While budgets for influencer marketing continue on the upwards trajectory, there is still a great deal of pussy-footing in the dark with no clear campaign structure. The core stages of a successful influencer marketing programme include a great deal of research before moving on to the next stages of planning, negotiating and finally execution. Yet the number of brands and agencies that pretty much skip straight to execution is alarming.

In response to this issues, ZINE has created the ‘Framework to A Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy’, which breaks down these stages into chunks, serving as a practical guide to help to help you run campaigns more profitably.

 

In particular the framework will help you to swerve influencer marketing pitfalls in the following areas:

 

Influencer Research

A lack of initial influencer research means campaigns are run with poorly targeted influencers. In ZINE’s own research earlier this year we found that just 29% of influencers are asked for the demographics of their following, and just 11% of bloggers asked for their Google analytics stats. This goes to show both brands and agencies are focusing too much on what they can directly see (number of followers and content), and not enough on audience relevance. In other areas of paid advertising such as PPC or Facebook ads, one would never dream of targeting an audience based on reach alone – why is this the case with influencer marketing?

 

Whether you are using going via the manual route, or using an influencer marketing platform like ZINE, in our framework we guide you though the number of influencers to to use and the questions to ask.

 

Planning

Getting content guidelines right from the start will have a huge effect on the success of you entire campaign – whether you are collaborating with one or 100 influencers. It will save you hours of back and forth with the influencers or agents, your reputation as you are not having to push back on content that isn’t right for you, and wasted budget as over scripted content fails to resonate with audiences and loses its authenticity. This may sound a little melodramatic but I cannot stress how crucial this element is.

Remember to include both general and legal guidelines and the date you need the posts to go live and send to all influencer you are running campaigns with prior to any official confirmations. For our campaigns we use our digital campaign set-up. This part of our influencer marketing platform takes the manual labour out of this stage as rather than copying and pasting to all influencer by email then trying to track responses, we simply upload our guidelines and dates, personalise messages, then send to our influencers in minutes!

  

 

Negotiating

Before approaching influencer you should already have an idea as to how much budget / product you are able to offer them. Keep in mind that not all influencers will necessarily accept product / event type collaborations.

Earlier this year, we surveyed over 1000 influencers and when it comes to payment:

• 34% expect to be paid financially
• 18% would work on a campaign in exchange for attending an event (e.g. London fashion week)
• 31% should be happy with a product

Brands who use ZINE’s influencer marketing platform for campaigns have the benefit of seeing which types of collaborations influencers accept during the research stage. Our influencers specify their collaboration types along with how much they charge for collaborations when they sign up to ZINE – you can then filter these out at research stage.

While there isn’t a universal ‘rate for influencers’ as why they will charge will vary according to reach, industry and brand affinity amongst other things discussed in the framework, it’s important to still negotiate with influencers, as Lauren Spearman from benefit Cosmetics said at our recent event ‘Influencer Marketing Strategy Unwrapped’ – not negotiating serves to raise the cost of influencer marketing across the industry as prices are risen higher and higher.

 

Whether you are new to the world of influencer marketing, or are already well accomplished at running campaigns – download your copy of our influencer marketing framework below to make sure your campaign budget and time are being fully maximised!

 

{{cta(‘4a365041-d2f1-486c-9758-fff42aef7613’)}}

 

 

---

Maeve Sugrue

I’m Head of Marketing at ZINE where I am helping peers and customers who want to revolutionise their influencer marketing strategy. I love food, fitness and Min Pins.