The Influencer Marketing Playbook Contents

THE INFLUENCER MARKETING PLAYBOOK CONTENTS:

1. Introduction

2. The roadmap to influencer marketing success

3. A data-driven approach to influencer targeting

4. Influencer engagement they can’t ignore

5. Collaborating on your influencer marketing campaign

6. Expand your audience by co-marketing with other brands

7. Influencer marketing content formats

8. Measuring & scaling for greater ROI

9. Turning influencers into brand advocates

10. Conclusion 1. INTRODUCTION

At the time of writing, this is how popular Influencer Marketing is, as quantified by Google Trends:

To make this clearer, 35,000 global searches are made every month for the term “influencer marketing.”

That’s 35,000 marketers looking to sharpen their influencer marketing skills. It’s easy to believe it’s too late to take advantage of influencer marketing. But this notion couldn’t be further from the truth.

Yes, the popularity of the practice has made the market much noisier. And the approach you’ll take now is different to what was effective 18 months ago. But for newcomers and veterans alike, it still works.

Let’s start by answering the obvious question: what is influencer marketing? Here’s a simple definition:

“Influencer marketing focuses on using industry leaders, bloggers, and individuals with a large audience around a specific topic to deliver your marketing message to a broader audience. Instead of going directly to market, you empower or pay influencers to share your story with their audiences.” Let’s break each element down, starting with influencer categories. At SpotRight, we classify these as:

THOUGHT LEADERS: This includes bloggers, speakers, and authors. These are influencers who have put their “hat” on a specific topic and 1 built a passionate audience around those interests.

ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERS: These are key decision makers within target organizations. You would engage with these individuals when establishing 2 co-marketing opportunities or for business development efforts.

SOCIAL INFLUENCERS: These individuals have a large following on one or several social platforms. For example, many photographers have become 3 social influencers on Instagram, thanks to the visual nature of the platform.

Influencer marketing is now considered a separate discipline. To plan and execute a successful influencer campaign, you’ll need to follow this process:

1. Identify the right brands or influencers to target 2. Create a marketing process to engage with those influencers 3. Create a campaign with those influencers to drive your message to their audience(s) 4. Track metrics and KPIs

The process above is exactly what you’ll learn in this playbook. But before we get into the execution, you need to create a strategy and set goals. 2. THE ROADMAP TO INFLUENCER MARKETING SUCCESS

All successful marketing campaigns begin with a solid strategy. Influencer marketing is no different.

You must define your objectives, the audience you’re looking to reach and the channels you’ll utilize to deliver your message to the right audience.

Start by defining your end goal. What are you trying to achieve?

The most common influencer marketing goals include:

AWARENESS: Extend the reach of your brand and message. This goal is the 1 easiest to measure (impressions and reach) but has little contribution to your ROI.

LEAD GENERATION: Driving traffic to your owned content to attract an 2 influencer’s audience and convert them into leads.

SALES: Offer discounts or exclusive deals to your target influencer’s audience to 3 generate real sales.

4 SOCIAL GROWTH: An effort to grow your social following. Now you know your objectives, you need to map the journey to reach them.

Targeting the right customer personas is the strongest foundation for success. Which segments of your audience are you looking to reach? For example, if you’re selling men’s underwear, two possible segments might include:

1. Men aged 24 to 35 interested in entrepreneurship 2. Men aged 18 to 29 interested in health and fitness

You won’t cover both segments with one influencer campaign, so make sure you prioritize your targeting. Take acquisition and conversion metrics into account.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn a data-driven approach to targeting influencers based on real consumer data.

Finally, decide which social channels you’ll be targeting. Each social platform has its ecosystem. Your target channel will direct the style, story, and format of your campaign:

• Use Instagram and Pinterest for static, visual content • Save long-form video for YouTube • For live, conversational videos (e.g., Q&A’s), use live video on Facebook or Instagram • When sharing business insights, use LinkedIn Keep in mind the action you want your target audience to take during channel selection. On Instagram, for example, there’s more friction for users to follow a link. It’s only accessible through the influencer’s bio.

However, if you were looking to drive traffic using the platform, users can swipe up to reach your page via Instagram Stories. You should also consider testing emerging platforms. The benefits of this are illustrated by the Law of Diffusion of Innovation:

Nobody could predict how huge Snapchat was going to be until the early majority came along to help it reach the tipping point.

The early adopters knew they were on to something, that it was something special. As a result, these users still generate a disproportionate amount of attention. Early adopters attract followers the more users use the platform.

Keep an eye on these emerging platforms via Product Hunt and tech publications such as Mashable and TechCrunch. Look for insights on growth statistics, e.g., user count and daily posts. Then test on a small scale to save internal resources until you’re confident it’s a winning platform.

Now you have a clear influencer marketing roadmap. The first destination is finding the right influencers to target. 3. A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH TO TARGETING INFLUENCERS

Finding the right influencers can be tricky. First, you need to decide on what category of influencer you’re going to target: “macro” or “micro.” Here’s how we define each:

MACRO INFLUENCERS: These are actors, musicians, and social media celebrities. They have over a million followers and, as a result, 1 charge higher fees.

MICRO-INFLUENCERS: They have between 1,000 and 100,000 followers (sometimes more). Micro-influencers are the most popular 2 choice due to affordability and ease of access.

When developing an influencer marketing strategy, we advise you target micro-influencers. The data is clear on why: According to Markerly, engagement-rate begins to drop down after 1,000 likes. In fact, accounts with 1,000 followers or less generate likes 8% of the time, while accounts with 1 million followers generate likes 1.6% of the time. This trend continues across comment rate:

Furthermore, Instagram influencers with over 6 million followers have been known to charge up to $100,000 for a single post.

For many brands, this just isn’t feasible, which is why micro-influencers with a follower size of 10,000 to 100,000 is much more appealing:

MICRO-INFLUENCERS ARE MORE AFFORDABLE, demanding a much lower fee (often $100 to $1,000 per post)

MICRO-INFLUENCERS GET MORE ENGAGEMENT, thanks to a loyal and niche audience around specific interests

MICRO-INFLUENCERS ARE EASIER TO ACCESS, as they prefer to work one-to-one with the brands they partner with Not all micro-influencers are equal. When identifying the right partners, make sure they fit criteria like the following:

THEY MUST HAVE 10,000 TO 100,000 FOLLOWERS. This is the sweet spot between 1 engagement and affordability.

THEY MUST CREATE HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT. Look at the posts each micro- influencer creates to see what kind of content they’re creating. Ensure it’s polished and 2 professional. Remember, these people will be representing your brand.

THEY MUST HAVE A TARGETED AUDIENCE. Most influencers are specialists in a single area, from photography in the Norwegian wilderness to doodles on post-it notes. These 3 influencers have an engaged audience because they’re great at doing one thing.

Now you know what the ideal influencer looks like. It’s time to find them.

We’ve talked about a variety of organic methods of finding influencers in the past. These include looking at your current audience and searching through hashtags to find posts with the most engagement.

In this playbook, we’re going to teach you a more sophisticated approach. You’ll use data to find the best partners to work with. Specifically, we look at consumer data collected from several sources across the web.

For the sake of this example, let’s say you’re working for Urban Outfitters, and looking to attract micro-influencers to work with you on an upcoming campaign. Using the SpotRight platform, you can identify the brands and influencers with which your customers have an affinity. In the following Urban Outfitters Engagers report, we’ll head to Brand > Summary. The following report provides insight into the brand following and behavior of this segment:

Looking at social data, we can see which other brands they engage with across relevant categories. You can identify co-branding opportunities and generate further insights into audience psychographic segmentation.

Now, let’s use the same data to identify influencers with access to our audience. In the SpotRight platform, head to Interests > Summary:

Like the Brands report, this gives us a list of influencers and media outlets that Urban Outfitters fans most engage with:

Again, these are segmented by channel and interests. If you were running campaigns on Instagram, you’d want to pay attention and identify influencers within that section of the report. You can also analyze more granular social data by clicking on the Social tab. Here, you’ll see the hashtags and accounts Urban Outfitters customers mention on social media:

For more influencer targeting methods, check out our guide on How to Find Instagram Influencers on the SpotRight blog. 4. INFLUENCER ENGAGEMENT THEY CAN’T IGNORE

You now know the audience you’re targeting and the influencers who hold the keys.

The next step is to make yourself known to those influencers. If you’re not already on their radar, some pre-engagement may be necessary.

By targeting the right influencers, the barrier to entry isn’t high. Remember, the influencers you’re targeting have a smaller audience than most social media celebrities, and prefer to work with brands one-to-one.

First, don’t cold email them right away - especially if they have over 100,000 followers. The most effective first step is social engagement.

Find out where they’re active and begin engaging with the content they create. Turn on notifications so you can act quickly on new content they publish. Commenting on their posts is an easy first step to becoming a familiar name to them. From here, you can introduce yourself via direct messaging. Write a simple message of gratitude, for example:

“Hi NAME – Just wanted to reach out and express how much I/we love your nature photography/illustrations. Keep up the good work!”

Sharing their content with your audience will also go down well. Influencers are constantly aiming to grow their audience, so getting their content out to new people can be really helpful to them.

On Instagram, you can do this through “re-grams,” where you simply post an influencer’s content and credit them for it:

The underlying principle is to be helpful. Find ways to drive value to your micro- influencers.

Look at the content they’re putting out and help promote what’s important to them. For example, many Instagram photographers sell their Lightroom filters to their followers. A great idea could be to create a blog post that features them, including a link back to their sales page. This approach would go down extremely well and get their attention quickly.

Finally, keep tabs on your target influencers. Use social listening tools like Mention, Google Alerts or Sprout Social to be alerted when they’re mentioned anywhere on the web. This way, you can add value outside of social media.

Engaging with them over a short period (e.g., one to three weeks) will get you on their radar. Now it’s time to begin the business relationship.

It all starts with an email. You can do this through a direct message on Twitter or Instagram, but we find email sets the tone best.

First, you need to find their email address. If target influencers have a website, check out the contact section. If they don’t have a contact page, use Hunter.io to find their email address. Head to www.hunter.io and sign up for a free account. In the domain search, enter the website URL for your target influencer:

You’ll see all available email addresses associated with that domain. If you don’t find anything, then a direct message will do.

Next, you need to craft a message that will get their attention. Here’s an effective framework you can follow when creating outreach emails: Let’s break down the principles for each part of the email:

The email begins with a hyper-personalized introduction. Here, you would call back to a comment or message you’ve already sent them. This level of personalization turns a 1 cold email into a warm one.

The second paragraph calls out the fact you don’t know each other that well. It also sets the intention for your outreach, i.e., collaborating on content. The paragraph after this is 2 where you explain what you’re trying to achieve and how the influencer can help.

Here, you must tell them why you believe they’re the best person for the job. Make 3 sure you get them. Why are you reaching out to them specifically?

Finish off with a simple call-to-action. Don’t go in with a hard, assumptive close. Most 4 influencers will want more information first, so give them a chance to ask for it.

Notice how the subject line is also personalized. Tailor your subject lines to the content your target influencers create, not the outcome you want. It’s short, personalized, and will pique their interest enough to open.

Once you’ve provided enough information, you’ll need to discuss the objective of the campaign. This discussion should cover the terms of business, and what the influencers need from you to do a great job. 5. COLLABORATING ON YOUR INFLUENCER MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Influencer marketing is most successful when brands give creative reign to influencers.

By this, we don’t mean let go of all control. Influencers know their audience best, and you know your brand and messaging. Therefore, influencer marketing must be a collaboration between brand and influencer.

The first step is to set terms. The goals you defined in the strategy phase dictate the terms of your relationship.

Let’s look at a few examples, starting with brand awareness. The following post by Alastair Humphreys and Land Rover illustrates the importance of storytelling for an initiative like this: This partnership provides a clear win-win for both parties. Alastair has amazing content to share with his audience, and Land Rover got their message out to the people they wish to attract.

If your goal is traffic, leads or sales, then you’ll need a more direct approach. In this example, Jennifer Chong created content that featured products by makeup brand Nude by Nature:

Both sides of the partnership must also agree on the metrics they’ll measure. Again, this will depend on your goals. You should be monitoring a “true north” metric, as well as other indicators of success:

1. REACH: How far your campaign content reached (usually measured as total number of impressions) 2. COMMENTS: The number of comments generated 3. SHARES: The number of people who shared your campaign content 4. SOCIAL GROWTH: The number of followers generated from the campaign 5. LEADS: Total number of new leads or subscribers generated 6. SALES: Total number of sales generated 7. CAC: The cost per acquisition of each new customer/user 8. REVENUE: Total revenue generated from the campaign 9. ROI: Return on investment as a percentage

Finally, you must both agree on remuneration. You’ll find most influencers respond best to cold, hard cash. However, some influencers (mostly bloggers) will happily create content in exchange for free product or services.

One final note on compliance: the FTC has clear rules on sponsored posts. Joseph Cole of TapInfluence has a great article on the matter, which we highly recommend. 6. EXPAND YOUR AUDIENCE BY CO-MARKETING WITH OTHER BRANDS

Business development is another practice that benefits from the principles shown in this playbook.

Co-marketing with other brands can help you tap into the marketing prowess of other successful companies. The collaboration between Red Bull and GoPro is a popular example of this.

Instead of peddling the products they sell, they decided to create content that positioned both as lifestyle brands (as they have done for many years now).

Red Bull would sponsor and run events for adventurers and athletes, providing them with gear from GoPro. The result is compelling, story-driven content.

The best example of this is the “Stratos” campaign. In it, Felix Baumgartner leaped from a pod floating 24 miles above the earth’s surface, all captured on a GoPro camera. As you can see, this minute-and-a-half epic has generated over 40 million views on YouTube. Not to mention the amount of media buzz it created around the event.

Story-driven content doesn’t need to be epic. Fur Baby Rescue, a rescue center for animals, partnered with BuzzFeed to create weird and whacky content, which is just the kind you’re used to seeing from the media giant.

That’s right - they gave puppies to drunk people and recorded the reaction. This crazy concept provided content in the form of YouTube videos, articles and GIFs to help distribute the content around the web.

The result? 70,000 social shares and over 12 million views on YouTube.

If you’re looking to work with other brands, the process is similar to the traditional influencer marketing process outlined in this playbook: If you’re looking to work with other brands, the process is similar to the traditional influencer marketing process outlined in this playbook:

1. Identify the brands that have an affinity with the audience you’re looking to reach 2. Identify the right executives that work within that brand 3. Engage with the via content and social media 4. Reach out using the email script outlined above

For example, if you’re aiming to reach women who are Major League Baseball fans, use data to find the brands they have an affinity with.

Using the SpotRight platform, we can see that some of these brands include Chai Moments, Bamboo Clothing Co. and Earl Jeans: 7. INFLUENCER MARKETING CONTENT FORMATS

Once you’ve begun a professional relationship (with influencer or brands alike), it’s time to create the content itself.

Your influencer content must serve the objectives you’re trying to achieve. It should also serve the influencer and their audience.

That’s why creating great, high-quality content is key to your success.

Set boundaries on what the content should and shouldn’t include. Are there words, phrases, and topics they must avoid? Guideline documentation makes setting boundaries much easier. Here’s how to create one for your brand:

DEFINE THE AUDIENCE: Who is it you’re trying to reach? Start out with a brief description of your 1 customer personas. Make sure your influencers are clear about who you’re trying to reach.

EXCLUSIONS: Tell influencers what their content should avoid. List topics, keywords, and products 2 they should keep out of their content.

FRAMEWORK IDEAS: Similarly, provide phrases, buzzwords, and descriptions of imagery to include in their content. Your ideas can be as granular as you like, from the backdrop (wild scenery, urban, 3 office) to products and objects (coffee, computers, other people, and animals).

EXAMPLES: Share influencer content that you’ve collaborated on in the past. Outline what worked 4 well and the elements that make your content successful.

TONALITY: This is especially important for text-based content, but also applies to captions and typography within images. What is the tone of your content? Is it serious or playful? Professional or 5 friendly? Short and sweet or long-form?

CONTENT FORMATS: What forms of content are you looking to create? Create a list of content 6 formats and what you hope to achieve with them. Let’s look at some popular content formats and how they align with influencer marketing objectives. You should include these in your guidelines as above.

Product placements are one of the most popular content formats. Here, your influencers would take photos of your product in action, posing with them or simply having them laid out in a beautiful setting. Behind-the-scenes content can make influencers and audiences feel like they’re getting an exclusive look at your products or brand. This format empowers influencers to create content that isn’t available anywhere else.

Ben Brown created behind-the-scenes content when helping friends with an ad for Audi. He shot Instagram Stories on his phone while using a camera to create content for his YouTube vlog:

At the time of writing, Instagram and Snapchat stories are generating a huge amount of engagement. Make them part of your content creation process. Consider a behind-the-scenes look to build hype for upcoming content.

Story-driven content (like the example by Alastair Humphreys and Land Rover earlier) is perfect for eliciting an emotional response from your audience. This is a brand-building play, but this approach can easily be applied to a lead generation or sales initiative.

Finally, co-branded content brings two teams together to create content for both audiences. Entertaining or educational content works best in this format. 8. MEASURING AND SCALING FOR GREATER ROI

Once you’ve signed-off on influencer content, it’s time to hit publish!

But, as you know, that’s not where the process ends. The next step is to measure results and decide whether to scale up.

Here, you’ll learn how to measure your influencer marketing efforts with the right metrics.

1 REACH, IMPRESSIONS AND TRAFFIC

While not as important as ROI, reach is a key indicator of influencer marketing success.

The further your micro-influencer campaign has reached, the more potential for traffic, leads and sales there are.

To measure reach, monitor these metrics:

1. The number of followers your micro-influencer has 2. The number of impressions your campaign content generated 3. How much referral traffic a campaign has sent to your site 4. Make sure your influencers give you a snapshot of impression data, as this is often only accessible to them. 2 CLICKS, LIKES & SHARES

If engagement is your goal, you must measure clicks, likes, comments, and the total cost of engagement.

Here are the engagement metrics to measure:

• The number of likes (or reactions on Facebook) your content generated.

• Measuring shares indicates the quality of your content. People recommend content that evokes an emotion (or expresses who they are).

• Comments are a strong indicator of engagement. It shows that your content has inspired discussion and grabbed your audience’s attention.

• Measuring brand mentions will show if people are talking about you outside of the initial discussion.

Tracking these metrics will help you measure cost per engagement (CPE). To calculate CPE, simply divide the total cost of the campaign by the number of engagements.

Measuring CPE helps you understand sentiment around your brand, not your products or services. It’s about measuring the return on customer relationships. 3 MESSAGE-TO-MARKET MATCH

If you did your homework, you should have engaged with influencers who have access to your target audience.

We recommend using our PersonaBuilder platform to understand if your message is reaching the right audience. While less accurate, the Demographics and Interests report in Google Analytics can also be used to gauge if your message is hitting the mark:

This report will provide you with the data to make long- term decisions. In other words, will you generate a positive ROI by working with this micro-influencer in the future? 4 SOCIAL SALES & LEAD GENERATION

While engagement and brand awareness are great, ROI is even better. Ultimately, your micro-influencer campaigns should be generating leads and sales. Maximize ROI by focusing on micro-influencers and social channels that generate the best results. For example, if you’re getting more qualified traffic from Instagram over Twitter, then coordinate with your micro-influencers to double down on the former. This way, you’re focusing on only the channels that bring the strongest results. Create an individual UTM code to measure each campaign. Quickly create UTM codes by using Funnel’s campaign name and URL builder. Open Google Analytics and head to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium to get a snapshot of how certain social platforms are performing:

To view the results of your campaigns, go to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns: 9. TURNING INFLUENCERS INTO BRAND AMBASSADORS

You’ve executed on your influencer marketing strategy, and you’ve generated data on the results.

Some are a success, and others aren’t, but your risk can be mitigated by working with micro-influencers. You can hedge your influencer marketing budget across several influencers instead of one with over a million followers.

Most influencer marketing campaigns are one-off efforts. Brands work with an influencer on a campaign, and then that’s the end of it.

Instead, you should consider turning your top performing influencers into brand ambassadors.

Ambassadors are much like influencers, in that act as advocates for your brand. You empower influencers and customers with content and tools to help spread your message while rewarding them for doing so. Ambassador marketing is different to influencer marketing. The relationship must be mutually beneficial, meaning you should add as much value to them as they do to you.

There are a few ways to do this:

Give access to products and services before they go live to the public. Provide early-access so that they can create exclusive, insight-driven content for their audiences. Unboxing 1 channels on YouTube thrive off these kinds of relationships.

Get them involved behind the scenes. As mentioned earlier, this can create hype while 2 creating content off the back off campaigns you’re already working on.

Treat them like employees. Cosmetic brand AVON exploded in the 90’s because the only way to buy from them was through their ambassadors. They attracted the best advocates by 3 providing the benefits you would like an employee, including health and dental plans.

One of the best examples of ambassador marketing in action is from Lululemon. They give their ambassadors complete access to events, making them feel part of something.

Ambassadors can then educate themselves on what’s happening in the company. By bringing them together, they piggy-back on these events to create user-generated content, further extending Lululemon’s social reach. But it’s their positive and healthy image that attracts such a dedicated following. Lululemon may sell yoga products, but they’re a lifestyle brand.

You can see the reason why in the way they empower their ambassadors beyond exclusive access to events and products.

For instance, they turn their retail stores into yoga gyms at the weekends, allowing ambassadors to provide classes and build their audiences.

Furthermore, they give ambassadors everything they need to run their events, workshops, and classes - from gear to the actual space to bring students together.

Which underlines one of the biggest, most important elements of influencer marketing: EMPOWERMENT. CONCLUSION

You can easily compare influencer marketing to content marketing. They both work well because it flipped the script on the marketing paradigm.

Instead of attracting and persuading customers, the philosophy is “give value and attract.”

Adding value to the audience is what influencer marketing is all about. The key is in developing mutually beneficial relationships throughout the entire process.

The best influencers know it’s not just about the money. What’s truly important to them is providing great content to their audience. Help them to do that, and they’ll spread your message for years to come.

FIND THE RIGHT INFLUENCERS, REACH THE RIGHT AUDIENCE AND 10X YOUR RESULTS Data-driven targeting is the foundation to successful influencer marketing. SpotRight can help your influencer campaigns have explosive reach for outstanding results. Click below to learn how!

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