How to Improve Content Strategy with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is already on the rise as it opens up new channels for brands to connect with customers. And as a visionary marketer, you need to know how to improve content strategy with influencer marketing.

And most importantly?

Understand the power of influencers as the entire world has moved online to social media platforms.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and more have users hooked daily. According to a recent report, 5.2 billion people use social media, which is about 63.8% of the world’s population.

Image via We Are Social

That’s why implementing a plan that helps improve content strategy with influencer marketing is vital for the success of businesses today. Indeed, with influencer marketing as part of your content strategy, you can amplify your messages to extremely niche audiences.

The word influencer holds power, value, and weight because these are people who have a direct influence on their followers.

What’s more?

Consumers have grown tired of paid ads over the years.

However, influencers know how to engage and communicate with their audience on their chosen social media platforms. They are savvy, not very different from celebrities, and are known for their integrity.

Best of all?

Online users look up to social media influencers for their engaging posts, which often include their honest feedback about products and brands.

Unlike celebrity endorsements, influencer marketing connects directly with readers. Provided the influencer is a specialist in the specific niche, brands can easily win consumer trust.

As marketers and brands continue to stretch their budgets for influencer marketing campaigns, we’d like to share some tips to improve content strategy with influencer marketing.

7 Ways to Improve Content Strategy with Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Marketers believe that using influencer campaigns can improve your content strategy. Over 80% say it’s an effective form of marketing. As a result, 75% of them have increased the content they create and distribute.

But how can you improve content strategy with influencer marketing?

1. Focus on Your Goal

So, you’ve decided to pursue influencer marketing and are convinced of its ROI (return on investment). However, to improve content strategy with influencer marketing, you need to finalize your goal before launching campaigns.

Ask yourself:

1. What type of content do you want to create?
2. Do you want to engage and create a desire to purchase your products?
3. Are you looking for branding and visibility?
4. Do you want more shares?
5. Are you only looking for engagement?

This should be your first step when you want to improve content strategy with influencer marketing. It will also help you determine KPIs (key performance indicators) you can use to measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign.

2. Find a Niche Influencer

You can improve content strategy with influencer marketing by scouting for the right influencer.

But, with the noise on social media, how can you find influencers?

You need to use the right influencer marketing tools to select an appropriate influencer best suited for your brand.

Luckily, you have access to many powerful marketing tools such as DeepSocial, Traackr, and many others that are either free or available on a freemium basis.

You can also find suitable influencers for your brand using an influencer marketing hub like Grin or Klear.

Armed with accurate data at the click of a button, you can find both macro and micro influencers that focus on a niche closest to your products or services.

Follow their social media profiles, understand what they post, read reactions, and see what sets them apart. Additionally, ensure potential influencers you choose are industry experts in their chosen fields.

But how do you set them apart?

With the widespread adoption of social media, you'll encounter various influencer personas that align with your brand, each with a different level of audience reach.

Some celebrity influencers boast millions of followers across social media platforms. These mega-influencers have a strong personal brand and significant PR value, often focusing on specific categories like lifestyle.

There are macro-influencers whose follower counts range from 100,000 to one million. These influencers have established their credibility and gained recognition as specialists in specific fields, like fitness or fashion.

Another category in the influencer marketing industry is micro-influencers. They focus on building personal connections with their audiences and tend to have a more diverse but highly engaged reach on their selected platforms.

Lastly, the nano-influencers are a small but effective solution for a successful influencer campaign. They’ve got influence within their local community, which is great for increasing brand awareness.

They’re your “everyday people” who use products and services and then share the results with family and friends. Despite having fewer than a thousand followers, their audience trusts them for fostering genuine connections.

Wondering how this would work?

You can benchmark Allbirds, a popular sustainable shoe brand, to enhance your content strategy with influencer marketing.

It partners with several Instagram influencers, who in turn contribute by curating, styling, and creating content as they wear their favorite pieces from the brand.

Image via Instagram

You can look out for bloggers, YouTubers, or an all-around social media star, based on your requirements, to improve content strategy with influencer marketing.

However, ensure your influencer outreach features influencers with relevant content, influence, and an audience that would love your products or services.

Note: Developing a solid influencer marketing strategy involves understanding the unique strengths of each type of influencer. Mega influencers offer massive reach, micro-influencers provide targeted engagement, and nano-influencers deliver authentic user-generated content.

3. Decide on the Content-Type

Now that you have identified the types of influencers, it’s time to think about the type of content you want created for your campaign.

When you want to improve content strategy with influencer marketing, you can either create content yourself, let influencers create content, or collaborate.

But how do you handle content?

Ask yourself these questions:

Do you want the influencer to create the content?

An excellent way to improve content strategy with influencer marketing is by letting influencers tell their own stories about your brand in a captivating manner.

Check out how @marthaa__k shares her experience before and after using Olay Retinol for all skin types. Her story can help build awareness, drive engagement, and boost the brand’s online presence.

Image via Instagram

Does your brand require a review?

You can improve content strategy with influencer marketing by winning customers' trust through genuine reviews. An honest and detailed review works better when your influencer has a fan following of your target consumers.

For example, if you have a salon, you can invite the influencer to review your services and shoot a quick video that outlines their experience. This is useful to drive conversions.

Check out this unboxing and honest review video by social media gadgets guru Marques Brownlee, which generated a lot of engagement.

Image via YouTube

Will a demo video best explain your product or service?

Another way to improve content strategy with influencer marketing is through demos.

Demonstrating the use of your product or service through demos is an effective influencer marketing strategy. Tutorials, DIYs, and easy hacks are a great way to connect with the influencer’s audience, build trust, and drive conversions.

Would an interview format create the most buzz for your brand?

You can also improve content strategy with influencer marketing through interviews.

The interview format is largely useful when you have the bandwidth to collaborate with various influencers. It can be a live stream, a blog post, or an interview. Ask questions audiences would like to know the answers to.

You can also opt for sponsored posts, guest posts, reviews, brand mentions, event coverage, and affiliate links to promote your brand.

4. Focus on Your Target Audience

When planning to improve content strategy with influencer marketing, your target audience dictates the type of influencer you need.

Understanding your customer personas is critical for choosing the best influencers and content creation.

A customer persona also makes it easy to tailor content and brand messaging to the right audience.

What’s more?

Building on a customer persona helps you understand the specific needs, interests, and backgrounds of your buyers.

And guess what?

There are many free templates that can help you conduct research, surveys, and other activities to establish a firm grasp on the buyer persona.

This will help you to:

• Craft the right message
• Choose an influencer with an audience similar to your target group

Social media marketing is all about engagement, and you can improve content strategy with influencer marketing if you align it with your company’s values. You need to tell a compelling story that is relevant to your targeted audience and publish it in the right place for the right audience.

For example, Instagram posts need higher visual appeal. Facebook posts may work better with short video content, eye-catching images, and valuable content that tells a story.

Monitor popular and relevant hashtags if you want to improve content strategy with influencer marketing.

Additionally, ensure it’s packaged right if you want to grow your brand with influencer marketing campaigns and connect with your audience.

And the secret tactic?

To improve content strategy with influencer marketing, consider the ideal buyers and the platforms they frequently visit online. A monthly content calendar is also essential to stay organized and meet all your content needs.

5. Measure Your ROI

It’s great to get started with influencer marketing, but you also need to measure your results. Find out whether your techniques to improve content strategy with influencer marketing have increased your return on investment (ROI).

Are your campaigns helping you achieve your goals?

What can you do better to improve your message?

All of this and much more will show when you measure your ROI.

But what can you measure when dealing with influencer marketing campaigns?

To improve content strategy with influencer marketing, you need to track and measure your influencer’s reach, impressions, traffic to your site, campaign engagement (clicks, reactions, shares), comments, and more.

However, a successful influencer marketing strategy goes beyond measuring simple metrics. You should track key metrics like brand sentiment and the quality of audience engagement.

In fact, advanced influencer marketing strategies include metrics that capture immediate campaign results and potential long-term brand impact. Marketing tools such as BuzzSumo can give an accurate overview of your influencers’ posts' performance.

Once you’ve partnered with the right influencers, analyze audience demographics and key performance indicators (KPIs), such as click-through rate, brand mention volume, and conversion rate. These are vital to determining the effectiveness of your influencer partnerships.

Use the Google Analytics Demographics report to gauge whether your message reaches the right audience. Google Analytics is also a fantastic tool to evaluate social media accounts with the most potential leads.

The Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder is handy for tracking campaign data by adding UTM parameters to the URLs used by your influencers. UTM codes add more value to your social media marketing campaign by providing information about every link.

Image via Google Campaign URL Builder

Some key metrics to improve content strategy with influencer marketing, include website visits, affiliate links, referral visitors, social media reach, and the buzz created online.

This helps you create a benchmark for future campaigns, evaluate your influencer’s brand worth, and study data that measures many aspects of your campaign.

Image via Instagram

For example, Daniel Wellington made a smart decision to promote its brand and improve content strategy with influencer marketing. Today, the branded hashtag #danielwellington has two million posts, and its Instagram account now has over four million followers.

The brand's success with influencer marketing shows how carefully constructed influencer marketing campaigns can increase sales and brand visibility.

As you try to improve content strategy with influencer marketing, you need to constantly track how well they help you build your brand or achieve your goals. A campaign without precise measurement of results is like leaving the job half-done. So, measure it right.

6. Budget Planning

What has trying to improve content strategy with influencer marketing got to do with budgets?

Your budget will help you decide the type of campaigns to run, the frequency, the context, the medium, and more. Talk with your influencer to create a plan.

Furthermore, a single post without any planning due to your budget constraints would have no effect on your brand in the long run. So, determine your investments and the kind of return you expect.

Remember that your costs can include a wide range of activities. Your influencer should also include all the costs in the final plan.

Then, plan your strategy with smaller messages, monthly posts, or large campaigns according to your budget.

Note: To improve content strategy with influencer marketing, it's essential to structure it around a budget, especially if your spending is limited. For example, you can offer an influencer a free service to get your review featured on their pages.

For example, Nominal didn’t have the budget to pay any influencer to promote their jewelry. They would approach influencers who sent them quotes they couldn’t afford, but they didn’t stop at that.

Instead, they would tell the influencer they don’t have that budget but send them jewelry as a gift. In the end, the influencers would tag them on their posts if they really loved the items or tag them in the comment section when followers questioned their source.

Best of all?

They would ask for permission to repost the influencer’s content, and this improved their content strategy.

Image via Instagram

If you closely monitor your budget, you'll undoubtedly achieve the best results when attempting to improve your content strategy with influencer marketing.

7. Collaborate and Build Relationships

It’s not enough to hand over the campaign to the influencer when you want to improve content strategy with influencer marketing.

Get in touch, review the content, and ideate to get the best results.

Develop good relationships with your influencers, ensure your brand message is clear, and that the influencer feels positive about your brand.

Why is this?

Building a relationship will help generate better ideas that can improve content strategy with influencer marketing. Furthermore, you don’t want random posts but content that creates conversations.

Why does collaboration matter when trying to improve content strategy with influencer marketing?

Building great relationships with your influencers also gives them deeper insights into your customer base and brand values.

This makes it easier for the influencer and your brand to develop a content strategy best suited to your product or service.

Image via Instagram

When you also develop long-term relationships with influencers, it transforms transactional interactions into strategic brand partnerships.

Every influencer has an individual style and preferred platform. When you understand them better, you can position your brand effectively in front of your target audience.

Best of all?

The influencer can incorporate your sponsored content into their daily messages. And this is a subtle way of driving social traffic and positioning the brand without advertising it directly to its followers.

To improve content strategy with influencer marketing, consider creating an influencer program where top-performing influencers become brand ambassadors. This can provide consistent, authentic representation across multiple influencer marketing campaigns.

FAQ

Q1. How do you develop an influencer marketing strategy?

A. Follow these steps when creating your influencer marketing strategy:

• Define clear goals
• Assign KPIs
• Know your audience
• Choose channels
• Define influencerr requirements
• Find influencers
• Create content
• Legalize agreement
• Monitor campaign

For more details on implementing these steps, check out this post on creating an influencer strategy.

Q2. What is the goal of content marketing?

A. Some content marketing goals include:

• Build audience trust
• Attract new customers
• Grow thought leadership
• Grow loyalty with current customers
• Boost sales

Q3. How do you improve content strategy with influencer marketing?

A. Here is how to improve content strategy with influencer marketing:

• Focus on goals
• Find niche influencer
• Choose content type
• Identify target audience
• Plan budget
• Implement strategy
• Measure ROI

Q4. What is a content strategy framework?

A. The content strategy framework details what you want to create, how you will create it, and why. It’s where you outline your brand vision, the channels you will use, and the objectives you want to meet with your content marketing efforts.

Q5. How do you measure influencers in marketing?

A. Here is how to track performance with influencer marketing:

• Measure content quality
• Track engagement
• Track followers reach
• Measure channel performance
• Analyze sales through tracking links

Q6. How do you develop a content marketing strategy?

A. Use these steps to improve your content strategy:

• Define goals
• Research ideal audience
• Set up a blog
• Update current content
• Brainstorm content ideas
• Identify channels
• Choose content formats
• Write content and publish
• Monitor performance

For more information on each of these steps, check out this post on creating a content strategy.

Q7. How do you maximize your influencer strategy?

A. Use these strategies to boost the results you get with influencer marketing efforts:

• Build campaigns around goals
• Work with relevant influencers
• Collaborate with influencers who can improve your content strategy
• Use more than one platform
• Re-use influencer content

Q8. How can influencers revive your content marketing?

A. You can improve content strategy with influencer marketing. You only need to get the right influencer tol help you:

• Increase reach
• Drive website traffic
• Generate more leads
• Build audience trust
• Grow social following
• Boost sales

Run An Influencer Marketing Campaign That Amplifies Your Content Today!

As you can see, influencer marketing is growing and is here to stay.

You can confidently improve content strategy with influencer marketing and set your brand apart from your competitors. It also becomes easy to get your message heard amidst the crowd.

Combine the above crucial steps to improve your content strategy, connect with the right audience, and build your brand with influencer marketing.

And most importantly?

Use the right monitoring tools, smart technologies, and innovative strategies to bring your product or service directly before your target audience.

You can also use these tools and technologies to track performance with influencer marketing and whether your tactics help improve your content strategy.

What have you done differently with influencer marketing campaigns? Do you have more insights on how to improve content strategy with influencer marketing? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.