Determine the Scope of Your Campaign
These few questions will help you create a campaign brief:
What is the objective of this campaign?
Influencer marketing can act on the three levels of the funnel: getting known, getting liked, or getting bought.
What message do you want to send?
I want to communicate about my values? About my new product line? About brand culture?
Lay out the messages you want to convey, the desired tone, and the arguments. However, remember that the influencer is also there to bring their personal touch and share their opinion.
Who is the audience?
Start with your segmentation and personas. There are thousands of content creators on the web, each enabling you to reach specific targets, so it’s up to you to choose yours.
This step will allow you to determine the type of influencer and the most relevant social network(s).
Who will be my ambassadors?
Base your choice of ambassadors on:
Your goals.
The fit between their values and those of your brand.
Their audience (age, country, interests, etc.) and how it matches up with yours.
Quantitative and qualitative indicators to monitor, which will help you finalize your choice.
The Influencer Marketing Hub suggests nine factors to keep in mind when choosing the right influencers for your strategy:
I asked Ben Pearson for their recommendations for implementing an influence strategy. Let’s see how it’s organized:
The Deditex Case Study
You will find Michael’s proposal in the case study document.
Making a Careful Approach
How do you approach influencers?
Good question! Ben Pearson also has some advice to share with you. And I’ll give you mine right after:
It’s better to go through an agency or specialized platform when approaching influencers with over 500K subscribers (Macro and All-stars). They will already have an address book that allows them to connect with influencers more easily. At this level of awareness, most influencers work with agents.
Using an agency or platform means that you have to manage this intermediary when implementing your influencer campaign. Still, it’s also a good investment: you have every chance of finding the influencers that will suit you.
You can also connect directly with nano, micro, and mid-tier influencers.
Start by following them on their various platforms and interacting with them on their content (do this for several weeks before the first contact if possible). This will allow you to verify the fit between what they talk about and your marketing objectives.
Preferably contact them by email or the messaging system of their most used social network. Your message must include several elements:
A personalized hook (How did you hear about them? How long have you been following them? Why do you like their content?).
Briefly present your activity and your values. Explain why you think they are the right person to talk to.
Introduce your collaboration proposal: objective, theme, how you envisage it working, etc. Let the influencer know that you are open to co-creation (if this is the case) or to discuss the terms and conditions depending on their desires and constraints.
Specify the allowance or compensation. This part may also be subject to negotiation.
The Deditex Case Study
Have you finished?
Let’s Recap!
Before your first influencer campaign, define your brief: What are your objectives? What are your messages? To what audience? On which platforms? What’s your schedule?
Identify relevant influencers based on quantitative (audience size, engagement rate, etc.) and qualitative (quality of content, tone of responses, etc.) criteria.
Once you have identified your influencers, you need to define the concrete partnership you hope to form with them. And once you’ve launched your campaign, you must follow up to measure the impact of your efforts. Let’s look at that in the next chapter.
