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 your 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 every single day. And according to a report, in 2020, 15 and a half new users started using social media every second, which is more than 1.3 million people every day.
Image via We Are Social
Implementing a plan to improve your content strategy is extremely important for the success of businesses today. And with influencer marketing as part of your content strategy, you can amplify your messages to a very niche audience.
The word, influencer, itself 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 includes their honest feedback about products and brands.
And compared to celebrity endorsements, influencer marketing connects directly with readers. Brands can easily win consumer trust provided the influencer is a specialist in the specific niche.
As marketers and brands continue to stretch their budget for influencer campaigns, we’d like to share some tips to improve your content strategy with influencer marketing.
Table of Contents
7 Ways to Improve Your Content Strategy with Influencer Marketing Campaigns
According to marketers, working with influencer marketing can improve your content strategy. More than 50% say it outperforms their branded content.
They also report that when they share this influencer content on other social platforms, it outperforms their branded content.
Image via Linqia
But how can you improve your content strategy with influencer marketing?
1. Focus on Your Goal
So you’ve decided to go ahead with influencer marketing, and you are convinced about the ROI (return on investment). However, before you launch influencer campaigns that improve your content strategy, you need to finalize your goal.
Ask yourself:
- What type of content do you want to create?
- Do you want to engage and create a desire to purchase your products?
- Are you looking for branding and visibility?
- Do you want more shares?
- Are you only looking for engagement?
This should be your first step when you want to improve your 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 your content strategy with the right influencer.
But, with the noise on social media, how can you find influencers?
You need to use the right 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.
Armed with accurate data at the click of a button, you can find 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 mass adoption of social media, you might come across many different influencer personas close to your brand but with a difference in their audience reach.
Some are social media stars with a huge fan following and who enjoy celebrity status. Also labeled as macro-influencers, they have a strong personal branding and more PR value with a category-specific reference such as lifestyle, for instance.
Others are known as micro-influencers, who target a niche audience and have a relatively smaller number of followers. They try to connect with their audiences on a personal level and enjoy a diverse reach on chosen platforms.
Wondering how this would work?
H&M is a popular fashion brand you can benchmark when you want to improve your content strategy with influencer marketing.
They partnered with several Instagram influencers in a campaign dubbed #HMLeague. These influencers then contributed by curating, styling, and creating content as they wore their favorite pieces from the brand.
Image via H&M
You can look out for bloggers, YouTubers, or an all-around social media star based on your requirements. However, ensure your influencer outreach features influencers with relevant content, influence, and an audience that would love your products or services.
3. Decide on the Content-Type
Now that you have identified the influencer, it’s time to think about the type of content you want created for your campaign.
And when you want to improve your 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?
With influencer marketing, you can let the influencer tell his/her own story about your brand in a captivating manner.
Image via Instagram
Check out how @michellerandolp tells an intriguing story about her experience with Sephora’s sunscreen above. By telling her story, she helps build awareness, drive engagement, and boost the brand’s presence online.
Does your brand require a review?
You can improve your content strategy by winning the trust of users with influencer marketing 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.
For example, this unboxing and honest review video done by Justine Ezarik, a gaming influencer that drove lots of engagement.
Image via YouTube
Will a demo video best explain your product or service?
Another way to improve your content strategy with influencer marketing is through demos.
Demos by influencers are a great way to showcase how your product or service can be used. 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 your 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
Your target audience also dictates the type of influencer you need.
A deeper understanding of your customer personas is critical for choosing the best influencers and content creation.
A customer persona also makes it easy for you to tailor your content and messaging to the right audience.
What’s more?
Building on a customer persona helps you understand the specific needs, interests, backgrounds, etc. of your buyers.
And guess what?
There are many free templates that can help you conduct research, surveys, and more to get a firm grip on 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 your content strategy 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.
Keep an eye on popular and relevant hashtags if you want to improve your 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?
Bear in mind ideal buyers and the platforms they frequent online if you want to improve your content strategy with influencer marketing. A monthly calendar is also a must for all your content requirements.
5. Measure Your ROI
It’s great to get started with influencer marketing, but you also need to measure if the tactics you implement help improve your content strategy ROI.
What is ROI?
It’s the return on investment for your campaign.
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 your content strategy, you need to track and measure your influencer’s reach, impressions, traffic to your site, campaign engagement (clicks, reactions, shares), comments, and more.
Marketing tools such as BuzzSumo give an accurate overview of the performance of your influencers’ posts.
Once you’ve partnered with the right influencers, you also need to track your demographics and target audience KPIs. These are vital to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.
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 to track campaign data by adding UTM parameters to the URLs used by your influencers. UTM codes add more value to your campaigns by giving you information about every link.
Image via Google Campaign URL Builder
Common metrics include website visits, affiliate links, referral visitors, social media reach, and the buzz created online.
This helps you to create a benchmark for your 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 their brand with influencer marketing. Today, their branded hashtag #danielwellington has over 2 million posts, and their Instagram account now has 4.9 million followers.
Their success with influencer marketing shows how carefully constructed campaigns can bring in an astonishing number of sales and brand visibility.
And as you try to improve your 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 your content strategy got to do with budgets?
Well, your budget will help you decide the type of campaigns to be run, the frequency, the context, the medium, and more. Talk with your influencer to chalk out 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.
And remember your costs can include a whole 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 your content strategy, you need to build it around a budget if you do not have flexibility in your spendings. 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
You’ll definitely get the best results when trying to improve your content strategy with influencer marketing if you keep an eye on the budget.
7. Collaborate and Build Relationships
It’s not enough to hand over the campaign to the influencer when you want to improve your 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 improve your content strategy. Furthermore,you don’t want random posts but content that creates conversations.
Why does collaboration matter when trying to improve your content strategy with influencer marketing?
By building a great relationship with your influencers, they also get deeper insights into your customer base and brand.
This makes it easier for the influencer as well as your brand to come up with a content strategy that works best for the product or service you are offering.
Image via Mediakix
Every influencer has their own individual style and preferred platform. And 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.
FAQs
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
- Defineinfluencerr requirements
- Find influencers
- Create content
- Legalize agreement
- Monitor campaign
For more details on implementing each of 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 create a content strategy with influencer marketing?
A. Here is how to improve your 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. It details what you want to create, how you will create it, and why. It’s a place 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 follower 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
- Chose 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. Here is how working with influencers can improve your content strategy. They can 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.
And with influencer marketing, you can improve your content strategy and set your brand apart from your competitors. It also becomes easy to get your message heard amidst the crowd.
Use a combination of 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 your content strategy with influencer marketing? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
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