An influencer marketing campaign is one of the fastest-growing marketing tactics. Over the past 10 years, the pull of bloggers and online influencers has skyrocketed. About 40% of consumers today had purchased something after seeing it advertised through someone they follow on Instagram or Facebook. Sometimes, the most influential content comes from like-minded people that your customers know and trust. And posts by influencers seem more legitimate because someone else is vouching for your brand.

It’s also the sheer reach many influencers now have online, which mean it’s no secret that brands can benefit hugely from forging partnerships. If you’re going to jump on this bandwagon, it’s important to consider these 5 tips that can help you maximise the return on your marketing dollars.

Define Your Goals

Don’t start an influencer marketing campaign without first setting some goals of what you want to achieve. This will help you plan your campaign more effectively. You may have various goals for your brand like increasing reach, revenue, or even generating leads. Based on your goals, you’ll be able to plan which metrics you’ll use to assess your performance. You can set target goals for each of these metrics/KPIs by giving them a numerical figure. After your campaign, you can analyse the success of your campaign by comparing your statistics to your KPIs.

If your goal is to increase your brand’s reach, you should measure your campaign’s likes, shares, impressions, and comments. This can give you an idea of the number of people who’ve engaged with and seen your content. For instance, British F1 racing driver Lewis Hamilton promoted the Mercedes-Benz VISION EQS and the brand’s intelligent electric mobility vision in a recent post. It generated more than a million likes!

If your goal is to generate leads, you can have influencers share the link to your landing page. Based on the number of leads generated, you can find out the cost per lead and calculate your ROI.

Define Your Target Audience

Along with defining your goals, you should also determine your target audience. Although this may seem like a basic step in planning a campaign, it is often overlooked yet is vital to creating a successful influencer strategy. Strategising your campaign will be much easier once you have a clear idea of who you’re targeting, so it’s important to take lots of factors into consideration when developing your target audience.

You should think about their age, demographics, interests, locations, and more, to help you make sure that your campaign reaches the right people. It will also make your job of finding the right influencer for your brand easier as you can search for influencers whose followers have similar interests to your target audience.

Finding the Right Influencers

The hardest part of influencer marketing is finding the right people for the job. Once you’ve tapped someone to share your products, that person becomes an extension of your brand. So, do your due diligence. Investigate an influencer’s previous posts to determine that they’ll be a good reflection of your brand’s mission and vision.

The increase in popularity of influencer marketing has led to a rise in the number of influencers in the market, and with that has come to a spike in influencer fraud. A lot of fake influencers have taken to social media, trying to trick brands into paying them for ineffective sponsored content. Be sure to carry out thorough background research on influencers and their social media profiles before working with them, in order to minimise your losses. Fake influencers buy followers, likes and comments to inflate their follower count and engagement, in order to attract brands that will pay them for ineffective sponsored content.

Partnering with such influencers can result in a loss for your brand because there’s no ‘real’ audience to engage with. Choose influencers with a ‘high-quality’ engaged audience, that match your target audience interests, rather than going for an influencer with the largest follower count. You should choose to partner with influencers who can truly have an impact on the audience you’re targeting.

When selecting influencers to work with, it shouldn’t be about ‘who has the largest following’ – go for influencers with highly engaged audiences as these are the influencers who really have an impact on their followers.

Give Up Some Control

Unlike traditional marketing, in which you take total control over all aspects of the campaign, influencer marketing is different. You can give up some amount of control over the campaign to the influencers themselves.

This can be highly beneficial to you. According to Crowdtap, 77% of influencers said that creative freedom is the #1 factor for motivation to collaborate. You should recognise that influencers like to work with brands that give them some flexibility. Additionally, they know their audiences the best. They know what works for them and what doesn’t, so it is better to let them exercise their creative freedom.

If you try to impose rules and regulations, the relationship may break down. Worse, you might dampen the spirit of that influencer’s posts, which means their followers won’t engage anymore. But giving up some control doesn’t mean that you don’t exercise any control over it. It only means that you should not try to micromanage the influencers.

Build Lasting Relationships

Some influencers may be looking for a quick deal and will do a one-off promotional post for you. They take the compensation and move on. However, while these may work for the short term, you should focus on building long-term relationships with your influencers. Long-term relationships with influencers are extremely beneficial to both parties. For your brand, it means that the influencer can be trusted with the quality and authenticity of the content.

For the influencers, it means that the brand they are collaborating with trusts them completely, which can be further motivation. Long-term collaborations open up new avenues such as account takeovers, to boost your influencer marketing campaigns further. You don’t also always need to provide monetary compensation to influencers for sponsored posts. You can still get your job done with influencer marketing tips such as gifting. But do not expect anything in return from your influencers when you gift them.

Influencer marketing campaigns can be a great tool for driving brand awareness, but only if you’re willing to put forth the effort. It is important to select the right influencers and collaborate with them in a mutually beneficial way.