When you’re putting together an influencer marketing campaign, you’re faced with a variety of solutions. And which one you choose can greatly impact the performance of your campaign. Should you try to tackle it in-house? Not unless you have tons of resources to dedicate to it. Should you hire an influencer marketing agency to handle it? Only if you have the budget. What if there was a way to do it yourself on an influencer marketing software platform? Welcome to the world of self service influencer marketing.
What Is Self Service Influencer Marketing?
Perfect for smaller budgets, self service influencer marketing allows you to distribute your blog, website or individual webpage to a network of top social media influencers who promote your content on a cost-per-click basis. These social media influencers share your articles natively with their audiences, which instantly increases your traffic and engagement.
This form of digital word-of-mouth marketing features a mix of organic engagement and paid advertising. It all takes place on an influencer marketing platform that streamlines the entire process in a cost-effective way.
Convinced self-service influencer marketing is right for you? Here are a few things to keep in mind so you can get the most out of your campaign.
Know Your Niche & Narrow Your Targeting
Know thyself holds true in the world of self service influencer marketing. Knowing your target customer’s interests is crucial to getting your message in front of the right people. It means knowing your brand’s voice and how to use it to effective resonate with consumers.
Using a self-service influencer marketing platform takes the pain and time-suck out of finding an influencer who’ll be a good fit for your company. Instead of trawling through Twitter using hashtags to find someone who might be relevant, all you have to do is adjust your targeting.
By tweaking your desired influencer reach and areas of interest, you can engage with micro influencers you typically wouldn’t have known existed. Plus, the technology behind the influencer marketing platform ensures that you only pay for qualified clicks your content receives.
Create Shareable Content
An influencer marketing campaign lives and dies by its content. Influencers will only want to share your content if it’s compelling and resonates with their audience. Remember, the goal is authenticity. The 2017 State of the Creator Economy found that consumers find the following qualities of influencer marketing to be the biggest driver of effectiveness:
- The credibility or believability of the source/writer
- The source/writer’s knowledge or expertise about the product or brand
- How much detail the writer/source provides about the product or brand
According to a study from market research firm Ipsos, three features make people more likely to share something. Highly shareable posts are:
- Funny
- Useful
- Interesting
Of those three features, interesting is the most important, with more than 60 percent of respondents saying that they shared content they found to be interesting. Interesting content often triggers an emotional response in someone, whether it’s happiness or sadness. Additionally, people are more likely to share things that confirm or validate their own beliefs.
Set an Appropriate Budget
Running a self-service influencer marketing campaign can cost far less than working with managed influencer marketing service. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to run the entire campaign on a shoestring. The goal is to get the most bang for your marketing buck.
The good news is that, according to the 2017 State of the Creator Economy study, there’s often a gap between what brands expect to pay and what influencers actually charge. That means your campaign might end up costing you considerably less than expected.
When using a self service influencer marketing platform, you have control over both your project’s budget and your cost-per-click. Please note that influencers with larger reaches require higher CPCs. But, you’ll find that micro influencers with modest reach tend to get high engagement among their followers.
When creating your influencer marketing budget, make sure your spend is big enough to last the entire duration of your campaign. Allow flexibility for multiple influencers to share and promote content on multiple channels.
Remember, it’s always better to have as large a budget you can afford. Any unspent funds go back into your project balance in case your article doesn’t perform well. But if you start to go viral, you’ll want the funds on hand to keep your article live so the campaign doesn’t end prematurely.
Test Different Messages
Some messages perform better with certain groups of people than others. Try testing a few different messages or different types of content and measuring performance against each other. This will help your brand see which message provides the best results. For example, you can have one influencer post a photo on Instagram that is targeted at working moms. At the same time, you can have a different influencer post on Facebook about your brand, with a target audience of stay-at-home moms.
At the end of a set amount of time, such as a week, you can review the engagement created by each post to determine which audience responds to your brand or to a particular influencer best.
Measure Results and Adjust Accordingly
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. So, if you don’t know how a campaign performed, you won’t know what worked and what you need to improve. Luckily, self-service influencer marketing platforms let you measure results and engagements in real time.
Using self service influencer marketing is an easy way to boost a campaign and measure the results from it. A self service, cost-per-click program lets you set a budget, add your content, and then have influencers share it with their followers. You’re able to see in real time how the shares are performing, so that you can make adjustments for future campaigns. Go ahead, give self service influencer marketing a try and see how it works for you.
