Influencer Marketing For Creatives: Goals, Audience & Campaigns

1. Class Introduction: Hi, this is Carmel. Welcome to my class on influence or marketing for creatives goals, audience and campaigns, influence or marketing solve real explosive growth. In the last year in 2017 almost every user online had a taste of it, either by launching a campaign for their businesses and brands or by witnessing of brands campaign as an audience. Marketers either used it for creating authentic content about their brands to drive engagement around their brands, and almost half of them used it to drive traffic to their websites or product pages. Some of them used it to drive online sales and generate cost effective content for their brands. The question is, why so much love for influence or marketing when there are many successful marketing channels available and proven? Already, we will find out all of that in this class. This class is for all types of designers and creatives. We're not here to talk about influence or marketing in general, but how creatives can learn and apply it to their creations to get in front of his many eyeballs. If you own a creed of business, whether it be a creative brand offering creative services on a line of creative products or even freelancing your expertise. Then this is the class for you. I will try to help you understand why influencer marketing is valuable for you. How to understand which platforms are right ones for you and how to think about a campaign , how to set up campaigns and find influencers that are best for you. The goal is to make sure that you understand key things to look for before starting any campaign and what to expect from it, whether it be through blog's instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube or any next big what you will learn about how to define your target audience, how to measure and define success for each and every campaign you lunch. Finally, we will look into what are the key things you should do that works and what doesn't. Overall, it's all about being able to share your story to the world with a great, compelling content and bringing influencers on the same page so that all feels natural at the end. I would love to see you create a project and share some content around the story that you want to tell online to this world. Using influencer marketing as the driving tool 2. Influencer Marketing For You: as a creative. You have limited options for marketing yourself to your audience. Working on your own channels for marketing takes time and needs consistency, and even that can hit the ceiling soon. Social media in general is the best option for marketing that we as artists and designers have weaken, tell her stories in whichever form we want. Teoh Blawg is another very effective channel for creators. If you already have an active Facebook page instagram account, Tumblr, YouTube channel or a blawg, then great. But are you happy with the results that you are getting by posting every day for months? Have you already given up? It's great to have your own channel and working hard on it every day is also the correct thing to Dio. But what if you can multiply your results just by using influence or marketing to achieve your business or career goals? At this point in time, influencer marketing is the most undervalued and still majorly undiscovered. Online marketing form most of the brands, and marketers don't understand how to use it because right now it's too human for them. Since there is more supply than demand, it's a great time to try your hands at it and gain access to undiscovered audience, which is somewhere waiting for you because you need to establish strong online presence in some way to be able to have success. Influencer marketing is like word of mouth, but it happens online most of the time. It's on social media, but there are other places to do it, too. If there is someone influential online and you engage them to share your brand or message or story with their audience, then what you are doing is influence or marketing. It's not like direct advertising, but some market is in their campaigns air doing such mistakes. The beauty of influence or marketing lies in the fact that not only celebrities, musicians, movie stars or athletes are eligible. But anybody with a strong online presence and is influential to their audience is eligible to act as an influencer. Why it's still undiscovered to a large extent and is waiting to be exploited. The reason lies in the fact that there is some time and work involved. There is a lot more of humans involved in the process in comparison to other online marketing forms like banner or Facebook ads and for obvious reasons, starting a Facebook or AdWords ad is easier for them. The other reason is that they're still testing things out and not going all in because those marketers working with big brands are too much metric and our oi obsessed. There are some ways to understand the r a y and influence or marketing to, but the value that you get by doing influencer marketing is not that easy to calculate in numbers. But no marketer can deny its effectiveness, And that's the reason why 48% of them are planning to increase their influencer marketing budget, and only 4% are planning to decrease the budget, according to a survey. So it's the perfect time to try it and get results before it gets too out of budget. For small businesses and freelancers like us, effectiveness of marketing through ads and commercials is going down. Nobody likes to see ads or click it. That's just how it is doing is successful influence or marketing campaign involves different strategies and steps. It starts with understanding of what you want out of it. What are the platforms that you feel should work for you and what an influencer marketing campaign looks like. Let's discuss about the platforms that are influencer marketing ready, especially for creatives like you. 3. Preferred Platforms For Creatives: influencer marketing often goes together with two other forms of marketing in digital space . Understanding both of them is important for you to successfully run your campaigns 1st 1 is social media marketing, which means that you should have understanding of each platform that you are planning to campaign on. Then you should also understand how to market on it and be able to judge that it is the right platform for you to do influence. Their marketing on the second form of marketing is content marketing, because the way you share your story in 2017 is by creating engaging and valuable content. Most of the influencer marketing campaigns need some form of content created by you or the influencer, which is the medium for telling your story to that influencers. Audience content is such an area where most of US creators air strong at, so you should take every possible advantage of this talking about the platforms that can be most valuable for you to carry on with influencer marketing goals or Instagram Pinterest and Blog's Pinterest and Instagram are the social media platforms that are built around visual expression on both the platforms, the content that is published and shared our images and photographs. Instagram has options for short videos, too, which is great apart from that blog's air, a great option to, since it can be used to tell your story in detail. And it can also be used as a way to connect to other platforms. Let's first talk about thes three platforms, and then we will look into other platforms that can be valuable. Also, Instagram is the most engaging social platform with more than 500 million active users. It's all you could ask for its mobile visual centric and might be the least spammy social platform out there. For creatives like you, Instagram is the first place you should promote your work, brand or product. Instagram's visual design format and focus makes it the best place for creative self promotion that has a broad audience, which can help you get your content in front of his many eyeballs as you want and for ease of doing influencer marketing. There are various useful tools available for Instagram, whereas Pinterest is best for product centric influencer marketing campaigns. The number of active users on Pinterest are growing, and it is over 100 million If you own an online store for your creations, Pinterest can bring you really Sales Blog's are everywhere, so it's quite easy to target your audience, no matter how narrow it is. Since the amount of analytics available for blocks and websites searching right influencer is not a tough job, you get enough room to tell your story in debt. Long form content is the most engaging content on such platforms, and there are more blocks and websites than you can even imagine. Apart from these three platforms, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat can be effective to. If you are already active on these platforms, then it will be worth it. But if you are good at video, then just go for Facebook video and YouTube among thes three platforms. With such a high engagement rate, you would not like to miss out on the fun. Choosing a platform should not be that complicated at first. If you're looking to promote your creative brand than Instagram is the best option. If you're looking to promote your online presence, no matter what it is, then Facebook video Blog's and instagram are the best options. If you are working on promoting your creative products than go for Instagram and Pinterest . If you're good with video than Instagram, video and Facebook video are great, too. The challenge with YouTube is to find the right influencer. If you can find the perfect fit than YouTube to can bring great results at the end, it's all about figuring out what works for you the most. Try to test each platform in order of your preference platform is one thing, but there are several factors that decide what can bring your campaign a success worth of celebration. 4. Setting Up Goals & Understanding Audience: Since you are familiar with influencer marketing platforms, we can move on and talk about what you need to do and understand before you start your first campaign. Two major things that you need to do before you think about finding the right influencers and launching any such campaigns are setting up your campaign goals and try to understand your target audience. These two things can be really confusing and unclear when you first think of doing it, but it's not that complicated. It's all about brainstorming and understanding your requirements as a creative in general. Let's talk about some of the goals that you might try to achieve with influence or marketing. It all depends on who you are. What do you dio? Are you doing it for yourself? Are you a business or freelancer? Are you doing it for a brand or have products to promote? And these schools might and should change from time to time. You should just grab a pen and paper and try to brainstorm what specifically you want to achieve with such campaigns in reference to your business or career objectives. Some of the goals that you might find resonating our brand awareness engagement, sales, lead generation or just scaling your online presence. Whatever your goal is, you need to decide on it. For example, if you are a freelancer or own a creative services business, then scaling your online presence and improving engagement around your work is a great way to get recognized. If you our creative enough, you should find a way to generate leads to through influence or marketing. If you own an online store with creative products or own a brand than building brand awareness, improving online engagement and sales might be your goal. You just need to understand your business requirement and set some concrete campaign goals that will decide what should be your audience. Who could be the best influencers for your campaign and how you can kick start your campaign successfully. Once you have figured out what your campaign goals are, the next thing you need to work on is to identify your audience. Understanding your audience before carrying out your campaign is obvious. It is as important as in any other form of marketing campaigns. You cannot miss this part. This is one of the common mistakes marketers dio, which may eventually result in failures even if you don't want to do a thorough research, which you should, you can still try to roughly find out about your target audience. You can roughly create a buyer persona for each of your campaigns or business goals. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research, your existing clients, emotional intelligence and your personal experience. It will help you decide where to focus on what type of content would be more engaging, which influencers to work with their behavior patterns and other strategic things. Understanding your audience as a whole is an ongoing process, but building an evolving buyer persona is quite practical thing to Dio. It is necessary for choosing the right influencer and working on the right content for influencer marketing purposes. The characteristics that you need to define in your buyer persona are relevant demographics where their attention is what their common interests are, where they spend most of their time online and other characteristics which can help you narrow down the target. If you still find it difficult, you can reverse engineer those characteristics and interests to some extent. Find two or three of your clothes competitors who are doing good and online space. Try to audit their social media accounts for key signals. You can use third party tools such as social rank would sweet or squirrel oven. You can get more insights on your community's preferences and interests, and what drives engagement? Same thing goes for your existing clients. You can try to understand them more in terms of all these points. One of the other ways that can be really helpful for you is to use insights from Google Analytics for your own website. It can show you roughly where your visitors live, their age, affinity and interest. It's on how much you can understand your audience. Once you have such details about your audience, you just have to start looking for such influencers whose community is a good match with your buyer persona. Later, the influencers whom you are working with may also be able to advise you on how much of an effort should be necessary, in their opinion, with their audience to deliver on your campaign goals. 5. Finding Right Influencers: Once you have your influencer marketing goals ready, along with thorough understanding of the audience you want to target, make sure that you have worked out on the action journey of your targeted buyer persona, which will help you understand how they behave on such platforms, how they buy or take actions, trying to map out your audiences perspective and how they should react to your campaign. Influencer Marketing is all about your customers or clients. Once you understand your customers behavior, you can analyze how they get influenced, who influences them in each step, and they take before making decision what they look for and how they get engaged. While most of the people doing influencer marketing think way too much about where to find their audience, they miss out on these important things. And for that very reason, they just go for numbers ending up with wrong influencers. Or overall it becomes a faulty campaign. Now it's time to talk about how to find the right influencers to participate with for connecting with the right influencers. There are two things you need to worry about. First is who, and the other one is how for designers, artists or creative businesses. Instagram, Pinterest and blog's are the best platform you can start your campaigns on. Try understanding this who and how from your client or customer's perspective, which means that, according to the platform you want to carry influence or marketing on will decide who is the right influencer and how you can find them. Engage with them in the ideal situation. The influencer you want to work with should be active on multiple platforms, but that's not the case most of the time, each platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube logs, Twitter each has its own set of tools and limitations about how to look for influencers. If you are active on any of these platforms where you already know about any such influencers you can work with, then that might be the first place to start because you already know what to expect. There are certain ways to judge on whom to work with for your influence or marketing campaigns, and it needs not to be people only. Any page or channel around your subject matter can be a good place to influence your audience. There are various traits to look for in an influencer. First of all, look for how active that influencer is in your space, how regularly they post something for their audience. And this is not to judge how big of an influence or they are, but more about how committed they are. If the volume of audience for an influencer is high, for sure, they post much more than someone with a small audience. But it doesn't mean that the one with the bigger audience is better for you. Then look for influencers who are great content creators. Great content means higher engagement. You want to work with someone who creates great content related to your target audience. Sometimes you can look for influencers who might not be directly involved in your subject matter, but their community is similar. Look for relevancy in the audience and not someone with only a big following. Look for the stories they're focusing on and how much the contents are accepted in their audience. If you will look on Lee for the size of these influencers than you might fail and bigger influencers even look for higher compensations, working with someone having one million followers might not even be close to being as effective is working with 10 different influencers. Having 100,000 followers each doing in depth audit of each influence or you think could work with is something you can consider. You can even ask for audience insights from those promising influencers, and then look for the signals and common traits between your buyer personas and audience. Inside of such influencers, you should go ahead and build a list of influencers you might want to work with for current campaigns or campaigns in the near future. There are different types of influencers out there. To find them can be a time intensive task. There are certain third party tools that you can use for searching potential influencers. You can easily find out different tools for each platforms. They're pretty easy to use income with decent support desk, too, just in case. Just Google. Find influencers for platform. Place your platforms name in place of platform and search. They all come with different features, pricing and plans because it all depends on your platform and campaign goals. It will not be very accurate to discuss them here, but let's see some of them that you can try on for such platforms. Good, sweet is a great tool for all around social media marketing and comes with various inbuilt features for influence or marketing. Using Hoot suite can help you manage your campaigns and collaborating with your influencer in real time. To It's good for Twitter and Instagram. If you are looking for video influencers for YouTube fame, Bit is a go to option. You can easily find influencers who are active on YouTube specifically, but they're open to use other platforms to for instagram because of the constant changes in its terms of use, it's not easy to suggest any specific tool for that. There are some tools which can help you find your influence or directly, or some can help you explore your options according to various parameters. The tools that you use for finding influencers directly are notify hype, tap tap fluency and other such platforms. But most of the time, they don't all have the influence or signed up on their website. So if you cannot find such influencers for your category on these websites, you can try doing it the other way. Using tools such as Icon of Square, you could explore instagram influencers based on the number of followers, followings to followers, ratio words and bio and hashtags used by them. Understanding how a platform works and the tools used for marketing on such platforms is important, and this applies to every platform you can use search tool on your social media platform for different search terms relevant to your campaigns, and then look for some posts, which are doing very well. You can look for the accounts who posted in and do your research on it. Using various social analytics tools such as Hoot Suite, Buffer App, Social rank, Keyhole Buzz, Sumo Crowd, Booster Cloud and Ikonos Square. For Pinterest, you can use tailwind. Finding influencers active as bloggers is not that difficult. You can just search different keywords on Google and look for some engaging and relevant contents. Then you can find a website or blawg, which matches your requirements easily. You can also check that Websites Analytics on similar web dot com. Apart from that buzz, sumo is a great tool for searching trending contents around a topic and connect with such influencers who posted it talking about tools. There are some tools you need to be aware of. Influencer marketing is not about a doing a shoutout or mere posting on your content. It's more than that. There are some tools you should avoid. The ones which lets you buy shout outs and followers for very cheap should be avoided. You can try some shot at ones, but it's neither influence or marketing. Nor does it work that effectively. But never, ever. Try your hands on such tools, which let you buy followers, and it may be considered spamming by that platform. Once you're done with your search for the right influencers, you should be ready with a list of influencers. You can use any spreadsheet application like Google sheets. Make sure that it has all the important information, such as number of followers, account, name, contact, email and other relevant info. 6. Campaign, Content and Measurement: Once you have identified potential influencers you would like to work with, the next thing you do is talk to them, but not without preparation. Things such as sharing campaign goals, asking for their audience insights, discussing the workflow, working on content, deciding on KP eyes and compensation are obvious things to talk about. But first thing you need to dio is build a report and introduce yourself to them. You can do this by sending a casual email or by D m ing them directly on their social account. Don't spam. Just send a message and wait. If you want to interact on any social media platform, do make sure to follow them. You can say hello. Talk about their previous work and how interesting their content is. You can introduce yourself in a liner to keep the email short and the diem's shorter. Once you have built the relationship, talk to them about how you can work with them and what value you can offer to them in return. Ask if you and they can work on a content together. If the influence there is a great content creator, ask if they can create a content for you your brand or product. Ask if they can share your story and content with their audience. Collaborating on a content is a great way to start, since they might already be interested in working with you and might not ask for any formal compensation. Once you both have agreed on how to initiate your campaign, talk about your campaign goals with them and what you expect from it. Set the tone during the initial communications that this relationship is a flexible on. This will help you and the influencer to work really well on the campaign, producing original content and building a connection in the audience rather than mere obsessing on numbers. If you are compensating the influence or don't hesitate to negotiate, tell them your story and your work. Talk about how this campaign Kenbrell value to your business and how this will affect your relationship with them. Setting a positive tone With long term relationship in mind, they're pretty open to welcome your offer plan. How you can carry on with the campaign and how you will pay the influencer. Will it be fixed budget campaign, or will it be a metric dependent compensation, but don't try to compensate every influence or equally their expectations and the value they bring to you are not the same. Be transparent and talk about this early. Even offering your product for free to the influencer can work. If they love it, they will also help create quality content. That being said, most of the influencers came for their audience, and they need to believe in you and your brand before they work with you. One very important thing that many small brands and marketers make is absence of a service contract if there is some compensation involved. Signing a service contract is a crucial step towards clear and transparent relationship with your influencer. It makes sure everything is concrete and professional. You can hire a professional or do it yourself by just downloading any service terms contract that you find online. Edit these terms according to the standard practices your campaign requirements. Things such as compensation, deliver, bols, nondisclosure and copyright terms of your content should be clearly mentioned in this contract. Send a draft copy of this agreement to the influencer for review and ask if there's anything they want to change or discuss. Finalize it and using any online documents signing services such as DOC You Sign or hell assign, send this service contract to their email and get it signed by them online. It would hardly take a few minutes, but will safeguard your interests and maintain transparency in your relationship. The next thing you dio is work on the campaign. Working on different content pieces, measurement of different KP eyes and exchanging periodic feedbacks about the campaign are crucial things to dio what will be the content, how you both can work on it or if the influencer will create the content for you. These questions need to be answered before actually getting your hands dirty. Be sure to send them quality images, videos and other contents as needed to a final review of the content. Peace before it gets published. Talking about the content It's all about finding the right balance. You know, your brand or business very well. And on the other side, the influence or knows about their audience very well. Work on a content in such a way that the goals are achieved and target audience loves it to something not to miss is the platform you are marketing on. Make sure that the content matches the quality standards of that platform. One influencer has made your content live. You should watch it closely how audience engages and reacts to it. Watch out for key signals, engage with the audience and see if they have any comments or questions that you can reply Teoh as the campaign progresses, Whether long term or short term measuring it is very important. You need to keep asking if these measurements air helping you reach your campaign goals or not. If something is not positive, you can tweak it or learn from it to follow that in your next campaign. That's how marketing works. It's very dynamic because of the technological advancements happening every day. What to measure during and after the campaign depends on camping goals and platforms used, keeping a record of different KP eyes measured at each place of the campaign. In Google, Sheet or Excel will work great. Invite the influencer to collaborate in the process. To KP, eyes are nothing but key performance indicators there some key data's toe look for when assessing the market campaign. It can help you understand how well or how bad your campaign is doing as I said earlier. Which KP eyes to track depends completely on your campaign goals and the platform used. For example, a campaign goal of selling your product to a wider audience needs KP eyes, such as online sales conversion. Re an average order value using you tm parameters Wherever you use any Web you are else for your website or product is highly recommended, it can be easily tracked in Google Analytics for your website. Best thing is, you can use unique you tm parameters for some your URLs for different campaigns and influencers. You can keep track on it from your Google Analytics dashboard under acquisitions tab. And don't worry too much for data and influence or marketing from the very beginning. Better approach is to look for some positive signals, even if it's not 100% aligned to your goals. Some deviations can also bring positive outcomes. Tweak things is needed and make sure you progress in the right direction. Be patient during your campaigns. Don't make your influence or feel pressure. If something is not working as good as you wanted it Teoh. Just because of some numbers, good influencers will never go out of the way to turn things around. It's better to go slow if results are not showing up. Influencer marketing is all about long term relationships that can build up over time. R a y of influencer. Marketing is great if you look beyond just these numbers. And if everything went great and the campaign turns out to be a clear success, make sure to thank the influencer. Working with multiple influencers on a long term with slow pace is the best way to go forward. It helps you make changes, learn different things, adjusting one at a time and achieving desired results from multiple audiences. It's far better to watch some campaigns getting success, and only a few failing. Been watching a single campaign fail completely. It might seem daunting at first, but it gets intuitive and easy over time. Once you have a smooth workflow and healthy relationship with different influencers, it can get is easy, ascending a couple of emails 7. What Works & What Doesn't + Class Project: influencer marketing is at its initial stages, so trying and failing should act as a learning experience. And as like other marketing forms, it's always good to start small and then go big over time once you see some successes. But once you start getting desired results, you will be among the pioneers of influence or marketing a few things to keep in mind as basic Do's and don't is totally worth it. So let's check out some of them. Set realistic campaign goals to save your time and resource is make sure to gain deeper understanding about your audience, even if it requires you to attend meet UPS conferences or being active on multiple forums. Be aware about the goals while working on your content and also offer the campaign is launched. Keep check on comments, responses and messages during your campaign and make sure you measure your progress. But be practical rather than getting obsessed with it. If you are not getting desired results, make a note of what could be wrong and communicate with your influencer. For example, if your goal was to sell more products on your online store and you are not getting desired results you can check if the Web links and product links are accurate, make sure they are shared at the right place. Look for multiple mid to small influencers rather than just one with large followers. Micro influencer is a term for influencers having low to medium follower base, according to multiple campaign case studies and surveys, they are the most effective ones to work with. Apart from these do's let's look at some of the don't one of the common mistakes marketers dio is they become obsessed with numbers. Still, measuring some key metrics is important for your campaign success. Don't totally ignore it, either. Trying too hard is a bad idea. Working with influencers is an effective way to spread your story to a wider audience. But if you and influencer are not on the same page, it won't be that effective. You need to communicate and let the influence or make decisions, too. Don't work with an influence or whose past contents are not even close to yours. Befriending like minded influencers will expand your reach, and thus your message. The best part about influencer marketing is that it is in a win win for both. I wish you Good luck for your influence or marketing campaigns. It's time for your skills to work for you. There are no such reasons not to try it. It's a great opportunity for designers and artists to expand their business or career. Using the most human form of marketing for the class project, you have to work on an influencer marketing campaign for your business objectives. Research and brainstorm a camping gold toe work on, then define your audience and buyer persona than find relevant influencers you would like to work with and build a list of influencers, then create a content for that campaign. According to the platform you're working on, you can share your process and tools used. Even better would be if you can try it on a small scale with any influencer and measure your results. It will be a great experience free to kickstart influencer marketing as an important channel for growth. If you have any doubts related to the things I taught you in this class, make sure to write about it in the discussions. You can share your class project with a little background of the business brand product or service you want to market. It would be great for you to gain helpful feedback from everyone in the class. I would love to see what you come up with. Thanks again for joining me in this class on influence or marketing. See you soon in my next class until then by