3 Things You Should Know About Influencer Marketing Before You Spend Your First Penny

But what have you been doing in Q 1 & 2 to support those Q4 efforts? Have you been relying solely on Facebook and Google ads to scale your business? What you should be considering, is using influencer marketing.

I can hear you saying now “but influencer marketing is over saturated and a dying fad! Why even try to fish in that pond?” I’ll tell you why, it’s because almost 50% of consumers rely on influencer input when making purchasing decisions. Let’s face it: people trust what other people have to say, other than advertisers and corporations. And although you can’t befriend thousands of people, you can however, befriend one influencer. This alone, is why influencer marketing has become such a powerful and effective marketing strategy. Let’s talk about some of the key tactics your company should be doing/starting for the second half of 2019.

1. Determine a Budget

Gone are the days where you could just send an influencer some of your product and they would make a great post in your favor. While there are still nano-influencers who aren’t opposed to this, don’t bank on a product trade only deal. We hear a lot that people don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for influencer marketing, which I totally understand. It can be a difficult pill to swallow knowing that there are no guarantees and it’s hard to track ROI, but when paying influencers, it’s up to you to set the rules. You get to create deadlines, give brand briefs, and even require metrics before sending full payment. Each campaign will be different so your first step should be to find out how much you can spend and then negotiate with influencers for your best ROI.

2. Know Who Your Influencers Influence

Once you have your budget set, it’s time to determine who you want to influence for you. Not all influencers are created equal and understanding that is incredibly important. Who do you want telling your story? Do you want a Macro influencer with 500,000 followers and a 1.2% engagement rate that will charge a few thousand dollars for one post? Or, are you looking for a Micro influencer who has 10,000 followers with a 15% engagement rate that will post a feed and story post for $100? Each of these influencers come with their own audience, and knowing this, will help you match with the best influencers for your respective campaign.

3. Be in a Committed Relationship

You now have your budget and your list of influencers. Now it’s time to start the most important part: building your influencer relationships. Influencer marketing can be tricky because naturally, you want to see how an influencer performs before committing. However, they may not produce their best quality content if there is no commitment. It’s all about trust, examples, and setting goals together. Influencers like knowing that they will have a steady income every month and just like a traditional job, they don’t want to be fired. Once you find an influencer that looks great on paper, look through their feed and show them examples of past content that you would like them to replicate. This gives them some guidance and will help you to know what you’re getting in advance. You can even request different kinds of posts each month from the influencer, that way they don’t get bored and neither will their audience.

Remember that while all of these things are great, they do take a lot of time to achieve. You can’t just send out a blanket email to an influencer of your choosing and hope the right person responds and gives you all of their information upfront. With any relationship, there is always some push and pull. At adQuadrant, we recognize the influencer world and the correct etiquette in building relationships for our clients. With this knowledge, we can arrange long term agreements and utilize influencer content in a myriad of ways. This allows you to see the full return on your investment for influencer marketing, which as we all know is the ultimate goal.