Influence Strategy: Your 5-Step Action Plan

Influencer marketing is trending, and brands have understood this well! Consumers are becoming less sensitive to traditional brand advertising, but conversely, they are increasingly trusting influencers.

The growing success of social networks has reshuffled the deck, and today partnering with influencers is one of the best digital levers for both increasing your company’s visibility and developing sales.

Do you want to launch an influencer marketing strategy, but don’t know where to start? Discover in this article everything you need to know about influencer marketing and how to go about collaborating with influencers.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a partnership between a brand and popular individuals whose ability to influence their community is recognized. These individuals can be public figures, influencers, or opinion leaders who have a large number of followers and significant engagement on the web.

As a brand, using influencer marketing allows you to reach new audiences, develop your brand awareness, transform communities into potential consumers, increase traffic to your website, and ultimately generate sales.

Influencer marketing is often considered the digital version of word-of-mouth. However, even if the result obtained is similar, there is a slight difference. Indeed, influencer marketing necessarily involves compensation (financial, product donations, etc.) between the brand and the influencer.

What is an Influencer?

There are different types of influencers classified according to the size of their community and their ability to generate engagement:

• The nano-influencer is a person who has between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. This influencer is a niche prescriber whose power of engagement and conversion is high. They are in constant communication with their audience, and have the ability to respond to each of their followers’ comments.
• The micro-influencer has a community between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. They have specialized in a particular field (sports, beauty, fashion, health…) and have gathered followers who are particularly interested in this theme. They have a close relationship with their subscribers. The micro-influencer has a highly segmented audience and a high engagement rate. In fact, in 2018, Forbes magazine defined this group of influential individuals as the force of future marketing.
• The macro-influencer has between 100,000 and 1,000,000 followers. They are an expert and influential content creator. Their large community allows them to have great visibility. They bring together people from different backgrounds.
• The mega-influencer or public figure (celebrities, artists, athletes, etc.) has an audience of more than 1,000,000 followers. The reach of their posts is strong but their engagement rate is low. Brands associate with this type of influencer to speak to an extremely wide audience. The budget for a collaboration with a mega-influencer is substantial.

Note that the number of followers an influencer has does not determine the engagement rate of their community. This corresponds to the ratio between the average number of likes and comments and the number of followers an account has.

Key Steps to Implement an Ideal Influence Strategy

Determine Your Marketing Objectives and Target Audience for Your Influence Campaign

The Objectives:

The first phase consists of determining the objectives you want to achieve for your company with the launch of this influencer marketing campaign:

• Where do you want to take your brand through influence?
• Do you have visibility and awareness intentions?
• Do you want to develop your community on social networks and increase your engagement rate?
• Do You Want to Promote a New Product or Service?
• Do You Want to Increase Your Sales and Revenue by Converting New Customers?
• Etc.

The success of influencer marketing campaigns varies between companies. In any case, you must always ensure that you use SMART objectives, which are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

It is important not to neglect this step because clarifying your campaign objectives allows you to choose the right influencers, the right influence platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube…) and the right messages and content to distribute in line with your company.

Then, translating these objectives into key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to evaluate the success of your influencer marketing campaign and make decisions for the continuation of your influence strategy.

The Target Audience:

Who do you want to reach by implementing this influencer marketing strategy? What are their specific characteristics?

For your campaign to be truly effective, it is very important to precisely define the audience you want to reach.

The mistake would be to target a broad audience hoping to reach as many as possible in the process.

Based on the previously set intentions, identify the target audience you want to reach and focus on specific audience segments to maximize the effects of your influence campaign.

Setting a Budget for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

This key step is one of the essential components of your influencer marketing strategy: what budget do you want to allocate to your influence campaign?

The necessary cost includes the remuneration of influencers and coverage of the cost of products or services.

Be aware that a collaboration with a content creator, including those with a small audience, may require financial participation on your part. Depending on the influencers’ notoriety, the type of campaign, and the platform used, their rates will differ.

To determine your budget accurately and know the influencers’ rates, a market study may be necessary.

Determine the Messages and Brief for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

Before launching and starting to contact different influencers, it is important to define the messages for your influence campaign.

Obviously, these messages will be closely linked to the goals you have set beforehand, the target audiences you want to reach, and the platform on which you want to spread your message.

This phase allows you to further refine your influencer marketing strategy to make it totally effective.

Writing a precise brief, clearly stating your campaign intentions, helps you determine the type of influencers you want to approach. This brief also allows you to present the course of your collaboration to the selected content creators so that everything goes as smoothly as possible.

Select the right influencers, those who correspond to your brand

Here we are! This step is crucial and determines the success of your campaign of influence.

Depending on your objectives, targets to reach, and your budget, you will be able to determine whether it is more interesting for you to work with nano-influencers, micro-influencers, macro-influencers, or even mega-influencers…

Strategically, it can be very interesting to collaborate with several types of influencers to benefit from their cumulative visibility as well as a qualified audience to increase the number of potential customers.

It is important to choose them well and ensure that each selected influencer has a real affinity with your brand. Authenticity is an important factor in the success of an influencer marketing campaign. The collaboration between your brand and each influencer must be natural and obvious so that they deliver a credible message to their community and create a desire to discover the highlighted product.

Here are the criteria you should be interested in:

• The agreement between their universe, expertise, favorite subjects, and your brand;
• The common values that you share;
• Their personality and history;
• Their expertise and professionalism;
• The social networks (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube…) on which they are active;
• The composition of their community;
• The quality of the content they offer;
• Their way of expressing themselves;
• Their creativity;
• Their relationships with community members;
• Their influence capacity;
• Their communication during previous influence campaigns;
• Etc.

To identify the most relevant influencers who could fit into your influencer marketing strategy, you can browse through different social networks, use an influencer agency, or utilize a management tool such as Trustt.

The tool developed by Trustt saves you precious time by giving you access to a pre-selection of influencers, and all your emails and follow-ups are 100% automated.

Contact influencers and establish the partnership

Now that you have compiled the list of influencers potentially relevant to your brand, it’s time to make contact.

Be careful! At this stage, nothing is guaranteed yet… It’s important to carefully prepare how you will contact each influencer and especially to avoid sending automated and impersonal emails.

Indeed, according to a study by Reech from 2020: 66% of influencers report having already refused partnerships with a brand. The main reasons cited are: lack of interest in the brand (73%), incompatibility with values (59%), and too low or non-existent remuneration (50%).

Take the time to understand each influencer well, to determine the arguments that will make them want to work with your company, and to establish a fair pricing proposal.

Start by explaining what you like about them, their work, and why you would be delighted to set up a collaboration specifically with them.

Then, present your company and its universe, your product or service offering, your values, and your commitments.

To ensure that the collaboration process is clear for each party, take the time to formalize each step and provide all your conditions: the types and number of publications, publication frequency, the message to convey, hashtags to include, redirections to your website, promotional codes, examples of posts, etc.

Finally, agree on their remuneration or on the rewards you wish to offer them, if your influencer does not require financial compensation.

This phase is essential because your goal is to build strong, long-term relationships of trust with each of the influencers you have selected.

You now have all the keys in hand to make your influencer marketing strategy a successful operation! Of course, as with any marketing strategy, don’t forget to analyze and monitor the results of your influence campaign. This allows you to adjust and optimize your strategy if necessary and to realize its performance.