Influencer marketing has gained immense popularity over the past few years. From 2017 to 2018, the number of searches for the term, “influencer marketing” increased by 71.7%. Also, it is predicted that by 2020, brands will be spending $5 billion to $10 billion on influencer marketing.

The data clearly indicates that brands have shifted from traditional forms of marketing to leveraging influencers. High-quality content has always been a vital element in creating a successful influencer marketing campaign. Your influencers will create entertaining and valuable content that isn’t too promotional and which can attract and win over your target audience.

In addition to quality content, there are other important elements that you need to consider when creating an influencer marketing campaign. This post will show you five ways to create an effective influencer marketing strategy.

Let’s get started.

1. Define Goals for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

One type of influencer marketing strategy will not fit every brand’s requirement. To run a successful influencer marketing campaign, it’s important that you know exactly why you want to run it. What are the goals that you want to achieve through influencer marketing?

It’s a prerequisite that you have answers to these questions before you start a campaign. The answers are the foundation of your entire campaign and will help you build your campaign effectively.

However, you shouldn’t have a big laundry list of goals either. This will simply create more confusion rather than guiding you. So, it’s better to take baby steps and focus on a couple of goals at a time to achieve your overall organizational goals.

2. Identify a Target Market

Now that you have identified your influencer marketing goals, you need to identify your target market. This might sound like a very obvious step, but if not done correctly, the entire campaign may not be successful. It is a huge factor in the success of your influencer marketing campaign. 

Once you identify your target audience, it will help you select the most relevant influencers. It’s important that the followers of your potential influencers are also your target audience. This means they should share the same characteristics as your target audience. 

Identifying your target audience will also help you pick a relevant and effective social media platform to execute your campaign. You will learn more about this in the following points.

3. Identifying and Collaborating with Relevant Influencers

Next comes the most important element in the success of an influencer marketing campaign – identifying and collaborating with relevant influencers. The main responsibility of an influencer is to reach out to your target audience and raise awareness for your brand.

However, it’s equally challenging to find a suitable influencer for your campaign. But it’ll be a little easier to find relevant influencers when you consider the goals of your campaign. Also, look for the following characteristics in your potential influencer to make your hunt easier:

• The demographics of your target audience should be similar to the followers of your potential influencer.
• Ensure that the potential influencer is an expert in your niche. 
• Also, they should have a decent amount of followers on their social media accounts.
• Review their posts to measure the authenticity of your potential influencer. Authentic posts will create a genuine impact on your target audience.
• You also need to calculate the engagement rate of your potential influencers. This will help you understand just how well they can engage their followers. The higher the engagement rate, the better your campaign performance.

In addition to this, you can also use tools to find influencers suitable for your marketing campaign. There are tools like Grin, which allows you to use filters like category, reach, engagement, and many more to find suitable influencers.

It’s important that you invest your time and effort into identifying relevant influencers for your influencer marketing campaign, as this can make or break your entire campaign.

4. Select the Right Social Media Platform

Did you know that 91% of marketers use Instagram for their influencer marketing campaigns? But that doesn’t mean you should use the same social media platform unless it’s absolutely right for you. You need to find out which social platforms would be suitable for your campaign.

The selection of the social media platform for your campaign entirely depends on your target audience. You need to identify the social platform where your target audience spends most of their time. It also depends on the type of content you want to post and share with your target audience.

Every social platform is suitable for a different type of content and targets a different set of audience. So pay close attention when selecting social media platforms for your campaigns.

5. Track and Monitor Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

It’s important that you track and monitor your influencer marketing campaigns. This will help you understand whether or not your campaign is running successfully and generating expected outcomes. It also gives you an opportunity to make necessary changes to your strategy to generate the desired results.

You need to monitor the entire campaign against the goals you decided upon at the beginning of your campaign. In addition to this, you should also evaluate the performance of your influencers. Collect data like follower growth rate, increase in sales, number of views generated, engagement rate, etc. to evaluate your influencers. 

The evaluation will give you a clear picture of your campaign’s impact on your target audience. And you can improve or strengthen your influencer marketing strategy accordingly.

Final Thoughts

Creating a successful influencer marketing campaign might seem easy, but it’s not. There are several aspects that you should consider for an effective influencer marketing campaign. It includes identifying relevant influencers, selecting the right social media platforms, defining goals, and identifying your target audience.

It is also important that you monitor and evaluate the performance of your influencers and the entire campaign. This will help you make adjustments as needed to improve your results.

Do you know of any other tips to create an effective influencer marketing strategy? If so, please feel free to comment.

The post 5 Ways to Create an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy appeared first on SiteProNews.

Influencer marketing has gained immense popularity over the past few years. From 2017 to 2018, the number of searches for the term, “influencer marketing” increased by 71.7%. Also, it is predicted that by 2020, brands will be spending $5 billion to $10 billion on influencer marketing.

The data clearly indicates that brands have shifted from traditional forms of marketing to leveraging influencers. High-quality content has always been a vital element in creating a successful influencer marketing campaign. Your influencers will create entertaining and valuable content that isn’t too promotional and which can attract and win over your target audience.

In addition to quality content, there are other important elements that you need to consider when creating an influencer marketing campaign. This post will show you five ways to create an effective influencer marketing strategy.

Let’s get started.

1. Define Goals for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

One type of influencer marketing strategy will not fit every brand’s requirement. To run a successful influencer marketing campaign, it’s important that you know exactly why you want to run it. What are the goals that you want to achieve through influencer marketing?

It’s a prerequisite that you have answers to these questions before you start a campaign. The answers are the foundation of your entire campaign and will help you build your campaign effectively.

However, you shouldn’t have a big laundry list of goals either. This will simply create more confusion rather than guiding you. So, it’s better to take baby steps and focus on a couple of goals at a time to achieve your overall organizational goals.

2. Identify a Target Market

Now that you have identified your influencer marketing goals, you need to identify your target market. This might sound like a very obvious step, but if not done correctly, the entire campaign may not be successful. It is a huge factor in the success of your influencer marketing campaign. 

Once you identify your target audience, it will help you select the most relevant influencers. It’s important that the followers of your potential influencers are also your target audience. This means they should share the same characteristics as your target audience. 

Identifying your target audience will also help you pick a relevant and effective social media platform to execute your campaign. You will learn more about this in the following points.

3. Identifying and Collaborating with Relevant Influencers

Next comes the most important element in the success of an influencer marketing campaign – identifying and collaborating with relevant influencers. The main responsibility of an influencer is to reach out to your target audience and raise awareness for your brand.

However, it’s equally challenging to find a suitable influencer for your campaign. But it’ll be a little easier to find relevant influencers when you consider the goals of your campaign. Also, look for the following characteristics in your potential influencer to make your hunt easier:

• The demographics of your target audience should be similar to the followers of your potential influencer.
• Ensure that the potential influencer is an expert in your niche. 
• Also, they should have a decent number of followers on their social media accounts.
• Review their posts to measure the authenticity of your potential influencer. Authentic posts will create a genuine impact on your target audience.
• You also need to calculate the engagement rate of your potential influencers. This will help you understand just how well they can engage their followers. The higher the engagement rate, the better your campaign performance.

In addition to this, you can also use tools to find influencers suitable for your marketing campaign. There are tools like Grin, which allows you to use filters like category, reach, engagement, and many more to find suitable influencers.

It’s important that you invest your time and effort into identifying relevant influencers for your influencer marketing campaign because this can make or break your entire campaign.

4. Select the Right Social Media Platform

Did you know that 91% of marketers use Instagram for their influencer marketing campaigns? But that doesn’t mean you should use the same social media platform unless it’s absolutely right for you. You need to find out which social platforms would be suitable for your campaign. 

The selection of the social media platform for your campaign entirely depends on your target audience. You need to identify the social platform where your target audience spends most of their time. It also depends on the type of content you want to post and share with your target audience.

Every social platform is suitable for a different type of content and targets a different set of audience. So pay close attention when selecting social media platforms for your campaigns.

5. Track and Monitor Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

It’s important that you track and monitor your influencer marketing campaigns. This will help you understand whether or not your campaign is running successfully and generating expected outcomes. It also gives you an opportunity to make necessary changes to your strategy to generate the desired results.

You need to monitor the entire campaign against the goals you decided upon at the beginning of your campaign. In addition to this, you should also evaluate the performance of your influencers. Collect data like follower growth rate, increase in sales, number of views generated, engagement rate, etc. to evaluate your influencers. 

The evaluation will give you a clear picture of your campaign’s impact on your target audience. And you can improve or strengthen your influencer marketing strategy accordingly.

Final Thoughts

Creating a successful influencer marketing campaign might seem easy, but it’s not. There are several aspects that you should consider for an effective influencer marketing campaign. It includes identifying relevant influencers, selecting the right social media platforms, defining goals, and identifying your target audience.

It is also important that you monitor and evaluate the performance of your influencers and the entire campaign. This will help you make adjustments as needed to improve your results.

Do you know of any other tips to create an effective influencer marketing strategy? If so, please feel free to comment.

The post 5 Ways to Create an Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy appeared first on SiteProNews.

Of course, the KPIs you should be monitoring depends on the goals of your business. While some KPIs support certain goals, they’re irrelevant for other goals. They can differ from industry to industry as well. 

Although KPIs vary depending on the goal you want to accomplish, there are some that every ecommerce business should measure.

Here’s my list of the top six ecommerce KPIs-

1. Conversion Rates

Your conversion rate tells you the percentage of visitors that took any action on your website. It’s a measure of how effective your website is at encouraging otherwise passive visitors to take an action. 

This could include signing up for an email newsletter, making a purchase, or other actions. Simply put, the conversion rate is the ratio of the number of sales/actions to the number of visitors.

According to a study by Wolfgang Digital, the average conversion rate of ecommerce businesses is 1.56%. Factors like the total sessions, time spent on the website, page load speed, etc. impact your conversion rates.

2. Average Order Value (AOV)

Average order value is a measure of the average amount spent on all the orders placed with an ecommerce business. This ecommerce KPI offers insights into how much you’re earning per customer.

It will help you make pricing decisions, understand customer behavior, and choose the right marketing channel for your products. Do keep in mind that AOV is calculated per order, and not per customer. It’s the ratio of your revenue to the total number of orders.

3. Website Traffic

Site traffic is one of the most critical ecommerce KPIs for a marketer. However, it goes beyond just counting the number of site visitors you’ve had. You can hook up your site to tools like Google Analytics to gain more actionable insights about your traffic.

You can track the number of page views per visit, the referral traffic sources, bounce rates, new visitors versus returning ones, etc. These metrics have become an industry standard as marketers seek to get more in-depth information about their customers.

4. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

Customer acquisition costs are another important ecommerce KPI that you should be measuring. Calculating your CAC will help you understand your marketing and sales expenses to attract and convert potential customers.

To calculate your acquisition costs, divide your total marketing and sales costs over a certain period by the number of customers you gained over the same period. Remember that these costs include any salaries and overhead required in the conversion process.

Knowing your acquisition costs will help you get a clearer picture of the scalability and sustainability of your business. Compare it with your AOV to determine that. 

For instance, if your CAC is $20 but AOV is $17, you’ve got a problem on your hands. However, if your AOV is considerably more than your CAC (say $60 in this case), you’re in a good position.

5. Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment in ecommerce, refers to site visitors placing products in their e-cart and then leaving without actually making a purchase. It’s every ecommerce business’ nightmare – spending money to entice customers without getting anything in return.

The Baymard Institute calculated the average abandonment rate for ecommerce businesses and found it to be 69.89%. By any measure, that is a staggering number, and you should focus on lowering that rate for your business. 

6. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

The projected revenue an average customer spends in your store, during their lifetime, is called customer lifetime value. It’s another ecommerce KPI that will help you determine and plan your projected costs and acquisition strategies.

CLV is the secret to understanding the value that each customer, potentially, has for your business. You can calculate CLV by subtracting your complete expenses over the association with the customer from the total profits they generate over the same period.

CLV is particularly important for your customer retention plans. You should have a retention strategy beyond the initial purchase. With targeted marketing and good customer support, you can build long-term customer relationships. Cross-selling and upselling strategies, as well as loyalty programs, can help ensure they keep returning for more.

Bonus: Exceeding Your KPI Goals

It’s not enough to simply know which ecommerce metrics to measure if you can’t exceed your KPI goals. While there are many strategies that you can employ, I believe in the power of SEO and influencer marketing.

1. Influencer Marketing

Now we’re all aware of what influencer marketing is and its general benefits for a business.  Influencer marketing, done right, can help you with practically all of the ecommerce KPIs we’ve discussed above.

It can help you generate more site traffic, improve conversion rates, reduce abandonment rates, and increase your CLV. Ecommerce brands like Milk Makeup have leveraged influencer marketing to accomplish this and other goals.

Running influencer marketing campaigns, however, isn’t as easy as it looks. From finding the right influencers to managing and monitoring your campaigns, there’s a lot you need to take care of. You can use automated tools to make things easier, that can help in influencer discovery, outreach, or campaign management.

2. SEO

As an ecommerce business, a great deal of your business comes from the people who find your site through search engines. This little nugget of information makes it crucial for you to be a top site in search engine results.

To do that, of course, you need to optimize both your on-page and off-page elements. It includes working on your content, keywords, external and internal links, and having a properly structured page.

Conclusion

The key to growing any business is monitoring your performance and tweaking your strategies accordingly. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of your goals and figure out which ecommerce KPIs suit your business.

Which ecommerce KPIs do you think are crucial for ecommerce businesses? Comment below.

The post 6 of the Most Important Ecommerce KPIs to Measure appeared first on SiteProNews.

The question that arises then, is what is influencer-generated content, and how can it help your brand? 

To put it simply it’s the content that an influencer creates. They could be blog posts, videos, podcasts, or any other form of content aimed to promote your brand and products. Its benefits range from a higher ROI, increased brand exposure, and better lead generation. 

Of course, to get the most out of your influencer marketing strategy, it’s important that you connect with the right influencers. It’s also important that you know how to make influencer-generated content work for your brand.

Here are a few tips to help you find the right influencers, and effectively leverage influencer-generated content to grow your business:

Check Their Alignment

The first thing businesses usually look at in an influencer is the strength of their fan following. However, a big fan base is of little use to you if they aren’t your intended target market. For example, collaborating with an influencer in the fashion industry is unlikely to do your enterprise software brand any favors. 

Alignment goes a lot deeper than just industry. Ensure that the influencer reaches the demographic your product is meant for. And, if possible, work with individuals who already use and endorse your products. 

It is here that influencer marketing tools such as Grin can help you. Tools like these will help you find the right influencers by reach, demographics, and alignment. Further, these platforms can also help you keep track of important metrics like engagement rates, ROI, and more.

Take for example Loot Crate, the gaming and fandom lifestyle brand. They teamed up with popular YouTuber and gamer PewDiePie. Loot Crate sponsored his “5 Weird Stuff Online” web series, and PewDiePie shared a discount code for the brand’s subscription. 

6 out of 10 YouTube subscribers prefer advice on what to buy from their favorite creator over celebrities. Loot Crate leveraged this in their strategy by working with influencers in the gaming and comedy niche. Quite the masterstroke, considering most of their audience is comprised of people who regularly viewed content generated by these vloggers. 

Collaborate with Them

Working with influencers is a two-way street. While influencers should have creative freedom over their content, at the end of the day, it’s still content for your brand. You must effectively communicate what sort of content you expect from them. Review their work, suggest edits, and make recommendations.

Therefore, it’s important to find influencers who aren’t just aligned with your brand’s image, but who are also open to feedback. This is to ensure the content reaches the right people and portrays your brand in the right way. 

Zara, the clothing retailer, worked with top fashionistas like Teesh Rosa on Instagram for their “#iamdenim” campaign. They gave the influencers the creative freedom to highlight their product in a way to attract their target audience.

The message behind their campaign was to spread the word that they worked with real people. And boy did it work. In a matter of 8 months, Zara’s fan following grew by a whopping 4.6 million followers.

Respect Their Work

Don’t shackle your influencers by exercising excessive control over the campaign. If they feel that you don’t respect their opinions, they may stop putting in their best efforts and become lackadaisical with their content.

They are social influencers because they know what they are doing. And their content is what got them there in the first place. While it is ok to review and approve content before it gets published, micromanaging them isn’t.

Cue Motorola and their social media campaign to launch their Moto Mods for the Moto Z family. 13 influencers were given complete creative freedom make videos that showcased something unique about their new range.

And boy did they surpass expectations. From strapping a Moto Z Force to a rocket (shown above) to surviving a haunted high school, the influencers did it all. Roughly 11 million views and approximately 38 million social impressions later, it’s fair to say the campaign was a hit. And all Motorola did was give them a basic idea.

Use Their Content in Ads

Given the boom in influencer marketing, 39% of marketers expect an increase in their influencer marketing budgets in the months to come. This could mean a tighter purse for traditional marketing content. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s another reason for marketers to repurpose existing influencer content for future ad campaigns.

With existing content from influencers, brands are sitting on a pot of gold that they know has worked in the past. By marketing that content in a different format, you can squeeze more juice out of it. But before you do, as a professional courtesy, remember to give credit to the original content creator. That’s not to say that you should repurpose content to the extent it becomes stale.

This point is best illustrated by talking about Old Navy. Working with fashion bloggers, they often repost and share photos previously posted by the influencers they work with. Like this photo originally posted by influencer, Madison Silotti.

They haven’t restricted themselves to just Instagram either. They partnered with YouTuber, Meghan Rienks, for a series of fun videos that they later posted on their own channel. The videos were shared on Old Navy’s Facebook and Twitter accounts too.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, influencer marketing is about gaining consumers’ trust. To get the most of your influencer-generated content, you need to not only find the right people, but trust them as well. If you respect their process, you’ll get more authentic content – content that consumers will be more likely to trust. If you have any insights on this topic, or any additional tips, please share them in the comments below.

The post Influencer-Generated Content: How to Make it Work for Your Brand appeared first on SiteProNews.