3 Affordable Influencer Marketing Strategies You Should Use

Social Influencers have become one of the most talked-about marketing channels in recent years, but not a lot of small businesses’ are including influencer marketing strategies in their plans. With their large followings on various social channels, these minor celebs are considered by their followers to be ‘experts’ in their fields. Whether it be a beauty vlogger on YouTube, a model on Instagram, a public speaker on Linkedln or even just the latest contestant on Love Island. These individuals have gained through one way or another a large amount of trust with their followings, that they know what’s best.

This trust combined with a large following of people who are actively interested in that Individuals field, means that utilizing Influencers to market your products has been classified as one of the most effective methods to achieve high levels of ROI where on average £6.50 is produced for every £1 spent with an effective campaign. With 74% of consumers reporting their buying decisions are influenced by social media, its clear to see why the ROI has the potential of people so high by utilizing these platforms.

Gifting Free Products

If your product could do with a shout out online, then gifting that influencer your products or services is a very low-cost strategy to get their attention. Content creators will often welcome these gifts gladly and may, in return, create content recommending your product. Keep in mind that just sending them the gift is not a guarantee they will showcase it, so may sure you’re sending them your best stuff to get them talking! Start the conversation through their preferred social channel and let them know what it is you’d like to send them! Top Tip: Always remember to include a letter, note or card inside the package so they know who to praise should it get them talking!

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing doesn’t demand funding to achieve results. By creating your own content within your marketing strategy that is relevant and related to the influencers can attract the content creator to your products/services. The simple act of sharing one of your blog posts they found engaging could see a surge in blog posts subscriptions or even purchases. Engage in conversations with the influencers online, don’t force your services but act like you are on their level as an industry expert and engage with the community. Build it until people are advocating your brand naturally through the content you are producing.

Guest Posting Blogs

Posting guest blogs on a creator’s site is a great way to link back to your own content and have access to a large pool of new consumers for your business. Once you are in the door you will then be able to continue to build a strong relationship with the creator and hopefully continue to post on their site. Don’t forget to give your own blog site some love whilst your at it, and ask if they would like to do the same on yours. Top Tips on Guest Blog Writing.

Tracking

Determining the ROI for influencer marketing campaigns is considered by most to be the most difficult part of the process, and dependent on what the goal of your campaign is will depend on how best to track the benefits of your relationship with the creator.

Here are some of our favorite ways to track the success of your campaign based on your goal:

Community Awareness

The goal of an awareness generating campaign is to do exactly that, to generate awareness in the community for your brand. Key figures to track for an awareness campaign are:

• Engagements with the featured posts/articles

• Increase in follower count that aligns with the influencer’s activity with your brand

• Google Analytics Acquisition allows you to track the social leads generated to your site

• A long-term tracking would be the engagement rates on your own posts, are the following you are gaining from these campaigns engaging with your own content or are the passive followers? This is also heavily dependent on the quality of your own content though.

Sales

By making good use of a specific landing page and the Google Analytics Goals function, you can easily track how many sales were directly caused through the recommendation of a said influencer campaign. Try A/B testing on the landing page to make sure you are consistently optimizing your conversion funnel for your new stream of incoming potential sales. Another useful tool is Google URL Builder in tracking the flow-through from social media to your site. Top Tip: If you create a strong partnership with an influencer you can use affiliate links, promo codes and UTM parameters to help measure the direct success from their account.

Market Growth

If it is a specific type of the market you are trying to access you can use the Google Analytics Demographics Report to show the increase/decrease in your desired target market for your site. If you are trying to target over 18 full-time students, and even though the click-through rate on the post is high, engagement is high but conversions are low, it may be because the posts highest engagement is coming from under 18’s, which isn’t useful or cost-effective.

In Conclusion; Influencer marketing isn’t just for big companies. It’s a marketing method that can be implemented in quite a few industries on various platforms and doesn’t always have to involve a large resource pool to get started. So, by implementing one of the methods above, and making sure you have the means to track its success, it may be exactly what your marketing plan needs!