By now, you’ve probably figured out that a crucial channel for your brand’s marketing spend is the influencer space.
Why?
Two out of three consumers trust social media influencers more than they do brand advertising. It turns out we trust people more than we trust companies.
If you’re looking to get into influencer marketing in 2022, there’s no better time than now to start planning.
The great news is that stepping into influencer marketing is much easier than it seems. In fact, you probably already have much of the foundation already established – so it’s just a matter of translating your brand foundation for the social influencer space.
3 Steps to Build Your 2022 Influencer Marketing Strategy
Step 1. Determine your brand positioning for influencers.
In most cases, you already have an idea of your brand positioning for other aspects of your business: products, website, email, and organic social, just to name a few.
For social influencers, it’s slightly different. You need to see your brand through the eyes of your influencer and their audiences… and tell a story.
With influencer marketing, it’s less about the features, benefits, and competitive differentiators. It’s about creating an authentic connection – how does your brand connect emotionally?
One way to get clear on this is to have your influencers share their stories about your brand. How do they experience your products, services, or experiences? This will give you insight into what will resonate with their followers.
You may discover they value different aspects than what is already in your brand positioning – so be open to allowing your influencer partners to shift positioning for their audience.
With this insight, you get to reinvent the brand voice, mission, and value proposition so it resonates with an engaged, responsive audience. They’re looking to their influencer for advice and recommendations on nearly everything – from the soap they use to the foods they eat to workouts they love.
Step 2. Choose the right influencer for your audience.
Choosing the right influencer is just as important as having a great product. This is where authenticity comes into play. If you’re not paired up with a creator who can authentically share your story and why it’s relevant to their audience, then you’re not in the right relationship.
Let’s say you’re a retail brand selling candles. And not just any candles... these are soy-based candles that don’t have an unpleasant odor when you blow them out, which your company proposes is a health benefit.
You’ve decided as a brand that you’ll position yourself as a health-conscious, environmentally-friendly wellness brand. The candles are just the start of the products you’ll take to market... but thanks to their easy fulfillment operations, high margins, and consumer-friendly variety, the candle will be the first product you highlight in your influencer marketing initiative.
With all this said, how do you know which influencer is right for you?
You’d likely look for influencers with the same values as your brand: eco-conscious, wellness-oriented, and health-based. They’re the best candidates to have an audience with similar values, so it makes sense to partner with authentic creators in this space. In this example, the industry they specialize in may not matter. As in, they don’t have to be primarily candle aficionados to create an impact.
They may be in the business space or the wellness space – or something else entirely. They may be product experts, lifestyle icons, or thought leaders. What makes them the right creators for you has to do with their values… not their category.
Authenticity comes in when they genuinely align with your brand’s positioning – and ideally, actually enjoy your offerings. So when looking for the right authentic influencers for your brand, it pays to think outside the box and tap a few different creators for your campaigns.
3. Set up your operations for efficiency and effective data tracking.
Your hard work means nothing if you don’t have a way to track sales and attribution correctly. The operational side of your influencer marketing initiative for 2022 is just as important as finding your authentic creators.
The traditional way of tracking influencer campaigns is rife with problems. Data often gets lost or has holes in it due to implementation on various platforms with inconsistent tracking. When you rely on third party attribution, it’s increasingly difficult to see the clear through-line from post to direct sale on your e-commerce platform.
So how do you get rid of the guesswork and collect the data you actually need to make real-time decisions?
You get the right platform partner.
Creatable is the leading platform which handles all your influencer marketing needs. Not only can you find relevant, authentic creators right in the online Creator Marketplace, once you establish those relationships, your creators develop content right in the Creatable environment, which then pushes out to your social media platform of choice.
What this yields is first party attribution – so you can see direct results and access clear, reliable data in real time. Creatable connects directly into your e-commerce backend so you’re able to track sales along with the corresponding first party engagement data that led to it. This is gold to a data-driven marketer.
Another key perk is your operations become highly effective, as you can review and approve content in the platform, as well as pay your creators there. This removes cumbersome multi-step manual operations that occur with the traditional model of running influencer marketing campaigns.
With intuitive operations, authentic influencer recruiting, and powerful analytics, Creatable takes the guesswork out of influencer marketing operations.
To find out more about how Creatable can get you started with influencer marketing fast – and give you the operational efficiency you’re looking for, schedule a demo here.
