The most crucial step while designing your influencer marketing strategy is to hire the influencer who is ready to promote your brand to their followers on the various social media platforms. While identifying the right influencer for your campaign seems to be the most tedious task, other things must be taken care of before an influencer starts promoting you. However, once you have identified the influencer, decided on their compensation, and are clear about the goals & objectives of the campaign, you are almost there. Next, reach out to the influencers, negotiate terms & conditions and sign the contracts. Let us discuss these points in detail so that you are clear about every step that needs to be considered while hiring an influencer to promote your brand.
Find the right influencer
The most crucial aspect of any influencer marketing campaign undertaken by brands is to get the right influencer on board. If the influencer is not the right fit for your brand and the product, the whole exercise can prove futile. So how will you decide who is the right influencer to take your marketing campaign to the next level? Before you set out on the path to find the right influencer for your campaign, as a brand, you should have a clear objective of what you want to achieve from the upcoming activity. Once the objective is clear, the brands will better understand the influencer they need. Brands also need to analyze the influencers’ engagement rate. If an influencer has fewer followers but a high engagement rate on their post than someone who enjoys a large following with less engagement, brands should take their chance with the former, which is more likely to succeed.
Besides the engagement rate, brands must watch followers’ profiles following the influencers. For example, brands will have to look at the followers’ demographics, age, and gender profiles to determine if they fall under their target consumers. iConnect’s influencer discovery tool helps brands onboard the most appropriate content creator for their campaigns.
Decide the appropriate compensation and method
Once you have shortlisted some of the influencers you want to onboard for your campaign, the brand must decide how to compensate the content creators for their services based on the campaign’s overall budget. They should ensure that the incentives and payments are lucrative enough to secure a collaboration with the desired content creator and, simultaneously, is a financially viable proposition for the brand. Depending on the kind and scale of influencers, the brands can offer them free products, discount codes, performance bonuses, special privileges, and monetary payments. But they should make sure to keep the compensation in line with the expected ROI and not go overboard. And this is where product seeding comes into play. While the cost of product seeding is relatively low for the brands, they have a high perceived value for the creators.
Reach out to shortlisted influencers
After you have selected the influencers and decided on the compensation, it is time for brands to start approaching the content creators through influencer outreach programs. Brands need to reach out to the content creators with their campaign proposal, clearly outlining the goals and objectives they want to achieve through the influencer marketing activity while underlining the organization’s values. The message should be precise, and creators should easily understand the gist of the note, enabling them to quickly decide whether they want to be a part of the campaign or give it a pass. It is also essential for brands to mention what made them approach the specific creator and give it a personalized touch so that it doesn’t come across as a mass influencer outreach activity, which can be a major put-off for the influencers.
Also Read: Video trends to watch out for in influencer marketing
Terms and conditions
After onboarding the influencer for your influencer marketing campaign, it is time for brands to discuss the terms and conditions of the collaboration, which would include deciding the final compensation for the activity, the expected results, and the campaign timelines. Brands and influencers can choose together the efforts required to pull off the campaign successfully, the ideal fees they should be offered, and the reasonable timelines to deliver the authentic content that resonates well with the audiences. All the terms and conditions should be clear of any ambiguities that may pose challenges in the future for either brands or creators.
Campaign details
This is when all the campaign details need to be shared with the creators, so everyone is on the same page. While some of the details were shared with the creators during the influencer outreach but now brands should explicitly explain the goals and objectives of the campaign, the kind of content they are looking for, timelines for the delivery, the do’s and don’t’s brand guidelines, and content production instructions. This will give the influencers a clear idea of what they are expected to deliver and make it easier for them to execute.
Contracts and agreements
And finally, in order to create a highly successful influencer marketing campaign, both brand and content creator should sign the influencer contract that contains all the decided terms and conditions and would ensure that both parties uphold the highest level of commitment towards the agreement. A solid influencer contract will help both parties honor their end of the bargain, creating content and executing a campaign that achieves the goals and objectives as desired.
Brands and influencers need to have a strong working relationship where both are clear about expectations from each other to create successful influencer marketing campaigns. Following the steps mentioned above while onboarding the content creator will help brands to scale their campaigns and forge a lasting relationship with the influencers, which will be a win-win situation for all the stakeholders.
