As marketers, we are on a steady diet of A/B testing - messages, images, marketing channels - to see which ones are working. Smart brands are strategically leveraging influencers to get more mileage out of those messages and channels… all while creating new marketing assets.
Pretty neat, but it takes technical know-how beyond just looping influencers into the mix… IF you want to run an influencer marketing campaign that actually delivers on promised metrics (because your agency should definitely be making some promises on metrics).
So, this post is the result of our team putting together several iterations of this information for different clients and prospects. We thought it would be cool to create a kind of encyclopedia of influencer marketing that covers:
Everything a brand needs to know to justify influencer marketing spend
Everything the Marketing Manager needs to know to get buy-in from the higher-ups
Everything the marketing team needs to know to set up and run a campaign
And everything the demand gen/paid team needs to know about optimizing a live campaign to deliver the best results
Let’s get started.
What You’ll Find in Our Epic Influencer Marketing Guide
What is influencer marketing?
The benefits of influencer marketing
Why it works so well
How it works
Setting Campaign Goals
Knowing How to Structure an Influencer Campaign
Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Campaign
The Different Types of Influencers
How to Find Influencers for Your Campaign
Choosing the Right Influencer Partners
Tips for Nailing Influencer Outreach
Influencer Outreach Template
Sponsored Content Best Practices
Securing Content Rights
How to Get the Best Creative Content from Your Influencer Partners
7 Things to Consider When Coming Up with Ideas for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
Campaign Management
Which Metrics Should You Track with an Influencer Campaign?
Optimizing a Campaign for Better Influencer Marketing ROI
What is Whitelisting and How Does it Work?
Whitelisting vs Boosting vs Dark Posts
Reusing Influencer-Generated Content
Campaign Management
Which Metrics Should You Track with an Influencer Campaign?
Optimizing a Campaign for Better Influencer Marketing ROI
What is Whitelisting and How Does it Work?
Whitelisting vs Boosting vs Dark Posts
Influencer Marketing Glossary & Stats
Influencer Marketing Definitions
Influencer Marketing Statistics
Influencer Marketing Basics
- What is influencer marketing?
- The benefits of influencer marketing
- Why it works so well
- How it works
What Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing has become an increasingly important part of the digital landscape. But what (EXACTLY) is it? A mommy blogger speaking well of a skin cream that helps reduce the discomfort of her daughter’s eczema? Is it a celebrity endorsement? How do we define it? How does it really affect your marketing campaigns? More, how do brands translate 💗 Instagram Likes 💗 into conversions? We’ll get into all of that in this guide, but first, let’s start at the beginning:
That’s because influencers (or creators) are the people others follow and keep up with for advice - whether it’s fashion, beauty, finance, tech, gardening, or even more niche interests like car detailing or spelunking!
The Benefits of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is personal... Where paid ads are often thought of as non-personal marketing, influencer marketing is far more personal, and that personal touch is the driving force behind the effectiveness of influencer campaigns.
Influencer marketing is a more targeted approach... Influencer marketing allows brands to get in front of niched-down segments of their target audience by borrowing the goodwill of the people those audience segments already like, trust, and admire.
Influencer marketing offers strong social proof... Influencers are great at two things: creating compelling content and getting their followers to take an action. Brands that work with influencers are gaining allies who already know how to present ideas, concepts, and visuals to their audience that can get them to respond.
Influencer marketing allows for real-time results... When brands roll out influencer campaigns in stages, they have the opportunity to monitor the campaign performance in real-time to allow the marketing team a chance to optimize campaigns and put more resources behind content that's performing well. Influencer marketing is also a great way to test messaging before sending ad concepts to print or using them in PPC campaigns.
Influencer marketing is more affordable... Influencer marketing is an all-in-one solution that allows brands to go directly to social media influencers for branded content, eliminating the need for a creative team whose job is to create the assets for specific campaigns.
Influencer marketing works faster... Influencer marketing has proven to be an effective tool for boosting brand lift across multiple channels. It’s also a good way to drive traffic back to their website, talk-up an event, promote a new product, and assemble a catalog of creative, compelling content.
Why Influencer Marketing Works So Well (even though we know we’re being marketed to)
We are bombarded every single day with branded messages. Ads abound. There’s a popular stat floating around that the average person sees about 5000 ads a day, and even that stat’s about 14 years old. Well, if we’re seeing more than 5000 ads a day, and the average person’s only getting six hours of sleep a night, that means during our 18 waking hours, we see 277 ads every hour on the hour, which is about one ad every 4.5 seconds.
And again, that stat about ads pre-dates Instagram influencers by about 5 years. Keep that in mind.
For every day in 2019, about 13,560 pieces of influencer-created sponsored content went up on Instagram, according to Statista. Between 2017 and 2019, the influencer market more than doubled in size, going from $3B to $6.5B in value.
Today, nine in ten marketers say they are running or planning to run an influencer marketing campaign in the near future. And the influencer marketing industry could very well grow to nearly $14 billion by the end of 2021. Makes sense, right? Influencers seem to have a finger on the pulse of social communities.
But then there's this little stat...
Tens of millions of people have taken deliberate steps to make sure they’re not exposed to ads by using ad blockers that are so sophisticated, they even help you skip pre-roll YouTube ads altogether. Something like 42 percent of adults who use the Internet globally also use an ad blocker.
So here’s the question: If people hate ads so much, why does influencer marketing even work on smart consumers?
Short answer: It’s the presentation. Influencer marketing doesn’t disrupt an Instagrammer’s experience like a TV ad interrupts an episode of The Bachelor. And believe it or not, one of the [many] reasons people go to social media in the first place is to learn about new trends, products, brands, and movements.
How Influencer Marketing Works
Influencer marketing integrates pretty seamlessly with your overall digital marketing strategy because it lets brands show up at different touch points along the path to purchase. The most effective influencer campaigns work across multiple platforms.
For every channel you add to your digital marketing strategy, you can improve your ROI and effectiveness by up to 35 percent, according to Analytics Partners. And studies have shown that conversions increase by at least 10 percent for brands that use influencer-generated content in the online purchase path.
Take a look at the channels identified in the graphic above. All of those channels - the subway ads, the Pinterest board, the newsletter - are access points for influencers to extol the virtues of your brand, creating a kind of echo chamber all across the web.
In the previous section, we included the stat (in the pink chart) that 81 percent of millennial women say social media is the best way to reach them. That’s a stat to which most digital marketers would easily subscribe. Well, here are a few more answers from that same poll of millennial women:
36 percent say websites they trust are a good way to reach them
35 percent say online articles
35 percent say email
17 percent say online video
The Ins and Outs of Rolling Out an Influencer Campaign
- Setting Campaign Goals
- Knowing How to Structure an Influencer Campaign
- Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Campaign
Let’s move on to some tactical elements of an influencer campaign to give you a basic understanding of how the puzzle pieces fit together. This will make it easier to understand how threading an influencer campaign throughout your digital strategy can help you hit all the important KPIs your brand is targeting this year. (And really, after the year we’ve had, don’t we all just kinda need a win right now?)
Setting Your Campaign Goals
We totally get why some marketers and brands are still giving influencer marketing the side-eye. There’s a lot of talk about things like earned media value, brand-building, long-term value, playing the long game…
That’s all great, but aren’t you more interested in finding out what part of influencer marketing lines up with ACTUAL business goals - the kind of business goals set by REAL companies? So many brands are still under the misguided notion that influencer marketing is just a brand awareness play when that’s not the case at all. For brands, the value of running an influencer campaign goes far beyond just reach and Likes.
It’s not that you can’t accomplish important business goals with influencer marketing. We’ve run our fair share of campaigns to help clients get more app downloads, boost sales, drive site traffic AND foot traffic. More often than not, there’s a disconnect between what a brand WANTS to accomplish and how it STRUCTURES its influencer campaigns to achieve that end. The former has EVERYTHING to do with the latter.
Influencer campaigns need goals. Campaign goals are the metric you use to measure the success of your influencer campaign.
Whether the goal is to get a new product in front of buyers, get traffic back to your site, or get a catalog of creative assets you can post across your own branded social platforms, a well-planned influencer marketing strategy can help you accomplish REAL marketing goals and move the needle on larger organizational goals.
Knowing How to Structure an Influencer Campaign
Influencer campaigns can (and should) be custom-built to achieve specific goals. Knowing which outcomes you want to see will determine how your campaign is structured. There are three primary types of campaigns you can use to reach your influencer marketing goals:
Brand Awareness Campaigns help you get lots of eyes on your brand, product, or event very quickly. These campaigns work best when your goal is to introduce a new product, when you’re rebranding, when you’re trying to present a value prop big enough to interrupt the buyer’s regular pattern.
Content Campaigns are designed to create a catalog of high-value sponsored content that brands can reuse as needed across their own branded channels.
Traffic/Clicks Campaigns work best for increasing site traffic, growing your list, getting sales, and when you’re also running retargeting campaigns (and need prospects to see your brand a few more times to stay top-of-mind).
Let's say you're a women's clothing retailer and you're planning to run a spring influencer campaign. Here's how each campaign would look with the different types of campaign structures:
Scenario 1 for Traffic/Clicks… You partner with three or four Instagram macro-influencers who have really popular blogs. You do this because you want to drive tons of people to your site to shop your big sale and use the blogger’s discount code to buy a romper you know your audience will love.
Scenario 2 for Influencer Content… You want to swap out your boring-as-hell product pics with influencer selfies or candid-looking shots of customers wearing that romper. You bring on a dozen or so Instagram nano-influencers who can take cute pics of themselves in it and leave reviews so it looks like regular user-generated content.
Scenario 3 for Product Awareness… You’re also upselling a snug, new body shaper to pair with the romper and you have a couple of great YouTube macro-influencers in mind who are active on TikTok and Reels. These gals will talk shoppers through the different ways to style the romper with tips on how to match the right body shaper with the right outfit.
The point is… Once we know what your goals are, we know the best way to structure the campaign to meet those goals by tweaking the way we handle the rest of the campaign elements.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platform(s) for Your Campaign
Which platforms should you choose for your campaign? The answer to this question eludes many marketing teams, so by default, a lot of marketers just go ahead and run campaigns on Instagram alone. But each platform offers advantages that are naturally a good fit for achieving different campaign goals.
Instagram is the most popular platform for running influencer campaigns by a long-shot, with 79 percent of brands using Instagram for influencer campaigns, compared with Facebook (46 percent), YouTube (36 percent), Twitter (24 percent), and LinkedIn (12 percent), according to Influencer Marketing Hub.
The factors that determine where your influencer campaigns should run are your product and your audience:
Knowing what your audience needs to see and hear in order to understand the value of your product
Knowing where your audience spends time online
Understanding which platform will give you the best shot at nailing the other two factors
For instance…
Platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, and TikTok are great social media platforms for reaching different types of audiences with different products. They each have their own culture, norms, and way of presenting ideas. But they’re not the only channels for influencer marketing.
If you’re trying to reach busy professionals, for example, you may need to loop podcasts into the mix. Or add YouTube and Facebook if you’re targeting a more mature demographic since those two platforms are so widely used by older social media users, especially now that churches, community groups, and in-person gatherings have gone virtual.
Tips for Partnering with Influencers
- The Different Types of Influencers
- How to Find Influencers for Your Campaign
- Choosing the Right Influencer Partners
- Tips for Nailing Influencer Outreach
- Influencer Outreach Templates
Influencer selection directly impacts a brand’s ability to move the needle with a social media campaign, but most brands have no idea how to actually structure the influencer selection process. If you’ve had entire influencer campaigns fail to reach your promised metrics, your influencer selection process may be flawed.
On a good day, only about 2 in 5 marketers feel like they know what the heck they’re doing when it comes time to recruit influencers, according to Ste Davies.
That’s a BIG DEAL because knowing how to align the RIGHT influencer with the RIGHT concept determines how your influencer campaign will ultimately impact lift across metrics like brand awareness, follower growth, list-building, downloading your awesome thing, intent to purchase, or completing a purchase.
Yet, influencer selection remains one of the primary challenges for most of the marketing teams who sit down to plan an influencer campaign.
So, how can you tell the difference between an influencer that is going to push your brand to the next level vs. one that will just eat up your marketing budget with no return on your investment?
Let's work out some of the most effective techniques for partnering with creators who will be the best fit for your influencer campaign and help you reach important KPIs.
The Different Types of Influencers
Remember a few years ago when most brands focused their attention (and budgets) on large influencers with huge audiences? They thought the more followers an influencer had, the better their influencer campaigns would perform. But that turned out not to be true at all. Not even a little.
Thankfully, most of the brands we encounter now know better. Now, clients want to hear recommendations on which types of influencers would work best for their campaigns.
There are basically five tiers or types of Instagram influencers to choose from when it comes to social media influencers. Different agencies and brands will have some version of this chart that they’re working from. But based on our extensive research and our own knowledge of the influencer culture, we think this is the most logical and inclusive breakdown.
How to Find Influencers for Your Campaign
Have you ever seen an influencer's feed and thought he or she would be perfect for your next campaign? Yeah, that's how a lot of brands handle the process of finding influencers for their campaigns. In reality, influencer selection is a bit more complex than just pinpointing influencers who create visually-appealing content, and it takes more than just finding influencers who seem to be members of your target audience.
The pool from which you source influencers also matter. Here are the four most common sources brands use to find influencers:
• Influencer Networks: A roster of an existing influencer network curated by a third party
• Opt-Ins: Influencers who respond to your “casting call”
• Agents: Professionals who represent a group of top influencers (which isn’t the same as repping a large group of influencers)
• Outreach: Conducting cold outreach to influencers you don’t know and who probably don’t know you
Although popular, these methods often end up being too restrictive and time-consuming to execute, and they don’t allow for real-world applications.
What happens if your campaign calls for blue-collar influencers, gardeners, or gamers? Will the agency have the resources and know-how to find the people needed for that campaign?
Influencer marketing platforms usually give you the best chance of finding a large enough pool of potential candidates for influencer campaigns, especially for brands that are targeting subsegments of your audience. You can sift through creator profiles using filters like age, location, brand affinities, engagement ratios, and even the categories in which influencers wield the most sway to narrow your candidate pool.
Choosing the Right Influencer Partners
Reaching the right audience hinges on how good you are at choosing the right influencers for your campaign. In order for that influencer selection process to work, it needs to integrate a couple of really important factors.
Most marketers have a pretty solid grasp of the basic information needed about an influencer to determine if he or she is a good fit for a campaign. That data usually falls into the category of quantitative data:
Stats
Follower size
Engagement rate or view rate
# of posts
Overall post performance
Demographic targeting
Location
Age
Budget + Availability
Previous sponsorship performance
Fraud detection
But qualitative insights are also important for choosing the influencer(s) who will be able to get you the outcomes you want to see. These include information on:
Quality of content
Is it creative? Original?
Influencer aesthetic
Relatability
Does the influencer fit your brand?
Are their values/messaging aligned with the brand?
Does the influencer’s content fit the campaign’s creative direction?
An influencer should be chosen based on the likelihood she’ll be able to create content for the specific buyer persona/audience segment she’s creating content to reach. In the example below, let’s assume these influencers both talk about fashion & are currently in their 20’s. But they clearly target different demographics, which means they will appeal to different types of brands in the same vertical.
💡 Finding the right influencer partner requires you to know more about an influencer than just demographic info and follower count.
💡 Finding the right influencer partner requires you to know more about an influencer than just demographic info and follower count.
The influencer selected also needs to be great at creating content for the specific platform(s) where your target buyer is most likely to spend time. For instance, a food blogger who creates amazing-looking flat lays for Insta may not have the same knack for creating entertaining TikToks, and the entertainment factor is a huge part of TikTok culture.
An influencer should stick to creative concepts that support the messaging needed to push your target buyer deeper into your funnel and/or farther along on the purchase path.
One thing you'll want to remember about your influencer selection process is that it's also important to take a look at the audience behavior. By looking at the behaviors of audience members who are actually liking and commenting on an influencer's posts, you can refine your targeting even more. Huh?
Okay, here's what we mean...
Let's say an influencer talks more about brands that are most liked by a certain age group, we can increase the weight for that age group (e.g. “Ann Taylor” targets a demographic that is a bit older, while “Nasty Gal” targets a demographic that is a bit younger).
Or maybe analyze the keywords being used by members of an influencer's audience to approximate if the audience skews younger or older (for example, seeing "#selfie" would indicate the audience is younger while something like "#momlife" would indicate a slightly older audience).
Or maybe see what other types of brands are being mentioned frequently by an influencer's audience to approximate the percentage of the audience that identifies as a certain gender.
Nailing down these kinds of insights are super important because most influencers have sway across multiple generations (it's not unusual for an influencer to have significant chunks of their audience a generation or two apart) and multiple categories (like a fashion blogger who's also a sought-after mommy blogger).
Tips for Nailing Your Influencer Outreach
When it comes to influencer marketing campaigns, blogger outreach is the first (and most important) step, but it can also be the trickiest to navigate. If you're taking your blogger campaigns seriously, you'll likely be vetting and reaching out to a ton of bloggers. And since finding the right ones to work with will make or break your campaign, you'll want to master the art of blogger outreach right from the get-go. So here are the 5 things you need to do for launch a super-effective influencer outreach campaign:
Research: If you scan someone’s blog for even a few minutes you'll get a good grasp of the topics they cover. Go through their navigation bar to see if you can identify categories, such as fashion, travel, food, lifestyle, or whatever it may be. Read at least a few blog posts to get a sense of the writing and style.
Targeting: Blasting out every blogger on the planet won’t bring you the results you’re hoping to achieve. You're better off using your time to properly vet the right bloggers to reach out to. While some bloggers might be interested despite the fact that your products don’t match her style, most will either turn you away or not respond at all if they don’t see a match. It’s always worthwhile to do a little research upfront so you don’t find yourself working with bloggers that have zero fit with your brand.
Personalization: Always address the blogger by her first name. If you don’t know it, you can usually find it on an About Us or Contact page. If it’s not there, click into a blog post and scroll down to the bottom. Look for either a bio or a signature. You also might find it at the top of the post where there’s usually a date and an author name. And if you still don’t have any luck, check her Instagram. Her name DOES exist somewhere online.
Flattery: Don’t be afraid to tell the blogger how much you LOVE her site…and why. This might sound a little cheesy but you chose that blogger out of the millions of bloggers out there, for a reason. What was that reason? Do you like her photo style? Do you like her personalized approach to writing for her readers? You know why you chose that blogger, so just take a few more minutes to let her know the reason why!
Credibility: Bloggers get bombarded by pitches so it’s important to establish credibility right from the start and even provide a little backstory. For example, we’re the husband and wife duo behind [brand name].
Clarity: Be clear on why you’re emailing the blogger and don’t make it difficult for the blogger to understand what you want from her or how she should even respond. If you want to be somewhat vague in your first email, that’s okay, but at least make it clear that you want to work together.
Benefit: How will this collaboration benefit the blogger, not just YOU. What’s in it for her? Will you be sharing her sponsored content across your social channels, thus exposing her to a new audience? Will the collaboration add credibility to the blogger’s portfolio? It’s just like a job interview in the sense that if you’re pitching a collaboration you need to show the benefit to the blogger as well.
AB Testing: Don’t just blast out the same email to every blogger. Test out two different subject lines to see what gets a higher open and/or response rate. You can track this with a tool like Yesware (or when using an outreach tool like ours - woop! woop!)! Do note, personalizing at least the opening paragraph of your email is ESSENTIAL.
Bonus Points: If you take the time to follow them on Twitter or Instagram and engage with their content. Get on their radar! This tactic can be used before and after you send your cold email.
Influencer Outreach Template
Check out the short email below that is a pretty spot-on email template for influencer outreach. It’s personlized, to-the-point, clear, and it includes all the necessary elements to help creators quickly understand what the brand wants and what how it benefits the influencer.
We’re fans of your street style blog and would love to work with you
How and When to Use Bloggers
For campaign goals like driving traffic to your site, boosting SEO, demonstrating a product, or having customers use coupon codes, you can loop influential bloggers into the mix. Blogs have a much longer life cycle than social media content.
Looping in bloggers provides you with multiple additional touchpoints to connect with your customers as they’re planning their purchases. Blogs allow your products to be visible on posts that can rank for any number of search terms (hello, SEO), depending on the innovative way your influencers have made use of your products in their posts. Plus, 9 in 10 bloggers share their content to social media, which is one of the biggest ways to drum up engagement for a blog post.
High follower counts are not relevant to SEO.
High traffic to their content is necessary, but not enough.
High Domain Authority (DA) of their blog is necessary, but not enough.
The criteria that DOES matter:
Finding influencers that have a high percentage of shared content.
This is the only surefire way to ensure you aren’t investing in false-positives.
Here’s a darned good example of what we mean...
This collage on the right is from a 2013 4men1lady.com blog post.
When we first talked about this plumbing pipe table tutorial, it was back in 2016. Back then, this particular blog post post ranked #4 on Google for the search term “diy pipe table” and had been repinned 88,000+ times.
In 2020, this same blog post, dated 2013, STILL ranks #4 in search results for “diy pipe table”. It’s been repinned 122,000+ times. And the Domain Authority for this site is currently 51.
Sponsored Content Best Practices
- Securing Content Rights
- How to Get the Best Creative Content from Your Influencer Partners
- 7 Things to Consider When Coming Up with Ideas for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
I liked that he referenced my blog and expressed interest in working with me right off the bat. At the very least, I found it intriguing enough to open his email. Bonus points for recognizing that my blog is about street style.