So you want to book talent for your influencer campaign. If you haven’t already explored the far-reaching potential of digital marketing, the time is now.
Perhaps you’re an established brand feeling stuck - or a new brand wanting to launch. Either way, we’re here to help!
theright.fit is your go-to marketplace for the highest-quality models, actors and influencers. Our comprehensive influencer marketing checklist below will outline everything you need to know.
1. Identifying your influencer campaign objective
First, get clear on what your objectives are for this campaign.
Whilst all brands want sales and revenue targets blasted out of the water – it’s important to remember where those sales will generate from. Reaching new markets or tapping into audiences who don’t know about your product/brand means you will have lots of eyes on you when converting audiences to buyers down the line.
When it comes to objectives:
- If you’re an established brand, you’ll push for conversion. Or - awareness if launching a new product.
- If you’re a new brand, you should aim for awareness and reach. Consistent sales will come once you build a following around your offer.
Sit with your marketing team to decipher what you all want to achieve. More detailed objectives could be:
- The launch of your business: What do you want audiences to know about you?
- Awareness: What are you doing that is different to the competition?
- Traffic: How can you create engaging and creative content that drives audiences to your platforms/landing page?
- New products: Similar to awareness, how can you educate audiences about the product to ensure they choose you over a competitor?
- Tapping into new markets/audiences: Have you exhausted the market? Do you want to reach different age demographics, genders, or audiences in new locations? Knowing this is how you best tailor content to suit.
- Conversion: If you’ve hit a wall, you can try unique offers, gifts with purchases, influencer-specific bundles, mystery offers, loyalty programs or product-specific discounts leveraged by influencers.
2. How to pick the right influencers for success
We hear from many brands that trial 3-5 influencers to push their product, and when sales don’t roll in, they’re quick to label content creation as a metric that doesn’t work for them! It’s essential to see influencer marketing as merely a cog in your wider digital marketing machine, but we’ll get to that later.
Once you’ve clarified your goals, you can look to book influencers.
HOT TIP! Ensure you pick people who align with your brand values and genuinely love and believe in the product. Audiences are savvy and can tell when partnerships are inauthentic.
If your budget allows, consider booking influencers for a 3-month agreement (after a trial posting) to ensure that audiences connect and resonate with the consistent content that goes live.
Some non-negotiables are:
- Demographics: What age market are you planning to reach? For example, ensure the influencer’s following isn’t all 18-25 if you’re selling luxury cars.
- Gender: If your product is female-specific, ensure the influencer’s following is 80%+ female.
- Location: Similar to the above, is the following based on where your product/service is based. There is no point booking someone with a 78% Brazilian audience when you only ship to Australia + New Zealand.
- Unique interests/niche markets: Before booking, reach out to see if they’d like to trial the product – testimonials will always seem genuine when they’ve tried and tested and it aligns with their values.
- Competing brands: Do a quick reconcile of the influencer’s content to ensure they haven’t recently worked with a competitor brand. Ask them if they’re tied exclusively to another brand in the same space.
At theright.fit, you can quickly review applicants for your jobs, chat with the influencer to discuss specifics, or hold a casting before locking anything in.
3. Multi-campaign drivers
As mentioned, your influencer strategy should feed into a broader company marketing plan that targets different audiences at different times of the year – or pushes various products and deals.
When looking to expand your influencer campaigns, consider the following:
- UGC: User-generated creators will provide content to sit across your social media in exchange for a fee - meaning they do not need to post to their socials. Consider booking faces you’d like to be associated with on your channels.
- Micro Talent: Micro influencers mean reasonable rates and more volume. You can book 10-20 x micros for the same price as a top-tier influencer. When launching, consider leveraging the power of both.
- Macro Talent: Which celebrity faces do you want to be associated with? Consider booking one macro/top-tier influencer as a long-term ambassador to feature on your website, socials, print media and beyond.
- eDM and SMS activations: Your eDM and SMS activations are a great way to keep loyal customers interested in upcoming offers and new products - personalise these to them with apps like Klaviyo.
- Paid social ads: You can repurpose your UGC as paid ads targeted towards specific markets you want to convert. When no usage fees are associated, you can utilise influencer content - or organise paid usage on well-known influencers to boost their content for an agreed term, driving to your website.
- Traditional marketing – press/TVC/print: How does your influencer strategy feed into broader marketing? Is the messaging consistent or tailored to various publics? You may use the same talent across all touchpoints for further impact.
4. Let's chat about measuring KPIs
KPIs are SO much more than a revenue goal or link click benchmark. Regarding influencer marketing, think of your KPIs as variables in an equation. As you shuffle one KPI or objective, the others are affected – feeding into a greater equation and the success of your influencer campaign.
Thanks to the nature of ever-changing digital marketing, you must treat each campaign with precision and agility. Changing the equation too quickly will mean it’s hard to measure where the success or failure is coming from.
We recommend considering the following:
- Influencer codes: How many codes did the influencer generate? If you have booked the influencer before – was it more or less than they usually accrue, and why?
- Screenshots from the influencers on reach and link clicks: Is this higher or lower than their usual link clicks – and why? If lower, consider asking the influencer why it may not have performed as well as their regular posts – this can happen for many reasons and reach is not always guaranteed.
- UTM link clicks: What was the traffic to your website? If the traffic was high but did not convert to sales – great! You now have many new users on your platform that you can target and pull through the funnel.
- Site traffic: When a specific influencer posted, did traffic increase? In what location was this?
- General sentiment: This can be more valuable than code usage or sales. What was audience feedback like on the partnership? What were customer requests, comments or press?
- Revenue: Finally, you can consider revenue and if the partnership moved the needle in sales. Context is essential - what are sales usually like during that season/month/week/time of day?
Influencer marketing is trial and error until you find what sticks! It’s essential to consistently ask why/why didn’t the campaign work and how you can achieve more next time. Remember that strategy is specific to each brand and industry, so you must identify your own.
5. So… then what?
Whether aiming for awareness or conversion, it’s essential to consider the below AFTER the influencer goes live:
- Do you have retargeting for customers visiting your website and social pages?
- Do you have other campaigns ready to move them through the funnel - retargeting them with discount codes, free shipping, testimonials and unique or personalised offers?
- Have you allocated paid spend to boost each influencer's post to reach more audiences and maximise your investment?
- Have you collated all the data to report across multiple platforms - Facebook and Instagram analytics, Google Analytics, Shopify, and the influencer’s screenshots of their insights? Looking at these in relation to one another will give you a wide lens of the campaign's success.
6. You’re ready to rock your next influencer campaign!
When booking, remember to stick to our checklist below:
- Ensure you have a comprehensive and clear brief for the influencer. Your brief should be concise and product-driven, call out specific wording, outline ‘what not to mention’ and inspire the influencer to get creative.
- If you have examples of prior content you’re looking to replicate, be sure to attach them for the influencer.
- Lock in the rates, specific deliverables and usage rights with a contract signed by both the brand and influencer.
- Set up paid partnership access on both the brand and influencer’s socials (and paid brand partnerships if you’re boosting their content for ads).
- Ensure the influencer codes are ready on your website.
- Approve the content, provide them with a UTM link and choose a live date!
And that’s it!
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