2024 Influencer Marketing Guide:  Secrets To Successful Campaigns

Not long after social media became an integral part of modern culture, marketers looked for ways to use this emerging medium to reach new audiences that bypass traditional media channels.

In the early days, influencer marketing was seen as best suited for more trivial products similar to what you would see advertised on late-night television.

But those days are long gone and influencer marketing is becoming one of the dominant forms of advertising for brands that want to form authentic and mutually beneficial relationships with their customers.

Brand campaigns have also matured and have moved beyond simple promotion and are now used to build brand loyalty, brand awareness, and customer loyalty in ways that other marketing channels simply can’t offer.

The result of this shift is that virtually every brand that wants to position itself in the market needs to have an influencer strategy as part of its overall marketing plan.

In this guide, we’ll take you through core aspects of influencer marketing in today’s environment so you can start to implement these concepts into your own strategies.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing describes the partnership between brands and social media influencers with the goal of promoting a product or service to the influencer’s audience. 

The advantage that influencer marketing has over many other forms of advertising is that it leverages the authentic and tight relationship that influencers have with their audience.

When companies find the right influencers who have an audience that overlaps with their target customer, the result is a campaign that resonates and engages customers to take action.

What Are The Limitations Of Influencer Marketing?

While influencer marketing can help bolster virtually any brand or marketing goal, it does have a few limitations to be aware of.

Influencer marketing requires a detailed understanding of your brand’s core customers. While this is the same with many other marketing methods, it’s especially true with influencer marketing.

Another possible limitation of influencer marketing is if a poorly constructed or planned campaign is used.

In traditional media, a commercial or ad spot that lacks engagement is usually just ignored by the audience. It doesn’t necessarily cause any harm to the brand outside of the fact that it wasted resources that could have been applied more successfully elsewhere.

With influencer marketing, a bad campaign can result in some harm to the brand depending on how it’s interpreted by the audience.

This risk can be easily avoided by carefully planning your campaigns and using some of the tips we’ll go through later in this guide.

But this limitation does illustrate the fact that influencer marketing does take a specific and unique approach to be successful.

For some brands, working with an experienced influencer marketing agency may help them achieve the best results and avoid any of these potential problems.

Understanding Influencers

For many casual observers, influencers may all seem about the same. But marketers categorize influencers by a few different criteria to help them utilize specific types of brand influencers to better reach campaign and marketing goals.

Influencer Audience Size

The first and most obvious metric is audience size. Influence marketers categorize influencers into the following groups.

Mega Influencers: Influencers with an audience size of 1 million or more. This usually includes celebrity accounts and the most well-known influencers, many who are household names.

Macro influencers: Influencers with follower counts between 100K and 1 million followers. While many macro influencers may not be household names, they often have an outsized influence on their specific niche or industry.

Micro-influencers: Influencers with 10K to 100K followers. These smaller influencers often have closer relationships with their audience and many expert marketers use micro influencers as part of their campaign strategy. Even major brands like Sephora and Coca-Cola use smaller brand influencers to great effect in their social media campaigns.

Nano-influencers: Influencers with less than 10K followers. Nano-influencers provide the most targeted audience within a niche and are sometimes used exclusively by smaller brands or as part of a larger campaign to help round out a broader strategy.

Influencer Niche

The next way that influencer marketers segment influencers is by their niche. Generally, the larger the influencer (mega, macro) the more broad the niche is.

For example, a tech influencer with 1 million+ followers might fall under the general niche of tech and consumer electronics. But a micro-influencer may have a more specific niche such as consumer drone technology used for amateur filmmaking.

By using different influencers, you can more closely align the audience’s interests with your own core customer’s interests.

Experienced marketers make full use of this increased targeting and prefer to use a wide range of influencers depending on the campaign goals, niche, and strategy.

The Importance Of Verifying Influencers

You’ve likely heard of influencers using “fake followers” or buying followers to make themselves look more popular than they are.

While this is an issue, it’s relatively easy to spot by looking at specific engagement metrics and how those compare to other influencers with similar follower counts.

An influencer that has lower engagement metrics may indicate the audience size is either inflated or no longer aligns with the content the influencer is currently producing.

Outside of verifying audience size, a full audit of influencers you plan on partnering with is critical to ensuring the campaign delivers the results you expect. This is also important for protecting your brand image if an influencer has a history of covering topics or posting content you don’t want to be associated with your brand.

The key areas included in an influencer audit are:

Audience Score: An influencer audience score is a metric that determines the overall quality of the influencer’s audience. This metric compares the influencer’s core metrics to other confirmed influencers to see how they compare on a scale.

Authenticity: Authenticity is critical for influencer marketing campaigns and you want to verify an influencer has this type of relationship with their audience. Key metrics in this area are engagement and how the audience interacts with various content posted by the influencer.

Tone & Voice: The tone and voice of an influencer can vary quite a bit so this one requires a little flexibility. The most important area to consider is whether the influencer deals with any topics or content that goes against your own brand’s values or image.

Off-Platform Research: Part of researching the tone & voice of an influencer is to look at any content or information they have off of the social media platforms. This can give you insight into the overall image of the influencer to help you make the best decision when partnering with someone.

Other Promotional Content: Finally, you want to look at how much other promotional content they produce or include in their posts. Too much promotional content can mean the influencer is losing engagement with their audience and is maximizing revenue. You want to find a good balance between the content the audience expects and any included promotional content or messaging.

When Should You Use Influencer Marketing For Your Brand

Today, influencer marketing campaigns can align with most marketing goals and campaign strategies. The key is to tailor the campaign and the messaging to the specific goal you want to achieve.

Most influencer campaigns look to achieve one of the following objectives.

Brand Awareness

Influencer marketing works especially well for brand awareness campaigns. It’s the perfect way to introduce and frame your brand in front of a highly receptive and targeted audience.

Increase Sales

If you already have an established product, influencer marketing can help you generate sales through promotional spots within content. There are several ways to go about this, such as demonstration videos or review-style content.

Build Authority Within Your Industry

By partnering with an established influencer who has authority in your industry, you immediately position your brand in a similar way.

This type of campaign requires careful attention to which influencers you partner with as well as the quality of the content that you are sponsoring.

Target Specific Audiences

Using smaller micro or nano-influencers, targeted campaigns can be created to reach new audiences in cost-effective ways.

This is a common tactic for scaling influencer marketing campaigns while maintaining a high ROI.

How To Create Your First Influencer Marketing Campaign

Influencer campaigns can be anything from basic sponsored posts to elaborate campaigns spanning several months.

Whatever the size, successful campaigns will follow the same basic structure to develop the strategy and achieve the desired results.

Outline Your Goal

The first step to any influencer marketing campaign is to determine your goals for the campaign. This includes deciding the specific purpose of the campaign we outlined in the previous section.

Whether you want to improve brand awareness or increase your sales, decide on that goal as the first step of the campaign process. That goal will inform the rest of your decisions as you build up the campaign.

Find The Right Influencers

Once you have your campaign goal in mind, you can start to create a list of influencers that fit your campaign strategy and target audience.

You can find influencers by directly searching for them via hashtags or by browsing social media feeds.

Another option is to use an influencer marketing agency that already has relationships with influencers. An influencer agency can help you deal with contracts, payments, and other technical issues pertaining to a sponsored partnership.

If you don’t use an agency, you’ll need to create the influencer contracts yourself.

Determine Your Content Strategy & Messaging

With your influencers chosen, you want to decide on the type of content your campaign requires.

Your campaign goals from step one, as well as the influencer’s own style, will play a part in this

Create a detailed brief of what you want to be included in the content and present that to the influencer for approval.

You’ll want to work with the influencer to match their style so your content is seen as authentic and engaging.

Start The Campaign & Track Results

Before you launch the campaign, decide on the metrics you’ll measure to indicate whether or not your efforts were successful. If you’re trying to increase sales, then traffic to your e-commerce site and conversion ratios are likely going to be your key metrics.

For brand awareness, engagement and traffic to your social media channels or website might be what you measure.

Decide on these metrics early on and measure what your baselines are. This way you can compare them after the campaign has ended.

After every campaign, you want to analyze what worked and what can be improved in the future. You may also want to continue partnerships with influencers that yielded especially strong results.

Tips To Avoid The Most Common Campaign Mistakes

Most every unsuccessful influencer campaign can be traced back to missing one of the key steps we previously suggested when creating your campaign.

Most commonly, companies are too eager to partner with the influencer who has the highest follower count but then fail to carefully analyze the influencer’s audience to ensure it aligns with their brand and target customer.

The next most common issue is creating a campaign that lacks authenticity or doesn’t resonate with the influencer’s audience. Once again, this is usually the result of poor research into the influencer’s audience to make sure they align with your core customer.

Following a methodical approach to planning your campaign and then adding creative elements during the content creation process will help your campaigns succeed and deliver the results that many of the top brands enjoy with every campaign they run.