This is part one of a two-part series on how to do Influencer Marketing. This video answers the question of what is influencer marketing and how does it work?

What is Influencer Marketing and How Does It Work?

Influencer marketing has been around for a few years now and it is probably the thing we get the most questions about. Here are the first six steps on how to get started with running an Influencer Campaign.

Step 1: Identify the objective of the campaign

This will usually have a social side and a website or sales side or some type of call to action.  What that might look like is on the social side you increase followers and then on the action side you might want people to download an item off your website or even make a purchase or enter a contest or get on your email marketing list.  Those are just some examples of things that you can use as call to actions on an influencer marketing campaign.  Let us say you want to grow your followers on Instagram and have those followers give you their email address. That might look like some type of contest where somebody must follow you on Instagram and then also give you their email address on your website. You start with, ultimately, what you want to see come out of the influencer marketing campaign and then the next step you go to is research.

Step 2: Research your influencers

There are all kinds of software’s out there that you can use. Most of them are limited because they are limited by the people who submit to those software platforms.  Not to mention some of those software’s cost a lot of money. We have seen upwards of fifteen hundred dollars a month.  You are probably best just doing some good old-fashioned research through hashtags, through google and that type of thing to find an influencer match.

Step 3: Select your influencers

The number one thing you are looking for is brand alignment.  You want them to be authentically aligned with your brand before you reach out to them. Beyond that you are going to look for follower count, engagement, and those types of thing. Then you go on to outreach. You reach out to them -usually you start on a social channel like Instagram, but then that often trickles over to email quickly.

Step 4: Offer samples

The next step from there is -and this is something we require; you offer the influencer a product sample. If you are a product company, you need to be prepared to give away product. That is the name of the game. It’s something that most of them require and we require influencers to try whatever it is they’re going to represent on our client’s behalf. Because if they do not it’s just an inauthentic campaign and doesn’t come off right. Sometimes providing product is not possible – if you are giving away a B2B service like accounting, that may be not be possible.

Step 5: Feedback

Next, you are going to verify that they get the product or service and make sure that they are happy. You are going to want to get feedback on the product. Assuming you get positive feedback then you are ready to negotiate the campaign.

Step 6: Negotiate

You negotiate what the content’s going to look like, what the outcome is going to be, and how you will measure success. You also negotiate cost.  Most influencers charge some type of fee these days, so these are all things that you negotiate.  The negotiation process is one reason why you work with a company like ours to do influencer marketing.  We already have a network of influencers that we can reach out to, we have already done that research. We have vetted these people because we have worked with a lot of these influencers before, so we know the quality we are going to get. Another reason to work with us is that we know what you should pay based on what other influencers are charging. We know what a good deal is we know what a good deal is not. It is easy to get taken advantage of in the influencer marketing campaign world and so that is one of the reasons you do work with a company like ours.

We hope that answers your question of what is influencer marketing and how does it work. In the next video we are going to cover the next steps of how to run an influencer marketing campaign.