INFLUENCER MARKETING FRAMEWORK FOR A PROFITABLE … Marketing Strategy/ZINE... · INFLUENCER MARKETING FRAMEWORK 1. DEFINING TARGET AUDIENCE & OBJECTIVES Defining and finding the

A step by step guide to a succesful influencer

marketing strategy.

I N F L U E N C E R M A R K E T I N G

F R A M E W O R K F O R A P R O F I T A B L E

I N F L U E N C E R M A R K E T I N G S T R A T E G T Y

2018

2

INF LUE N C E R M A R K E T IN G F R A ME W OR K

“For every minute spent organising, an hour is earned.”

- Benjamin Franklin

3


INTRODUCTION

DEFINING TARGET AUDIENCE & OBJECTIVES

CREATING A CAMPAIGN BRIEF

IDENTIFYING & RECRUITING THE RIGHT INFLUENCERS

NEGOTIATING PAYMENT - WHAT TO EXPECT

MEASURING SUCCESS

ZINE

www. zine.co [email protected]: @zineco_officalFacebook: @zine.co.officalInstagram: @zine.co.officalLindekdIn: ZINE

CONTENTS

4


Though impossible to place an exact value, the influencer marketing industry is booming. Instagram alone has over 2bn monthly users, and with that many

eyeballs, influencer marketing is set for more growth and budget allocation as money is drawn from other media. It has grown so significantly in fact, that it’s reported to be the fasted growing customer acquisition method for 2017.

But while budgets for Influencer marketing follow its upward popularity trend, many are still a little way off from achieving the full potential of their influencer marketing strategy.

With that in mind, ZINE has put together this framework that details the essential components for an influencer marketing programme that delivers. This report provides a comprehensive guide suitable for those starting out, through to those with more experience in executing campaigns.

Having previously surveyed over 1300 consumer and 1000 influencers for our report Influencer Marketing: Science, Strategy & Success, ZINE has identified areas of optimisation for influencer collaborations.

Through using both the insight from our report, and ZINE’s experience managing influencer campaigns for brands and agencies, we present this Influencer Marketing Framework as

a practical guide to help you navigate the world of influencer marketing by addressing:

Research - finding the right influencer, transparency in numbers, and assessing audience health.

Planning - how to prepare an effective campaign brief with brand safety in mind.

Negotiations – how to evaluate costs.

Execution – guidelines on implementing a campaign, collaborating with influencers effectively, and staying within regulations.

INTRODUCTION Though influencer marketing continues to rise in popularity, the lack of universal standards in campaigns means many brands and agencies are yet to see it’s full potential.

5


1. DEFINING TARGET AUDIENCE & OBJECTIVESDefining and finding the right influencer is one of the most labour intense and time consuming elements of influencer marketing. Reach, resonance and audience need to be taken into consideration alongside clearly defined campaign goals.

DEFINING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

Before you embark on your first campaign, it goes without saying that you need to have a pretty good idea of who your current / target audience is. Identify basic demographics like age, gender, location, in addition to brand affinities and top interests. Having a clear idea of this from the start will help keep you focused when it comes to influencer selection. There are thousands of influencers out there - reducing that pool by defining deal breakers will narrow the list of options down a fair amount. Give some leeway in your requirements or you might end up making the search even harder. There is rarely an influencer that ticks all the boxes - style, audience demographics

and budget - a hundred percent. Some compromises need to be made, and by working with a mix of influencers, you might achieve more of your overall campaign goals.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

For those just dipping their toes in the tactic, it can be tempting to throw a little bit of budget at it to see what is delivered. However, to maximise the effectiveness of your campaigns, you will need to have a clear strategy laid out - which starts with the core campaign objectives. The campaign objectives need to be shared with both team and management and ideally be within a set time frame. At this stage you will also be thinking about how

you will measure the success of your campaign.

Typical influencer marketing objectives include: raising brand awareness; increasing engagement or driving sales. As many of the social media channels are only just starting to catch up with brands working with influencers (e.g Instagram click to buy which launched earlier this year), measurement for some of the objectives can prove trickier than the typical digital marketer (where everything is trackable) is used to. Sometimes you will have to think a little outside of the box!

Example Awareness ObjectiveOn average I get 30,000 monthly visits to my website which I would like to increase by 25% in order for me to deem the campaign successful. I will run influencer campaigns during the month of June, attributing everything above 30,000 to my influencer marketing campaigns.

6


INTEGRATING YOUR INFLUENCER STRATEGY WITH MARKETING & PRSuccessful influencer marketing campaigns are well integrated into your wider marketing / PR strategy. That means choosing influencers that resonate well with your brand and audience, ensuring all branding and messaging on your website / landing pages is consistent with the messaging shared by your influencers, and running your own online / offline campaigns alongside your influencer programs that support the wider campaign goals. You should also identify which part of your marketing funnel your influencer marketing strategy will be supporting:

ABOVE Summary of areas your influencer marketing strategy can target

7


2. CREATING A CAMPAIGN BRIEFThis may seem easy enough, but it’s a crucial step in creating an effective influencer campaign. Supplying the right information to the influencers upfront, can prevent a lot of back and forth and other common pitfalls.

INTRODUCING YOUR BRAND

Depending on your brand this may be a more or less relevant, but even for large and well known brands, this section has an important purpose. For a specific campaign you may want to highlight a certain or even new aspect of your brand. In any case, giving the influencer a short overview of who you are and what you do is best practice.

SHARE YOUR CAMPAIGN GOALS

Letting influencers know what your objectives are will help shape their content. As previously discussed, this could be awareness, consideration, buying or advocacy. Provide details of specific goals and how they will be

measured, eg. clicks, new follows etc. So the influencer can weave these objectives in their content strategy.

CONTENT GUIDELINES

78% of over 1,300 consumers surveyed said they were more likely to buy products based on the recommendation of someone they trust, and at the same time, 68% of influencers said they prefer loose or no guidance when creating content for their social media channels. We admit that this is a challenging balancing act. Too little guidance may lead to a creative interpretation that is off brand and too much guidance often results in uninspiring, look alike content across the board. Because this is such a tricky topic, we have broken down Content Guidelines in some key components.

8


Content Guidelines FrameworkProviding a consistent framework that allows for creative freedom but aligns content with the overall campaign strategy and branding is the way forward.

This framework can be broken down in two parts, content guide-lines and caption guidelines, and is mostly not about creative guidelines, but a restrictions and the overall creative guidance that should be provided.

CONTENT GUIDELINES

It’s ok to ask for some specifics here, especially what you don’t want! Apart from giving creative guidance there are plenty of other things to cover and think off. It is often those details that lead to disagreements between brands and Influencers, but misunderstandings can easily be avoided by addressing key points from the beginning.

Boomerang, still image, Carousel, long video, short video - how would you like the influencer to communicate your

ABOVE Difference in engagement between sponsored and organic content

ABOVE Sponsored content is hardly noticed

message? You can specify your preferred or one and only media type or leave it to the influencer to pick the best format.

Flatlays, street style, close up, collages - are there any formats you feel will not fit your campaign and brand objectives?

It can be difficult to orchestrate content which focuses on the product or brand without coming across too staged (see also the section on branded content on the side). There is always a bit of a trade off between the visibility of the promoted brand and the natural feel of the content. Manage your own expectations by picturing how your brand would come across either way and how much freedom you are willing to give to influencers.

A good compromise is to allow the influencer to post a more natural image with less brand visibility and another carousel image with a product close up. This allows the influencer to create content that feels natural to them and their audience without compromising your brand visibility.

MEDIA TYPE IMAGE STYLE

BRAND/PRODUCT VISIBILITY

9


Even if an influencer rarely posts in black and white, you should be clear what setting and mood you are expecting. A brand mood board can often help communicate this visually. Don’t think just because it’s summer the influencer will create particularly sunny content - when creating content constantly, this can be easily overlooked and influencers want to mix up their feed a little too. Make sure you’re not caught in the wrong mood!

Make sure to ask specifically for no other brands to be visible in the content if that is a criteria for you.

CAPTION GUIDELINES

The caption should be in the influencers own words to maintain authenticity so it’s best to refrain from prescrib-ing captions or phrases from the start. Apart from commu-nicating your overall campaign goal again, eg. a caption that inspires your audience to try the product, you can provide some highlights of your product/brand or service you would like to emphasise. You can also provide a list of ‘good to mention’ attributes and ask influencers to pick one or more to include in their caption.

Campaign Rules Prior to posting content you should make sure your campaign rules are communicated to all steakholders. Namely:

1. Timeline - post by date and submit content for review by date

2. Content review - let influencers know if you would like to review the content and how they can best submit it with you alongside with their proposed caption.

3. Exclusivity - you can ask influencers to not work with a competitor for a minimum period after your collaboration has gone live. Careful though, strict exclusivity agreements come at a price tag.

4. Content rights - will you be repurposing the content on

your own social media, website or print?

5. Product delivery - if the influencer is to use a product or service for this collaboration clearly state how the product/service is best obtained.

6. Tags - provide the social media handle of your brand.

7. Hashtags & Brand tags - provide your campaign #s.

8. Disclosure - yes, always include #ad or similar!

It pays to give your influencers a certain degree of creative freedom. This will result in better performance of your in-fluencer marketing campaigns, as the message will be much more authentic and trustworthy for consumers which is vital.

It’s worth mentioning that effective and easy communica-tion also plays a decisive role for the success of a campaign. Ask if the influencer has any questions around the brief, if anything is unclear and be available for any concerns or clar-ifications. You can ask the influencer to share their thoughts around what content they are going to produce and adjust the creative direction of the post before any pictures were taken, avoiding duplication of work and frustrated influenc-ers.

LIGHTING/COLOUR MOOD

OTHER BRANDS

10


11


3. INFLUENCER SECTION: IDENTIFYING & RECRUITING THE RIGHT INFLUENCERS.There might be the perfect influencer, the one that ticks all the bosses. But most campaigns need more than one influencer and there simply isn’t enough time - compromise where possible but don’t lose track of your goals.

F inding the right influencer can be one of the most labour intensive and time consuming com-ponents of your influencer marketing strategy. Reach, resonance and audience need to be taken into consideration alongside your clearly defined campaign goals. The ‘right influencer’ doesn’t

necessarily mean getting the influencer with the largest following that your budget can allow. A strategic approach to influencer sourcing, takes into account the size of relevant audience rather than total reach. Relevance and resonance are key to finding the right influencer.

“73% of Influencers said, they put more effort into content creation when they’re passionate about the brand or product” [Source: ZINE Influencer Marketing Report].

In our 2018 influencer marketing report we surveyed 1300 consumers active on social media. Only 25% said they were likely to buy a product when someone with over a million followers recommends it, vs 78% who would buy a product based on the recommendation from someone they know and trust. To learn more about engaging a micro influencer strategy see this article.

While brand safety is a massive issue when it comes to in-fluencer marketing, your due diligence during the research stage should provide a certain degree of protection. This can be difficult to do manually at scale, but influencer marketing platforms like ZINE really excel in this area. Enabling you to vet (at scale):

• Engagement rates• Unique page views• Previous brand associations

• Previous campaigns• Most popular brands amongst followers• Audience likes

How to find Influencers Depending on your resources there are number of ways to find influencers - ranging from the manual labour to advanced technology.

SCROLL & SEARCH

Good ol’ fashioned Googling and searching social platforms. Set aside plenty of time for this as it involves conducting individual searches and maintaining the list on a spreadsheet. You may also need to find a lot more influencers than you intend to work with, as responses are not guaranteed.

INFLUENCER MARKETING AGENCIES

Can be good for the cash-rich-time-poor who want to work with macro-influencers and social celebrities. Influencer marketing agencies offer full campaign management. As you will not be liaising with the influencer directly, it is important to prove a thorough brief that your agent is able to convey to the influencers they select.

12


PROGRAMMATIC: These platforms an be great for cheaply sourcing micro-influencers at scale. Extra care should be given in providing campaign briefs as quality and compliance can be a little compromised with less experienced influenc-ers.

INFLUENCER MARKETING PLATFORMS

Can offer access and campaign management to influencers of varying sizes depending on the technology in question. As you will own the relationship with the influencer you are able to build your own network of content creators. ZINE even offers advanced follower analysis and engagement rates on all of our influencers - which paired with an easy to use search function, makes light work of influencer marketing sourcing.

How many influencers should I use? There is no universal, optimal number of influencers to use in a campaign.

The number of influencers you use for your campaign depends on your budget and the size of influencers which should be determined by your overall influencer marketing strategy.

Even though there is not straight answer to this question, we want to provide a framework that can help you narrow getting an answer. The number of influencers for a campaign can be derived from the total reach (e.g. the sum of followers/sub-scribers/visitors etc. of all influencers used) and the average size of influencers.

Example: If you have a target to reach 1 million people with your campaign and are leaning towards mid sized influencers with 50k -100k influence, your ideal number of influencers is between 10 - 20. If that seems too much you can reach out to larger influencers, if you need more content produced, you can look for more micro or even nano influencers.

Influencer pricing varies widely, depending on vertical, location, size and required channel or content type - so there is no easy multiple to apply. To get an initial feel for what prices could look like, you can use the multiples in our in-fluencer pricing guide a sponsored post pricing cheat sheet . After reaching out to a few influencers in your desired bracket you will get a better understanding of prices and you can adjust your overall reach target or size of influencer ac-cordingly.

13


Complete Transparency Ask your influencers to send you their ZINE digital media kit - whether or not you use ZINE. Influencers can get a media kit for free - they connect their social media channels and their media kit automatically updates with follower numbers, engagement rates, audience demographics and previous collaborations. They can even add in their rate card prices - which will help with negotiations…

What information to ask your influencers In order to for your influencer marketing strategy to be successful, you must ensure highly targeted content is reaching the right people.

At the minimum, you should get the following informa-tion from your influencers across each of the social media channels you intend to work with them on:

NUMBER OF FOLLOWERS

This you can easily see in their online profile however for blogs you should take care to ask for a screen shot of their google analytics for verification.

ENGAGEMENT RATES

Unless your influencer is using the ZINE media kit, calculating engagement rate is a manual job. See our guide on influencer engagement rates here.

AUDIENCE DEMOGRAPHICS

By this we mean average age, top countries, gender split and so on. These figures can even vary across the different social media platform for the same influenc-ers.

EXAMPLES OF PREVIOUS WORK

Seeing examples of previous work is a good way to vet your influencers work quality, which is imperative for brand safety.

14


4. NEGOTIATING PAYMENT - WHAT TO EXPECTBefore approaching your chosen influencers you should already have an idea of how much budget / product you can offer. Remember that not all influencers will necessarily accept product or event collaborations. In our previous influencer marketing report - Science, Strategy & Success, we interviewed over 1,000 influencers to get their view on payment.

18%would work on an influencer campaign in exchange for attendance at an event (for example, Fashion Week)

34%expect to be paid financially

31%would be happy with a product sample or gift (e.g, being able to keep the product that they reviewed)

I N F L U E N C E R S

Once you have negotiated pay, the pink elephant that 75% of brands and agencies miss, is sharing campaign goals and objectives with influencers [LINK ZINE 2018 Report]. Once this is done you can then get onto the nitty gritty of discussing campaign guidelines and legal compliance.

15


How much do influencers charge for sponsored posts?Fees for quality influencers are determined by a range of factors that can be easily calculated.

They are:

• Platform• Follower count• Engagement

We have created a sponsored post pricing cheat sheet to help both brands and influencers with pricing sponsored posts.

However, be aware that there are other factors that you won’t be able to calculate that will bare great impact on your cost per post - namely:

INDUSTRYRates vary per industry / account type eg. fashion models and photographer accounts will charge at a higher than fitness accounts.

BRAND AFFINITY

As per our influencer survey influencers are far more included to work with a brand they feel strongly about regardless of cost.

NUMBER OF POSTS/ SIZE OF CAMPAIGN

Running a series of campaigns with the same influencer will drive down the cost per post.

EXCLUSIVITY CONTRACTS

This goes without saying. Limiting an influencer from working with other brands comes at a premium.

RELEVANT REACH

Well trained influencers will have a good grasp of their audience. That means the more relevant their audience is to your brand, the more valuable they are to your brand / client.

POPULARITY OF INFLUENCER

Is your chosen influencer not only big on instagram but also happens to be a youtube superstar? Expect competition for time and content and higher prices compared to less known influencers of the same size.

As the industry matures marketers / PRs are increasingly seeing the value in doing more than working with influencers on a pay to play basis. Working with influencers as content creators rather than advertisers means you can work with influencers to create engaging content you can use for your traditional digital marketing / PR channels, and have an extended reach and engagement through your influencers networks.

Pay to play or content generationLook beyond the audience you can reach through influencers and unlock more value with targeted content creation.

16


5. MEASURING SUCCESSWith a wide variety of metrics utilised in the industry including reach, engagement, earned media value and all the click-to-buys, utm’s and tracking pixels, the ROI question cannot be solved or achieved without a solid who, what, how framework.

You can’t prove what’s not there, so first let’s focus on steps to achieve ROI and then how to measure it.

WHO?

WHAT?

We have found a lot of PRs and marketers don’t set or share specific goals for their influencer marketing campaigns. This is key to evaluate the success and subsequently ROI and also helps the influencer to tailor their content to that specific objective.

Awareness: Reach is a common metric, however should be redefined as relevant reach. An influencer with over 500k followers might look attractive, but what if only 5% of those followers are actually likely to be interested in your product or service?

Engagement: Smaller (micro)influencers typically have greater engagement on their content. A combination of smaller influencers will on average, provide you with a higher total engagement than one large influencer with the same reach.

Sales: If product sales is your ultimate goal and you are keen on measuring success, make sure you select the right platform for your campaign. Instagram is lagging behind in tracking functionality, leading to an often cumbersome detour

via the link in the influencers’ bio or referral codes - which is unlikely to catch all the traffic this post has generated.

Instagram does however provide a tracking link for paid posts - a useful tool for influencer campaigns.

The single most important factor to consider in influencer marketing is your target audience. ROI can only be achieved if your campaign reaches the right people and therefore finding the right influencer is key.

An influencer that is visually on brand and seems to associate with brands that fall into your landscape may seem like the best option at first sight, but digging deeper into their audience will reveal if this influencer can deliver ROI on your campaign.

HOW?

AWARENESS: In the absence of any monetary value via sales, set a benchmark value, eg. CPM from other digital marketing campaigns you run, and compare it to the CPM achieved by the influencer campaign.

EMV: From CPM you can calculate the Earned Media Value

17


A fantastic test to run, is the same / similar content via sponsored (your influencers), paid social, and organic posts. As the latter two you are doing from your business social media accounts, you will gain additional visibility.

SPONSORED VS PAID VS ORGANIC

(EMV) of the influencer campaign. This effectively compares the value of the reach you achieved through the campaign vs how much it would cost to buy these impressions through the social channel.

ENGAGEMENT: Measure EMV using engagement and CPE instead of reach.

SALES: Make sure you have adequate tracking technology, like UTM links, tracking pixels and/or referral codes that are set up as goals in your google analytics to track sales coming from a specific source. This way you will be able to attribute your total revenue from an influencer / campaign and calculate ROI the traditional way.

ZINE

www. zine.co [email protected]

Twitter: @zineco_officalFacebook: @zine.co.officalInstagram: @zine.co.officalLindekdIn: ZINE

SALES

JON LAWFORD

[email protected]

MARKETING/PR

MAEVE SUGRUE

[email protected]

Documents

INFLUENCER MARKETING FRAMEWORK FOR A PROFITABLE … Marketing Strategy/ZINE... · INFLUENCER MARKETING FRAMEWORK 1. DEFINING TARGET AUDIENCE & OBJECTIVES Defining and finding the