How to launch a campaign with micro influencers?
Nowadays, it has been proven that Influence Marketing has become a must for brands. Over the past few years, there has been a significant increase in collaborations with influencers, especially with micro influencers and nano influencers. These content creators with smaller communities enjoy higher engagement rates, which raise the interest of brands. They are authentic creators and maintain a very close relationship with their followers, being able to influence them in a powerful way.
Whether it is to generate visibility or sales, these “small” players have successfully demonstrated how effective it is to work with them. The data shows this and brands are increasingly encouraged to make use of them. In fact, despite the current situation caused by the pandemic, 16.9% of marketers say they will maintain or strengthen social media activity and 16% say they will shift investment to digital channels, so influence marketing would not be as affected by covid-19 as other sectors.
However, despite their belief in its effectiveness, for some professionals it is not entirely clear how to carry out a micro influence campaign. Today, Hivency is a proud guest of Metricool’s blog, to give you the keys to success when launching a campaign with micro influencers.
Preliminary stage
It’s decided… You are going to launch a micro-influence campaign! Before you start and to ensure the success of your campaign, it is important that you follow a series of steps and start by doing your homework.
Objectives
As with any marketing action, it is essential to define the objectives you want to achieve in advance. Knowing your objectives will help you establish your strategy correctly before launching it.
Crédit Bongkarn Thanyakij via Pexels
The five main objectives in influence marketing strategies are:
- Generate engagement
- Generate consideration
- Generate sales
- Increase your brand awareness
- Improve your brand image
What about you? Would you rather develop your reputation or boost your sales?
Persona and social networks
Another essential point in this preliminary phase of the campaign is to determine your buyer persona, that is, the type of profile you want to target.
By doing so, you will get to know your target audience well and know what their needs and interests are, as well as finding out which channel is best for you to communicate with them. This will be the moment when you decide which social network you will launch your influence campaign on.
Furthermore, knowing your target audience in depth will give you insights into the kind of influencer profile you should work with.
KPIs
The last step of this initial phase will be the selection of the KPIs. The Key Performance Indicators will allow you to track the performance of your campaign. This is why it is essential that you set them up before the start of the campaign.
The best known and most widely used KPIs in influence marketing are the engagement rate, earned media value and reach, but there are many more that can be very useful when measuring the progress of your campaign.
Set-up and launch
Once you have completed the preliminary phase, it is time to prepare and launch your campaign.
Briefing
You will start this phase by creating your campaign briefing. It is important that your briefing is clear and attractive. This will be your letter of introduction to the influencers and in a way the “instructions” of the campaign. You will have to explain what the campaign will consist of, talk about the product and/or service you want them to promote and specify the type of content you want.
Many collaborations with micro influencers are rewarded with free products instead of payment. If this is your case, keep this in mind and don’t be too demanding. The level of demand should be consistent with the compensation received by the content creator.
According to Hivency Influencer Study 2020, for 77% of influencers, being a content creator is a passion or a hobby and 87% of them request a campaign if the product fits the type of content they share with their followers. Therefore, if your brief is too restrictive and restricts their creativity, you run the risk of not finding influencers for your campaign.
Here is a list of do’s and don’ts when writing the perfect brief!
Do:
- Use a friendly tone with the content creators: be friendly with them and use smileys;
- Write a short and clear brief: 4 or 5 instructions maximum;
- Choose a title that highlights the main information of the campaign;
- Add a short introduction to explain the context;
- Propose examples of campaign visuals (e.g. a bright photo…) and specify what is, for you, a visual that aligns with your brand.
Don’t:
- Omit specifying the endowment for the content creator;
- Forget about adding an attractive visual to ensure participation in the campaign;
- Ask to use too much # (the overuse of # kills the #);
- Put guidelines that limit the creativity of the influencers too much;
- Set deadlines that are short and impossible to meet, creators need time to prepare content.
Identification
The time has come to identify the content creators you will be working with.
Find the influencers that fit you, review their profiles and metrics and propose them to work with you. It is important to know the community of your potential content creators to determine if they correspond to your target. Knowing their interests and their level of engagement with the influencer is vital!
If you rely on a platform such as Hivency, this process will be much quicker thanks to a matching system that helps you identify the right influencers for your brand. You will also be able to analyse their profiles before collaborating with them. Unfortunately, fake followers are still lurking around, so you need to make sure you don’t collaborate with profiles full of them. Thanks to Fame Check you will be able to know the quality of the influencers’ audiences and how their followers are distributed as well as their engagement rate.
Product Delivery
You have already selected the profiles for your micro influencer marketing campaign. Now you can send your product or explain how to redeem the service you proposed to them.
Take care of every detail of this step, as it will be the first real contact between the influencer and your brand and it will determine its experience. First impressions are always important.
Keep in mind the importance of product endowment. Indeed, some brands do not realize the work of influencers and offer products that are not worthy. As we explained during the briefing stage, consistency must be the key to a marketing campaign with micro influencers. Your level of demand towards the creator must be in harmony with the value of the product or service you offer.
Hivency’s tip: Do not doubt to get in touch with the influencers at this step to make sure they have received the product or to solve any kind of doubt they might have. A message like the following one can be a really good way to show the influencer that you are available for him and strengthen your relationship with him.
“Hi!!
We hope that you have received the shipping with the product of the collaboration. We really hope you will enjoy them and will have a nice experience you will be able to share with your community! Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions regarding the partnership or related to the product.
Have a lovely day!”
Publications and results
Once the campaign is launched, you will start to see the published content and you will be able to measure the impact of your marketing campaign with micro influencers.
Analyse the data as the publications arrive. Don’t hesitate to give your feedback to the influencers and thank them for their collaboration.
Check that the action has met the objectives you set by reviewing the previously selected KPIs.
Why not sharing the content created by the influencers on your social networks? Upon asking for permission, of course! It is a great way to enhance the content of other digital channels as well.
This can also be the perfect opportunity to identify your best performing content creators and strengthen your relationship with them so that they become ambassadors for your brand with whom you can collaborate on a regular basis throughout the year.
Now you have all the keys to launch your influencer marketing campaign and make it a success. What are you waiting for?
