This is the second post on how to do influencer marketing. In the first post I covered the question what is influencer marketing and how does it work. I shared the upfront portion- the research, the objective setting, and now we’re ready to actually talk through  implementation. To follow are the steps on how to run a successful influencer marketing campaign.

Step 1 of How to Run an Influencer Marketing Campaign is Content Creation

In our last segment we talked about how you would negotiate what the influencer was going to give you. Whether it is a product review, or a service review the influencer is going to go ahead and create that content. Then they are going to post that content on to whatever channel it is that you negotiated. The important thing here is that you make sure that is labeled as sponsored content. You can get into quite a bit of trouble with the FTC if you do not. It must be labeled as an advertisement or sponsored in one way or another. Each social network has ways to do that and to make it easy to do. It is really important to do that; I can’t stress enough how much you have to make sure that that gets done. That is another reason why you would work with a company like ours because we know to do that, we know to look for that, and we know how to make sure that happens.

Step 2: Review

Once the content goes live you review it and you ask for tweaks if needed. Sometimes influencers will let you see what they are going to post beforehand. But if they don’t – sometimes they don’t, you could always ask. Remember, this is their personal brand that they are posting on so usually they will have the ultimate say on what gets posted. But you can always ask if you  want to see a change in a hashtag or if you don’t like how they said one thing, or we’ve seen things as simple as just making sure a trademark is placed next to the name of the product. Again, this is why you work with a company like ours to represent you is that we hash these things out before they’re even an issue, so that when the content is posted things are fine and it looks exactly the way we thought it would look.

Step 3: Share

Now your job is to share the campaign on your own social profiles. While that campaign is running you want your own social followers to see that as well. That not only helps you out, but it helps the influencer out a little bit as well. It makes it a little bit easier to go back and work with them a second time by getting in with good favor. You want it to be a collaborative partnership.

Step 4 of How to Run an Influencer Marketing Campaign is to Measure Success

In the beginning we talked about objectives and going in upfront you knew what you wanted to achieve. Now you measure against those objectives and you see if it was successful or not. If it was not as successful as you had hoped, you try to figure out why. You figure out why you did not get as many followers or why you didn’t get as many email subscribers or sales as you had hope you would. It is important to evaluate each campaign so that you can be better informed for the next time.

Step 5: Secondary promotions

Another part of running a successful influencer marketing campaign is doing a secondary promotion. You can run paid advertisement on social channels to re-promote that content and have it live a little bit longer, and have it extend a little bit further for you. You could create an “As featured on” section on your website or even on your social profiles to feature the influencer content.  Those are just some ideas to have that content that was created live a little bit longer and to help it go a little bit further in your next campaigns. It also helps you land future campaigns. You can use an “As featured on” when you are talking to other potential influencers.  Having that name brand recognition with other influencers they might know can help you get in the door a little bit faster with your ideal influencer.

Step 6: Go or No-Go

Finally, you make a go or no-go decision to work with that influencer again.  If the campaign worked out great maybe six months or a year down the line you want to work with them again. You don’t want to necessarily judge the effectiveness of influencer marketing on one or two campaigns with influencers. It could take some time to figure out what works for your brand, what objectives are reasonable as a goal. So keep that in mind. I think that you need to probably do around six campaigns to really understand if it’s something that’s going to work for you or not.

This was some general guidance on how to run an influencer marketing campaign. If you have any questions, we would be happy to help you. We do this every single day for multiple clients and this is actually one of our services that we do the most for clients so don’t hesitate to reach out.