Digital Marketers: 3 recommendations to maximize the impact of your influencer marketing program

The rise of social media has made Influencer Marketing a must-learn lesson for all digital marketers. With a special form of collaboration between business and influential individuals, Influencer Marketing has become a popular trend that brings in millions of dollars and prospect customers for brands --- and the trend is continuously on the rise. As a future brand marketer and a social media addict myself, I found this topic fascinating. I will share two articles that came to my interest in this topic recently, and my own take on what contributes to building a successful influencer marketing program.

The first article, written by Neal Schaffer on his professional blog website, gives his own expert viewpoints on the How to Strategically Build an InfluencerMarketing Program. Everyone can be an influencer as long as they are widely recognized, connected, and trusted by a community. Digital influencers and their earned trustworthiness among the audience are powerful resources to brand marketers. According to Neal, there are six critical steps he mentioned to build a well-functioning Influencer Marketing program, covering the whole roadmap of researching, creating, understanding, engaging, amplifying, and finally measuring. Especially, engagement has become a key driver to program success.

Image Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/influencer-content-campaign-cheat-sheet/

While Neal reveals the full roadmap, Elise Dopson gives the best advice on Databox in terms of how to effectively measure and track Influencer Marketing campaigns. As data suggests, 93.4% business perceive Influencer Marketing as extremely or at least somewhat effective. Among The 10 Most Important Influencer Marketing KPIs she suggested, there is no single KPI can define the performance or quality of an Influencer Marketing campaign alone, thus the importance for marketers to keep an eye on all of these important metrics, ranging from as tangible as ROI or CPC, all the way to audience engagement or loyalty.

Combing these two perspectives and my own experience as an Integrated Marketing Communications graduate student, I have developed 3 recommendations for digital marketers to maximize the influence of their influencers:

• Understand the Community – Research until sufficiently and deeply understand the community your major customers are at before picking the right influencer and deciding the right influencer marketing strategy.

• Focus on Engagement – Drive deeper engagement to arouse actual action and drive conversion, rather than merely focusing on getting a wider reach.

• Maximize the Social – Use multiple social channels to create an omni-channel influencer marketing strategy, and amplify your brand messages through paid social media if necessary.

Keep these recommendations in mind before you decide on a specific influencer or influencer strategy, and get maximum 'influence' towards your brand!

Erin GUO is an Integrated Marketing Communications master student in the Northwestern University. With great passion and relevant skills for digital marketing and creative strategy, she plans to pursue a brand marketer career path after graduation in December, 2019. Feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.