At times when the economy appears to be less secure, brands have become extra careful with their spending and the return on their activities. It is not surprising that Influencer marketing has taken off so dramatically in recent years. This is because influencer marketing has the potential of impressive returns and has relatively lower running and execution costs as compared to traditional marketing. Today, influencer marketing has established itself as a high-value marketing tactic that marketers couldn’t ignore. Although influencer marketing is no longer an afterthought, there are marketers that are not aware of the crucial information they need to know before engaging influences.
This article will guide you through the 3 crucial things that you need to know in order to plan for a successful campaign. We want you to attain the maximum impact for your influencer marketing campaign.
No 1 # Build Your Online Presence
Have you created your Facebook Page for your brand?
Have you created your Instagram account for your brand?
Do you have a website?
Have you set up your e-commerce store?
Do you have a Google My Business account?
Today, the majority of consumers use the internet to find a business. This is why having an online presence is so important. You need to make sure that you are searchable because it can help your potential consumers to find your brand before they are aware of your existence! This can also help them to learn about your reputation before making a purchase. Eventually, all of this information will play a role in your customer's purchasing decision.
Having various social media accounts help you to reach your intended audience. This explains why being on social media is a necessity in this day and age. If your brand does not have a presence on social media, your potential customers may feel unsure of your credibility. If you have already set up your social media accounts, when you engage influencers for your marketing campaigns, these influencers will then be able to tag you on the content that they have created for you. This way, they can direct their audience to your social media page as well.
Also, to increase your online presence, you need to have a website. Other than social media, one of the first places people will go to find out more about your company is your website. Make sure that your website has all the information that your potential customers need. This information should appeal to your buyer and present a solution to their problem. Of course, if you have a website, influencers can help to drive the traffic to you.
You should also list yourself in some of the e-commerce marketplaces such as Shopee, Lazada, 11Street, and etc. Not only that they are well known in Malaysia, but they also have a significant presence in the SEA region. Therefore, setting up your e-commerce store on these marketplaces can easily give you more exposure and provide you instant access to a vast number of potential customers. When you list all your products on their website, it can boost your brand visibility. It’s a good opportunity for small business owners to gain good profits without any advanced investments.
Do you know that you can actually engage with customers on Google for free? By signing up for a Google My Business Account, your Business Profile allows you to manage how your business appears on Google Search and Maps. It is a free tool for you to see and connect with your customers, post updates to your Business Profile and see how customers are interacting with your business on Google. If you have not done so already, add your business to Google now!
No 2 # Do Free Marketing First
Before you start to engage influencers, you should ask yourself what are the free marketing that you can do for your brand?
1. Friends and Family - Word of Mouth
Whenever you have created some content for your social media, feel free to get your friends and family to share your content. People trust their friends, family more than ads. Recommendations or positive customer stories help businesses to expand their reach. This is how trust is built. When a potential customer is making a decision to buy your product or service, great word-of-mouth makes it more likely they will think of you first.
Networking helps too! Take our Sushivid Founder and CEO, YuhWen’s personal experience as an example. When SushiVid just started, the first person that she reached out to was her friend Swee Yong - Hermo’s investor. It turned out that Hermo became our first customer! Not only that, when she reached the accelerator program, the person-in-charge introduced her to someone from Lazada and they became our second customer!
Often, your friends and family can actually help you if they see that you are sincere and hungry to achieve in life.
2. Build customer reviews
Reviews online are sort of like Modern Word-of-Mouth Marketing. Today, anyone can refer or recommend a business anytime. Online reviews make your brand look trustworthy. A steady stream of positive reviews can build significant trust and credibility. It plays an important role in the customer’s purchase decision process and can eventually help you drive more sales.
But, where should your online reviews be? The answer is EVERYWHERE! Your reviews should be on Google, social media and e-commerce platforms. Online customer reviews give you a steady pipeline of content that search engines highly value when selecting which results to pop up. If you are ranked higher, the algorithms and people alike tend to see your website as an authority in your industry. This will lead to more exposure, hence your visibility increases!
3. Consistency
Another question you might want to ask yourself is - Are you active enough online?
Your online activity should be active enough if you want to show up online. This includes regularly posting to your own website, social media accounts, and etc. You also need to make sure that all the information about your business is up to date. It’s one thing to have a social media page, but your page will become inactive if you have not been updating it.
Additionally, you can also engage with followers on social media. You can engage in the conversation or concerns that they are talking about in your industry and try to appreciate them or address their concerns. This, in turn, can help you to build a loyal customer base.
No 3 # What is Your Final Goal?
Before you invest in influencer marketing, another question to ask yourself is what is your end goal?
1. Understand what you what to achieve
Often, brands who want to do influencer marketing may have a perception of influencer marketing being a ‘one size fits all’ solution to their problems. Of course, we would love to achieve everything for our clients but with a certain amount of budget, there is a limit on what we can achieve. For example, we should only aim to drive traffic to your website or increase awareness for your brand or increase App downloads. The reason why we need to focus on one thing at a time is because if we have too many things to focus on and have too many objectives in a campaign, in the end, we couldn’t find out which works and which method is effective.
Besides that, we need to know who we are targeting. Brands would often want to target everyone - the whole Malaysian population. Your target market should be identified and clearly defined. If you choose to target everyone, you are overspreading yourself. Your budget may not be as effective and you may not find out who is the one that’s driving the traffic for you.
Let us explain this using the skincare analogy:-
If you buy 4 different skincare products and you try them all on your face on the same day. You wouldn’t know which product is the one that I’m sensitive to. You may be guessing that you may be sensitive to product A or it may be a combination of the products. You can never be sure.
Even though you want to try out all 4 different skincare products, you should try them separately and monitor the result. Always know what you want to achieve and never try to overachieve.
2. To know how you are measuring.
How are you going to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign? How often do you give up while you are doing the report on your marketing campaign effectiveness? The most important question - Do you have the right tools to measure?
If you don’t, need not worry! SushiVid is here to help. We have a lot of data and we really care about getting the right kind of information for you. Working with us, it’s not just about engaging influencers. It is working with them on the right kind of data, the right kind of reporting, the right kind of information that you want to attain. This is where we set ourselves apart from you doing influencer marketing directly yourself.
Knowing what you are measuring is very important. It’s not just the likes, the comments and the engagement rate. Yes, those things matter but what else? Are you measuring the App downloads? Are you measuring the clicks? Are you monitoring their conversations? How about consumer sentiments? These are the important things to track as well.
3. Have a long term plan
Do not give up on Influencer Marketing just because it didn’t work for you the first time. There are so many different variables that you might miss in the first place. If you are giving up on this just because it didn’t work for you for that one time, you are not doing this particular industry justice.
You need to have a long term plan before you start your influencer marketing campaign. You can break your campaign into different phrases and assign different objectives for each phrase. For example, in the first month of your campaign, you can focus on increasing your brand awareness. Then, the next month, you can focus on driving traffic to your website and the following month, focusing on App downloads. This way, we can tell what works and what’s not.
To sum up, influencer marketing can be a very effective marketing strategy that can help you to achieve your goals. But before you dive deep into an influencer marketing campaign, it is crucial to pay attention to these 3 points that we have highlighted above to ensure that you are not wasting your time and budget on ineffective marketing campaigns.
For more information about things you need to know before investing in influencer marketing, do check out our Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zce3vFHVml8