about what you want to get out of it.

Here are some goals to consider:

• Build brand awareness: Get more people to know, like, and recognize your brand.
• Increase engagement: Ramp up the level of interaction that your customers have with your brand—on platforms you’re currently using and new platforms you want to break into.
• Grow customer loyalty: This is all about building relationships and a community.
• Attract a new target market: When entering a new product space, you want to do everything you can to build buzz and drive targeted traffic.
• Increase sales: Get more leads that convert to paying customers.
• Create content: The value of influencers is not only in their audience but also in their ability to create content that’s timely and relevant—and often cheaper and more interesting than a brand’s own content. An influencer distributes the content and gets their audience’s eyeballs on it, and then you can repurpose that content on your own channels or elsewhere within your marketing strategy.

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Researching the right influencers for your brand

Collaborating with the wrong influencer can be a costly mistake, so it’s important to do your due diligence. As you’re vetting influencers, here are six key questions to ask yourself:

1. Do they align with our brand’s vision, mission, identity, community, purpose, and values?
2. Would the influencer normally use our product/service?
3. Is the influencer an expert in our niche?
4. Do they operate in the same social space as our audience?
5. Who is their target audience?
6. What is their audience engagement?

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Now that you’re thinking about the right influencers to engage, let’s take a look at the different types of influencers and the pros and cons of working with each. Although this is changing, Instagram has historically been the most influential platform, so influencer types are defined according to Instagram follower numbers.

Nano influencers

Who: Typically have less than 5,000 Instagram followers. They’re everyday people who typically have small, more friend-based followings.

Pros

Can create buzz within a specific targeted audience. Trusted for their specialized advice in a particular area. Usually eager to work with brands in their area. Ability to craft unique or tailored campaigns.

Cons

Smaller reach. Can be time-consuming to manage. Might not be used to working with brands.

Micro influencers

Who: Generally have 5,000-100,000 Instagram followers. They cover a niche market and have a small but dedicated following.

Pros

More diverse and organic reach across multiple segments. More engaged with audience and more likely to respond to follower comments and questions. Content is generally more authentic. Compensation can be performance-based. Can help provide deep insights from creative tests with multiple narratives

Cons

More content you’ll need to review and approve

Macro influencers

Who: Typically have 100,000-500,000 Instagram followers. They're a hybrid of micro and mega influencers.

Pros

Fewer influencers to manage. More concentrated engagement. Content quality takes a big leap compared to micro influencers. Less content you’ll need to review and approve

Cons

More expensive (and they generally work for a flat fee). Limited content licensing. Less diversified reach. Engagement rate decreases compared to micro influencers. Less organic reach, depending on the algorithm

Mega influencers

Who: Generally have 500,000-5 million Instagram followers. They specialize in driving high-impact awareness with a very broad reach.

Pros

Content quality is close to that of a creative agency. Can be more prescriptive with the types of content you want them to produce

Cons

Cost more than macro and micro influencers. Almost always work on a flat-fee model and work with talent agencies

Celebrity influencers

Who: Famous personalities typically with more than 5 million Instagram followers.

Pros

A committed and passionate following across multiple platforms. Reach of audience. Aligning your brand with a 'known' brand can build credibility

Cons

Very expensive. Potentially polarizing. Their personal brand can overshadow your brand and message.

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Once you’ve paired the right type of influencers with your startup’s goals, you’ll want to keep any budget constraints in mind as you move forward.

Do conduct extensive research to find the right influencers for your brand—and do match the type of influencer to your goal(s).

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Considering your budget

Especially if you’re just starting out and money is tight, you’ll want to think about different ways to pay influencers.Payment can be a combination of:

Free product: Instead of cash payment, you can gift influencers products or services. This structure works well for micro influencers in exchange for shoutouts on their channels.

A flat fee: Pay influencers set, predetermined amounts.

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Commission: If your budget allows and an influencer can drive significant sales, consider paying them a cut. You can track this through affiliate links and unique coupon codes. This structure encourages accountability and allows for measurable results at scale.

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Exploring 3 influencer marketing strategies

Consider these three influencer marketing strategies:

1. Tentpole strategy: This centers your marketing efforts around one event, typically a big launch or a holiday. You plan ahead and pulse in a slew of influencers before, during, and after the event to help tell the story, expand your audience, and create buzz.
2. A moment in time: This strategy is reactive. It happens in real-time, while an important conversation is happening that people are tuned into. The conversation around social justice is just one example of this. In times like these, you can leverage influencers with relevant voices to join the conversation.
3. Always on: With this approach, you use influencers to help tell your story 365 days a year to drive engagement and retention over time. Instead of just thinking about your brand when there’s an event or a holiday, consumers are interacting with your brand regularly.

The magic happens when you can use different influencers to leverage all of these strategies simultaneously. For example, you can have micro and nano influencers who are always on. These influencers are always talking about your brand and what’s happening. Then you can have celebrities come in at tentpole moments to help build hype around a specific event or holiday.

No matter how you build your strategy, you’ll want to plan ahead so that you can get the best content out of the influencer. Leave plenty of time to iterate.Building on these key strategies, let’s go through a few creative ways in which you might use influencers:

• Sponsored content: Recruit influencers to feature your brand on their channels.
• Contest/giveaways: Run a contest and ask influencers to share the event with their followers.
• Takeovers: Allow an influencer to take over your social media accounts for a defined period of time.
• Affiliate links: Provide influencers with a unique link that will reward them with a percentage of the sales they drive.
• Discount codes: Give influencers unique discount codes for a product or service that they can promote.‍
• Brand ambassadors: Develop a relationship with an influencer who is a loyal fan of your brand. In exchange for exclusive offers, free products, and potential features, they promote your brand, products, and services.

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Creating a content strategy to help guide influencers

On the one hand, if you give influencers too much structure, you may end up with content that feels forced and won’t resonate with their fans. On the other hand, if you don’t provide enough structure, you could end up with content that’s way off-brand and won’t help you achieve your objectives.

So how do you strike the right balance?

Don’t micromanage, but do provide some guidance. Discuss parameters and expectations up front, and give influencers a brief outlining your goals and brand look and feel.

Show them how you present your brand to your customers. Not only will this help speed up the process, but it will also help you establish a collaborative relationship with the influencer. The end goal here is for them to create content that resonates with their fans—and for you to get what you want (and pay for).

Be sure to:

• Set clear terms and timelines for your agreement
• Align on mandatories, objectives, and creative style
• Negotiate rights for using content on your channels up front
• Have influencers clearly identify posts as sponsored and use hashtags where appropriate
• Avoid publishing blatantly promotional, hard-selling content that can turn off fans

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Tracking your metrics

As some platforms like Instagram experiment with suppressing the number of public likes, it’s a good exercise to think about what metrics really matter to your startup. Beyond vanity metrics, how are you tracking conversions and actual sales?

Do have a plan to track KPIs and ROI

Before launching an influencer campaign, ask yourself: What does success look like? Put a plan in place to track KPIs: count, likes, and engagement, including comments, use of your hashtags, and shares. Also, use third-party analytics like Sprout Social, SEMrush, Sprinklr, and Hootsuite to help track metrics, and don’t forget to set up necessary URLs and landing pages before you get started.

Don’t rely on influencers for metrics

Surprisingly, a lot of brands don’t use metrics to track their ROIs. Instead, they lean on influencers to give them the metrics, but this often includes fake views and people who don’t actually see the content. Make sure you’re on the same page with the influencer about what success looks like and how you’re going to measure it.

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Hiring an influencer marketing agency

When you’re starting out and have a smaller budget, it’s best to choose influencers yourself and DM them directly. As you grow, you’ll want to start reaching out to bigger names. At this point, you should consider working with an agency.There are two approaches to this:

1. The high-touch approach is to hire an agency to help you with a broad influencer strategy. They’ll identify the right influencers for your brand, create a strategy around the different types of influencers—essentially, they’ll help you with everything we’ve covered in this guide.
2. The low-touch approach is to hire an agency that’s more “programmatic.” In other words, they automate the process. There’s a standard contract, but it’s made for scale. You tell them the characteristics you’re looking for, and they go out and find influencers that fit the bill. They also take care of all the paperwork and payment negotiations.

So how should you prepare before speaking to an agency? To vet prospective agencies, start with this set of basic questions:

• Who are the clients they work with?
• What are examples of past campaigns that match your vision?
• What does this agency’s network look like?
• How do they measure success?
• Do those metrics complement your idea of success?
• Do you prefer a low-touch approach with more programmatic, automated methods?
• Or are you looking for a more high-touch, bespoke relationship where an agency can reach out to agents behind the scenes for you?
• Does this agency have the tools and infrastructure in place to monitor your campaign?
• What will you truly be getting out of a campaign?

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Keeping up with emerging platforms and trends

The influencer marketing landscape is constantly evolving. Early on, companies were all vying for the audiences of a few big names at a high cost. Today, a dynamic strategy of using lower-cost micro and nano influencers to drive conversions is more important than ever.

The popularity of platforms is also constantly changing. For instance, Instagram has historically been the major platform for influencer marketing efforts, but YouTube is now a major player, and TikTok has exploded during the pandemic. New medium platforms like Clubhouse will continue to emerge, and new crops of influencers will rise along with them. Staying plugged into where your demographic is engaging is crucial to maintaining a successful influencer marketing strategy. Don’t be afraid to test first as a consumer, and then learn from that experience!

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Takeaways & next steps

When used correctly, leveraging relationships with influencers can help build brand awareness and even increase sales. For early-stage founders, prematurely working with influencers can sometimes lead to disappointment—and wasted time and money. But when the timing is right and when you have an effective strategy in place, the payoff can be big.As you consider getting started or adjusting your own strategy, we hope you’ll remember these nine dos and don’ts of influencer marketing:

• Don’t jump in before defining your goals.
• Do conduct extensive research to find the right influencers for your brand.
• Do match the type of influencer to your goal(s).
• Don’t follow just one influencer marketing strategy.
• Don’t be too prescriptive—or too vague—about the content you expect.
• Do have a plan to track KPIs and ROI.
• Don’t rely on influencers for metrics
• Do consider working with an agency when the time is right.
• Do stay on top of emerging platforms and trends.