Our 6 Step Guide to Creating an Influencer Marketing Campaign

According to a Meltwater study, 64% of B2C organizations say they already use influencer marketing or plan to do so. This number is expected to grow to about 90% by 2026.

Influencer marketing campaigns are proven to grab audience attention and convert leads into sales. A survey by Inmar Intelligence found that a whopping 84% of customers have made a purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation. 

With this in mind, let’s explore how you can put together an influencer marketing campaign in 6 simple steps.

Step 1: Define your goals

As with any marketing strategy, setting well-defined and measurable goals for your influencer marketing campaign is important. 

Marketing goals give the marketing team a direction. These targets also allow the team to tweak the strategy along the way while keeping a sharp focus on sales, performance, and engagement rates.

Your goals can include anything from increasing brand awareness to improving engagement to extending audience reach. These will depend on your brand and what you aim to achieve from your marketing campaign.

Step 2: Define your audience

You can’t design a successful marketing campaign without defining your target audience.  

Identifying your audience will allow you to spend your time and effort marketing your products and services only to prospects who are the most likely to buy from you.

For instance, if you’re drawing a marketing campaign for a beauty brand, your primary target audience will be women who are interested in makeup and skincare.

Step 3: Look for influencers

Once you’ve defined your influencer marketing goals and identified your target audience, it’s time to look for influencers. 

At this stage, you need to look for influencers who are in your niche and have experience in creating content for brands similar to yours. These influencers will have more credibility, and they’ll be able to endorse your brand and products more engagingly.

For instance, if you’re marketing fitness products, you need to look for influencers who have a history of working with fitness brands. An influencer with fewer followers who has expertise in fitness is likely to give you more results than an influencer with more followers but without any expertise in that area.

Step 4: Reach out and follow up with influencers

After shortlisting which influencers you want to work with, reach out and follow up with them. 

With the holiday season approaching, many brands will simultaneously try to reach out to influencers to market their products and services. If you want to work with popular influencers, it’s best to get onto this step quickly.

Pro tip: Reach out to two to three influencers on every social media platform to improve your chances of retaining them.

Step 5: Sign a contract 

The next step is to finalize an agreement with the influencer you’re going to work with. 

You’ll have to draw up separate contracts for each influencer you work with. 

Remember that the contract is where you’ll mention your expectations from the marketing campaign as well as compensation details and payment terms. So keep it as comprehensive as you can.

Step 6: Execute the campaign 

After signing the agreement with the influencer, it’s time to onboard them into your marketing campaign. Send them briefs, affiliate links, and anything else that you want them to include in their posts. 

Once they launch the campaign, review the engagement with their posts. This includes views, impressions, likes, comments, and shares. 

Start your influencer marketing campaign with Outfit

If you haven’t put together an influencer marketing campaign before, it might seem a little overwhelming but thankfully instead of having to do all of the work yourself, you can use the Outfit platform. We make finding the right influencer easy with our Discovery tool, you can do all of the influencer management and communication in-app, we take care of rates, invoicing and payments, and we even do all of the reporting at the end of your campaign.

Sign up with Outfit for free today to get your campaign started!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Akshat Biyani

Akshat Biyani is a freelance writer based in London, UK. After completing his finance degree from Warwick Business School, Akshat worked as an analyst for several venture-backed start-ups.