Goal-setting is the most important part of planning an influencer campaign. To make sure that your campaigns deliver the best results, it’s essential to clearly define your influencer marketing goals. Let’s take a look at 5 of the most important influencer marketing goals your brand should focus on.
1. Brand Awareness
Product Reviews. Influencers can feature your brand’s products or services in their posts. However, it needs to be more of a review in which the influencer shares their experience using your products. It must not sound salesy or pushy.
Contests or Giveaways. Collaborating with influencers to host giveaways and contests is a great way to gain more brand exposure. This exposes your brand to a new audience who can be your potential customers. Contests and giveaways can help to engage a large audience. If your influencer marketing goal is to boost brand awareness, you need to encourage sharing of your content using contests. Use branded hashtags to gain more exposure for your brand.
2. Traffic
Boosting your website traffic is an important influencer marketing goal that you must not overlook. But not all traffic is created equal. You should focus on getting traffic that is relevant and which can lead to conversions. To drive traffic to your website consistently, you should focus on creating engaging content. You can do this through:
Sponsored Blog Posts. Take advantage of every opportunity that allows you to engage a crowd. You can connect with bloggers and ask them to write blog posts featuring your brand. Not only can this be great to boost your visibility among their audience, but also a way to drive traffic to your website. So make sure that your influencers include links to your products or website on their posts. This will help you drive traffic, which is one of the most important marketing goals for a brand.
Guest Posts. You can also write guest posts for high-authority sites with a link back to your website. Respond to every query on the published post to engage readers and drive them to your website.
Sponsored Social Media Content. It’s the age of social media. In fact, 77% of population in the United States is using it today. Collaborating with social influencers to co-create high-quality, engaging content can increase traffic to your website manifold.
3. Sales and Lead Generation
The primary goal of all marketing efforts is to generate leads and drive sales and profits. If your influencer marketing goal is to drive sales, relying only on shoutouts or product reviews won’t work. You need to focus on strategies that can give you conversions. The first option is to collaborate with celebrities and link your products to their social content. Some social media services enable users to tag links to images and others to add links to description texts.
Affiliate Marketing and Discount Codes. You should come up with campaigns that will benefit both the influencer and their followers (potential customers). The best idea is to meet this influencer marketing goal is to make use of affiliate marketing and discount codes. This campaign would involve a custom discount code that can encourage consumers to make a purchase. You can also provide your influencers with affiliate links that will help you track sales driven by them. Then, you can offer commissions to the influencers for every sale they drive.
Collective Shoutouts on Instagram. 92% of marketers believe Instagram to be the most effective social media platform for influencer marketing. Collaborating with multiple Instagrammers to promote your products can generate more leads and drive extensive sales in a short span of time. So partner with influencers whose audience resonates with your brand and may buy your products.
4. Social Media Followers and Engagement
When you focus on increasing brand awareness, you may also see an increase in your social followers and engagement. It is easy to combine these two influencer marketing goals together as they complement each other.
Takeovers. A takeover is an effective influencer campaign where you let an influencer take over your social media profile for a short period of time. This is a great way to strengthen your relationship with your influencers and get their audience to engage with your brand. A successful takeover will help you meet multiple influencer marketing goals. However, before you attempt a takeover, make sure that you have worked with the influencer for a few campaigns and can trust them. The more trust you build with your influencers, the better results you can expect.
Brand Ambassadors. Look at your current influencer collaborations to spot the ones who share the same beliefs as you. If you have worked with them on several good campaigns, you should think of establishing a meaningful, long-term partnership. Make them your brand ambassadors – the faces of your brand. This will help to make them feel more valued. And this will directly reflect on their work too. Brand ambassador programs can drive more followers and increase engagement. They will provide great support to help you achieve your influencer marketing goals.
5. Reputation
Every brand wants to strengthen their brand image and earn a good reputation among their potential customers. The best way to do this is to build meaningful partnerships with influencers. Consumers trust their peers, friends, and their favorite influencers. It is important for brands to get their influencers to trust them. These influencers will then help you convert people into loyal customers for your brand. If building reputation is your influencer marketing goal, you should think of ways to make your influencers and their audience feel valued. This will help you strengthen your bond and thereby, build a good reputation.
Events. One effective way to make your influencers feel valued is to host an event for them. You can send invites to influencers who have done a good job with campaigns. It will make them feel appreciated and will help you make a stronger connection with them. Hosting an event can be an opportunity to create more engaging content for your brand. With influencers talking about being a part of the event, your brand will gain greater exposure.
Conclusions
With clear objectives you are better able to find the right influencers for your campaign, whether they are nano influencers, micro influencers, macro influencers or mega influencers. The right influencer marketing objectives will also help you align your campaigns to the right social media channels and discover the influencers that will best represent your brand.