Not getting all you want from influencer marketing? Take these steps!

Not getting all you want from influencer marketing? Take these steps!

We've all heard of influencer marketing, but have you actually taken the right steps to achieve your goals with it?  A lot of people seem to be saying they aren't having success with influencer marketing, even when I'm over here pulling in a 400% ROI at times and claiming it's amazing   Now, it does take time to build up to a great ROI, I'm not a rookie at this by any means, and it did take me many attempts to learn how to boost my sales.  I would say I failed at least 10 times when I started with influencer marketing, but I didn't let that beat me and I kept refining my tactics to pull in traffic and sales.  Eventually, I got the right combination of influencers and ads to bring in the best conversions I could get right now.  I'll obviously be working on it all the time to boost my ROI, so I'm not exactly sure how high it can go

Everyone wants to try out influencer marketing, but they usually hear "it doesn't work, stay away!" but that's from the people who tried once and failed.  Hell, they could have tried a couple times but done the same exact thing and thought it just doesn't work, regardless of what they do lol   In this discussion I'll be going over a few things you can do in order to help you boost your conversions through influencer marketing, and they are:


Narrow down your influencer list
One of the main problems with this is that people pay just any influencer to post their ads, and that's never a good thing.  You'll want to find influencers within your niche and industry, but even then you still need to narrow down the list since not all of those accounts will be good to work with.  What you'll need to do is list all your potential influencers in a spread sheet and have the following columns:

• Followers - List the amount of followers or likes an account has.  This way you can estimate the potential of a post would have if you worked with this account.
• Comments - Search through the last 20 or 30 pictures or posts and see how many comments they have.  This will give you an estimate on how many comments you could get on your own posts, which could turn into sales.
• Likes - Almost every post will be able to get likes, especially on Facebook and Instagram, which is a good way to understand who is actually seeing your post and enjoying it.  People will click "like" more often when they actually enjoy something rather than taking the time to comment.  The only downside of this is there are "like" services out there so you'll need to take this with a grain of salt.
• How often the influencer is posting - If you are looking through profiles and seeing everyone posting 50 times a day, you might want to avoid working with them.  This is because your ad will quickly drop from their top few posts, and it won't get seen as much as you would like.  The good influencers know you want to have your post seen more, which will increase your conversions, so they won't post as much each day.

Narrowing your list is crucial when you want to have the best ROI from your marketing campaign.  You can't just hire any influencer and think you're going to make a ton of money.  Only go with the ones that have a good amount of followers, have natural engagement on their posts, and are not posting a ton every day because that will get your ad seen less.


Work with influencers that are willing to work with you
Obviously you'll want to pay them for their work, but some influencers will want to post specific things and want 100% creative control.  Usually this isn't a problem, unless they are posting things from your website that aren't best sellers or on sale, which will always have better conversions than other items or services on your website.  You know what sells best from your website, so only work with the influencers that will post what you want them to.  You can give them creative control of how it looks and what filters to use, because sometimes they only post a certain way and that's what their followers expect.  You can give them full creative control as long as they're willing to take your suggestions on what you want posted and how you want the caption to be written. 


Monitor your conversions using UTM tracking
When you're running some influencer marketing campaigns, you'll likely have multiple people posting for you in order to boost your sales.  If you're paying 10 different influencers on Instagram and 10 on Facebook, you'll want to be sure who is sending the most traffic and what amount of that traffic is converting into a sale.  With UTM parameters, you can add the influencers profile name, the post, source, and basically whatever you want to track where the URL is at that will notify you exactly who is sending the best traffic to you

I've used UTM tracking, without filtering my lists, and it basically did it for me   It helped me see who the "big" infleuncers are that don't convert well and who the micro influencers are that convert the best   You may think one influencer is going to generate you 5-10 sales a day with their posts because they have 1,000,000+ followers, but you could quickly notice that it send a decent amount of traffic but no sales.  On the other hand, you could be paying a micro influencers with 50,000+ followers a fraction of the price and they're actually the ones sending you traffic that is converting the 5-10 sales.  Basically, this means you can stop paying the bigger influencer and pay the micro influencer more to get additional ads out there to boost your sales   The only downside about doing it this way, without filtering your lists, you'll need some up front capital to test everything. 


Split test your ads
The only way to really know how well your ads can do is to split test them.  You'll rarely get a winning campaign right off the start, which means you'll need to edit your images to show different products or services and even edit your text that will convert the viewer into a sale.

I like to hire 10 different influencers at a time, using 10 different ads for products that are similar, then I'll track everything and see what works best.  Now, I can't get an accurate assessment of what works best with just one campaign like this, I had to do 5+ campaigns to make sure I knew exactly which influencers were the best for my investment.  I would rotate the ads between infleuncers and monitor everything along the way.  If the campaigns that were previously successful, stay successful the entire time, they will be my winners and I'll try to work out a monthly deal with these people


Work out monthly or yearly deals with influencers
After you've done everything above, you should have narrowed down your list pretty well, and now you'll want to save even more money on your influencer marketing campaign by spending more up front and saving in the long run.  Most influencers will gladly set up a monthly payment plan to post XX amount of times each week or month, which will help you out a lot since you don't have to send 3-5 payments a week to these people for their posts. 

Work out a yearly payment plan after you have some cash rolling in, and you've already been paying them for a monthly plan, because now you have a good business relationship up and running and you can likely get an even bigger discount   Think about it, if you're paying $10 a post and the infleuncer is posting 5 times a week, that turns into $50 a week or $200 a month.  If you were to pay them up front, for the entire month, they might accept $175 for everything.  Now, if you've been working with these infleuncers for a while, you can set up a 12 month agreement and pay less.  If you got them at $175 a month, that would be $2,100 for everything, but you can likely get them down to $1,800 for the year and save even more money   Full price would have been $2,400 but now you're paying $1,800 and saving $600 a year



In conclusion
Influencer marketing is extremely powerful if you figure out what you're doing and weed out the bad profiles.  The bigger profiles will be much more attractive, because you do some quick estimates and think you'll make a lot of money with each post, but that's not always the case.  You will have to do everything I said above to weed out the bad profiles, split test everything, and get some discounts with bigger commitments   Over time you'll get it right, and you'll be happy you stuck with it



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Thanks!

Tommy Carey