Transcripts
1. Introduction: Influencer Marketing: When an influencer promotes your business, it often feels less like marketing and more like a recommendation from a friend. Because an influencers endorsement feels more authentic, these partnerships often delivers significant results for organizations and the forum of sales awareness and improve trust. If you're unfamiliar influences are people that have established an audience online that they can connect and share information with. Consistently. Influencers typically have a following on social media, but it's also quite common for them to reach people through a newsletter, blog, podcast, or mix a different channels. There's influencers in almost every vertical or usually known for discussing their expertise or interest in a certain niche like technology, sports, or skincare, for example. In this course on influencer marketing fundamentals, I'll share how your company can work strategically with the right influencers to achieve your goals in a cost-effective manner. Hello, I'm Brian Hanuman as a marketing consultant, I'd helped numerous companies successfully navigate their influencer marketing campaigns and programs. And as an adjunct professor at NYU and Francisco Martine university, I've extensively analyzed many of the best and worst influencer campaigns from leading brands. Based on my experience and research, I'll teach you about the influencer marketing industry by highlighting the different types of influencer partnerships to consider. From there, we'll walk through the process of working with an influencer on a campaign that entails everything from setting goals, finding in selecting the right influencers to partner with, and the best ways to contact and compensate them. In addition, we'll dive into how to collaborate on the actual specifics of a campaign and how to measure the initiatives impact on your accompany. To give you even more insight into the process, we'll dive into the details of a recent successful and distinctive influence her campaign from Headspace. So whether you're an entrepreneur running a business or a marketer out of brand, this course will provide tangible takeaways are getting more from your investments in Influencers. Appear ready to reach the right customer and achieve your marketing goals by working closely with influencers in a thoughtful way. Then let's begin.
2. Completing the Class Project: To keep this course as actionable as possible, I've created a worksheet that will act as a brief to guide you through each step of creating an influencer campaign. Think of it as an easy way to remember each important part of the process and, uh, someplace to jot down your notes and ideas as to how you'll tackle each step. The goal of completing this class project is to ensure all of your influencer campaigns moving forward are thoughtful, strategic, and of course, results oriented. Before diving into the course, I recommend reviewing this worksheet so you get a sense of how I suggest structuring a campaign. You might find it useful to keep the worksheet open in another tab in your browser so you can fill out each part and take notes as you're completing a lesson. If you take a look at the worksheet, you'll see that there's a section that corresponds with each aspect of creating an influencer campaign from start to finish. The first section is where you list the goals of the campaign to keep your efforts goal-oriented from the start. After that, is where you'll identify which influencer or influencers you'd like to work with, along with the details about their audience topics we'll talk about and the platforms that are on. And the worksheet continues on and on from there. There's no one right way to fill this out. Instead, treat it as a framework to guide any campaign you're working on with an influencer. If you'd like any feedback about an influencer campaign you're planning, feel free to share the completed worksheet in the project gallery below so I can respond with any suggestions. I can't wait to see what creative marketing ideas you come up with.
3. Types of Influencer Campaigns: Every time you work with an influencer, it's going to be a slightly different experience. Maybe they're big on Twitter known for their commentary on the latest food trends, or have an active falling on YouTube, who watches they're video game reviews. Each influencer has a distinct audience, perspective, strengths and weaknesses as a content creator, preferences for how they wish to partner with companies. Now, even though no to influencers are like, let's review the most popular ways of partnering with them on a campaign to help guide you during the planning process. First off, all influencer campaigns are either short-term or long-term collaboration's. Basically if you work with an influencer for less than a month or in a one-off capacity, that's when a partnership is considered short-term. This works well for testing influencers to see their impact gives you room to partner with a mix of influencers at once and give me less time consuming and resource intensive. Because they are often the more affordable option for many businesses, it's the most common way. Influencer collaborations are structured. The downside of working with influencers short-term Is it can come off as less credible Of a partnership to consumers at times, and there's fewer opportunities to learn from that collaboration as a marketer. On the other hand, long-term collaboration, or when you work with the same influencer or group of influencers for a month to a few years, depending on the circumstances. For example, MAC Cosmetics worked with the makeup influencer patrick Star for over a year, launching a makeup line together, promoting it extensively across his YouTube and Instagram. The benefit of a long-term partnership is the opportunity to build a meaningful relationship with the influencer, helping the entire collaboration feel more trustworthy by customers. There's also more opportunities with a lengthier partnership to dry a prolonged brand awareness and engagement. In terms of downsides, these partnerships can be more costly to retain an influencer and collaborate with them at the scale. There's also a risk of the partnership becoming stale over time with continued exposure to the same audience long-term. Beyond the length of time you will partner with them. How exactly you will work together usually falls under one of the following options. There's sponsored posts, reviews, product collaboration's event participation, ambassador programs, affiliate marketing, social media takeovers and contests and giveaways, sponsored posts. The most common type of partnership entails a influencers sharing content featuring and companies products amongst their audience in a photo or a video. Reviews or what an influence your users, your products, sharing their honest opinion of the item's quality, usefulness, price point, and more usually in exchange for free product or fee, one of the most involved ways of partnering is co-creating products with an influencer. The items you're promoting or more aligned to their audience. And one of a kind, ideally driving a lot of buzz about the collaboration. Like How among Claire, the French apparel company, regularly partners with popular designers to re-imagine it's well-known down jacket, exposing the brand to a much larger audience. Next, event participation is pretty straightforward. It's when influencers are compensated to promote and take part in accompany conference, panel or event, either in person or virtually. Ambassador programs are usually long-term partnerships where multiple influencers are expected to work with a brand and a variety of ways, from sponsored posts to joining events. Then there's affiliate marketing where influencers earn a percentage of the sales they're able to drive from purchases that their followers make using a certain link or Promo Code. For example, at influenced her on Instagram might showcase a product they like, then include a link to purchase that item on their Instagram stories or mention a code to use at checkout. Another campaign type to consider is a social media takeover or an influencer posts from your organization's account as themselves for a short period of time, sharing their perspective. It's a way to add a fresh viewpoint to your company social media presence and cross promote to a wider audience on that social network. Lastly, hosting a contest or a giveaway with the supportive and influencer can help drive more engagement and participation that promotion, increasing customer signups significantly. Think of these options for your next campaign as a starting point, as the only limit to how you can work with different types of influencers is your own creativity.
4. Setting Campaign Goals: Influencers can help your business grow unless you are clear on what your goals are. So which goals should you be focused on when it comes to working with influencers? Well, there's five categories of goals to consider. But before we dive in, recognize that most campaigns should focus on a few goals that wants to get the most from your investments. The first and most end category of goals is convergence. Whether that's increasing sales, sign-ups, donations, or email subscriptions. These are the most significant outcomes you're trying to encourage From an influencers audience. Driving conversions, especially sales, is essential for the long-term viability of an influencer program. So get clear on what kinds of conversions matter most to your organization. The second category of goals is engagement, which are the interactions people have with an influencer campaign, like mentions, clicks, comments, likes, and shares. Less important than conversions. Engagement goals indicate an audience's interest level in a particular campaign and can help drive more visibility to your efforts. So typically, the more quality engagement on a campaign, the better. For example, you might focus on the goal of earning a 100 comments and 5000 likes per post as part of an ongoing and influencer series on Instagram. The next category of goals is audience development, or in other words, growing you're following as a result of partnering with an influencer. Many organizations partner with influencers when first starting off on a new channel to build an audience on that network quickly before the platform gets too crowded. This one is simply about increasing your followers on the places that matter to your company and customers. Whether that's growing your audience on social media or on your podcast or newsletter. For instance, to jumpstart that our snapchat account, the candy brand jelly ranchers, partnered with different creators to grow a large following on the Mobile-First network. This way, they were able to rapidly build an audience of the right customers on Snapchat, since the Platforms users skew younger and these influencers are followed by a lot of young people. Fourth goal category to consider is strengthening brand affinity and royalty, which is all about building a stronger connection with your customers based on your shared values. When customers feel like an organization shares the same values, like being eco-friendly, For example, there's more likely to be an emotional element to their purchasing decisions. Choosing to work with influencers based on the values they consistently communicate and the causes they support can help your organization position itself and its reputation more strategically. To measure brand affinity, you might monitor the time spent on your website or the number of mentions your company receives and social media from working with a particular influencer. The fifth and final category of goals to consider focusing on is awareness. One of the most common goals is to gain attention from an influencers audience to increase the views, impressions, and traffic to your offerings as a business, boosting awareness of your business can lead to engagement and conversions. But if you're just focused on getting attention, that you're not getting enough out of your partnerships. And there you have it. Those are the different categories of goals to keep in mind as you start to build out your influencer campaigns.
5. Finding Relevant Influencers: With your goals in mind, the next step is finding relevant influencers to work with. For starters, you need to decide which social networks you'd like to promote your organization on, as that'll impact where you look for these influencers. You don't need to fully commit at this point in the planning process. You do need to focus your efforts a bit to at least a few channels as looking everywhere will be pretty time-consuming. Most influencer campaigns happen on Instagram, YouTube, and tick tock. But this will evolve. Make your decisions based on what audience you're trying to reach, and what products, services, and messaging you're promoting, and how each social network is commonly used. For instance, if a lengthier video would be the best way to feature the many use cases of your new product line, then YouTube maybe the ideal channel to consider. That's because it's the primary place consumers watch videos of a few minutes or longer online, as opposed to other social channels where short-form videos are usually the norm. On another note, maybe your customers are 50 to 70 years old, then it'd be ideal to target them on Facebook, where they're most active, as opposed to tick tock or Snapchat. From there, my main suggestion is to manually searched the social network that you have in mind for influencers that have aligned with what you're promoting, your customers and your company begin by entering high level keywords and hashtags that would relate to your campaign and seeing what types of content is resonating on the topic and who's sharing this information? As you're searching. Keep in mind that these searches will generate results based on the words appearing and a person's bio of their account or in the public posts they're sharing. For example, let's pretend you're a business that sells eco-friendly so Products and you'd like to partner with a few influencers to promote your offerings on Twitter and Instagram to search for folks that are known for talking about this topic. Head over to Twitter and enter a term like eco-friendly into the search bar and review the top tweets that include that phrase. Scroll through the results, review the tweets to see who's talking about eco-friendly related topics and hover over the profiles to get a quick preview of their following and account bio. This will help inform whether you take a look at their profile further to learn more. The influencers you'll want to work with will usually be verified on Twitter, but not always. As you can see, this search pulled up tweets from a range of profiles like a popular climate activists and actress from India and an eco-friendly lifestyle blogger all discussing this topic. You could do a similar search on Instagram or you can look for influencers in a certain region. Like if you were trying to grow exposure of the brand locally at first, enter in the name of the area you want to explore in the search bar and select places. Let's try Chicago, which will pull up all the top publicly shared Post tagged with that location. Scroll through the top posts to see what content catches your eye and as a significant amount of interactions as a sign of its popularity, indicating which creators to review further. In my experience, manually searching for influencers initially is usually the best approach to find the right influencer and vetting their alignment further. It can just take a significant amount of time to help streamline the process and bit, I recommend trying tools like TweetDeck, BuzzSumo mentioned and influenced dot co that can help you narrow down your search a bit more quickly. With TweetDeck, you can search for a keyword and then filter the search to only show tweets from verified users, helping make sure you only see content from top creators when using influenced Doc. Oh, you can search by category. So in this case we'll choose green lifestyle and then specify we're interested in Instagram users with five to a 100 thousand followers. And from there, you can review the results to see which influencers would be a strong match. To summarize, when looking for influencers, search relevant keywords and hashtags on the social networks themselves, and third party tools to find creators worth collaborating with.
6. Selecting the Right Influencers: The biggest mistake you can make is selecting an influencer to work with solely based on the number of followers they have. Yes, it's important that you select influencers for a campaign that can reach as many of the right customers as possible for the span you're committing. But there's more to it than that. Instead, I like to think of the size of an influencers audience as merely one of many initial considerations worth reviewing before deciding whether they're the right match or not. Beyond the size of an influencers audience. It's important to review how engaging their content is to their own following. Do this by reviewing their recent posts over the last few months to see what levels of engagement their content consistently gets. You should take note of the number of likes, comments, shares, views, and other publicly available data points you can reference to get a sense of how their content performs. Another one to consider that we've touched on is topic relevance. Or in other words, is your product company and message a natural fit for the influencer? And what they talk about. This matters as authenticity can make or break these partnerships. So understanding what an influencer stands for prefers to discuss online and the kinds of content they create makes for a better fit. For instance, an influencer known for healthy eating and their fitness routines isn't the right match for a fast food brand to work with. As it just seems like a cash grab and misaligned. Next, get a sense of their audiences demographics. If your products, services, or messaging is catered to a niche customer group, like people in a certain age range or geographic area. This is hard to identify definitively, but you can make some assumptions by reviewing who's interacting with the influencers content in the comments and sharing their posts publicly. The subjects, the influencer continually talks about where they live, their age and more are all factors impacting the types of people get value from following them. Like if you're a company only sells perishable foods and France, then it wouldn't make sense to partner with an influencer who's falling is mainly made up of Americans. After that, it's important to double-check that an influencer is safe for your brand to work with, review their content on social media and conduct Google searches of their name to ensure they haven't shared hateful or harmful information in the past that goes against your values. Protecting your reputation as an organization is critical. So it's important to only partner with influencers that help build trust and uplift your brand amongst like minded people. Lastly, a more straightforward consideration is making sure the types of content the influencer typically produces makes sense for the campaign you're launching. It's important not to push an influencer in a direction that's not a natural fit or misrepresent the message you're trying to get across. Instead, adapt what you're trying to communicate to the influencers, audience and approach the content which can make your partnership with them more sincere and less transactional. Don't forget to reference these considerations as you assess which influencers are the right partners for you.
7. Contacting Influencers: You don't wanna get ignored when reaching out to influencers as your time is valuable. To get the attention of an influencer and start a conversation about a partnership you're outraged needs to come across as credible and quickly describe what's in it for them. The best-case scenario is to start by finding the influencers email listed on their profile or a website as email is one of the best ways to ensure your message actually reaches them. I don't recommend direct messaging and influencer about a collaboration, even if your account is verified, as it's just too easy for the message to get lost and never actually reach them. The goal of sending this email is to introduce yourself, express your interests in working together, highlight the benefits of collaborating and schedule a meeting with them. So let's read through what an effective outreach email looks like and then break down each part afterwards so you can duplicate this approach. Some important contexts is that the person writing this email is a marketer at a company that sells houseplants called flower town. And they're looking to promote their new line of succulents. So the subject line reads, paid partnership with flour town. Now, here's the email. High Quinn, I'm Millie, a marketing lead at Flour town. We sell houseplants online and from our three shops in Chicago. And I'm reaching out to discuss partnering with you on a paid campaign. Were a fan of your art and the stylish House projects, you continually share it Instagram, which is why we think would be a natural fit to work with you to showcase our succulent line. We'd love to discuss the details of sponsoring a few posts and stories as well as potentially doing an Instagram live together. Are you available to meet Tuesday, December eighth or a Wednesday, December ninth, anytime from one to four PM Eastern Standard time. Also, please send over your media kit and rates for partnerships. Thank you. Signed Millie. Let's break down this email unexplained why we included each part in terms of the subject line. It's short and sweet and calls out that you're interested in a partnership, particularly a paid one, which will help ensure the email gets opened. Next, introduce yourself, give some brief background on your company no more than a sentence or two, and then immediately explain you're interested in exploring a paid partnership. This introduction sets you up as a credible person from a legitimate business, genuinely interested in compensating them for a collaboration, which helps ensure they keep reading the following sentence to describe a specific reason as to why you're reaching out to them for a partnership. So there's no confusion as to why you're an ideal match to partner. After that shared detail or two about what you were thinking in terms of the structure of the collaboration. Like are you looking for a series of Instagram posts or review on YouTube? Lastly, wrap up the email by expressing interest in scheduling a meeting to discuss a collaboration and of course includes some time, so it's easy for them to schedule from there. This call to action is critical as negotiating the key components of the collaboration and all its moving parts will happen in person or virtually or over the phone when possible. And to set expectations on your side from the beginning as the influencer to send over their media kit if they have one and the rates they charge for partnerships. This way you're aware of their compensation preferences before meeting. So you can assess whether they're too expensive, affordable, or if there's room for negotiation. As you might have noticed, each section of the email was only a short sentence or to making the entire email easy to quickly read. And that's how I recommend contacting influencers based on the many creators I've successfully reached out to on behalf of my clients and their campaigns.
8. Compensating Influencers: How much do influencers charge? What should you budget? Do you always have to pay to work with influencers? Those are the three most common questions marketers ask regarding compensating influencers. So let's address each of them. So how much do influencers charge? It really varies depending on the size of their audience engagement rate, what channel you'd like to be promoted on, and how in-demand they are. Most influencers charge a fee per post. Many have a flat fee for larger, more involved partnerships. And in some cases they get compensated based on the performance of the campaign or receive a royalty based on our percentage of products sold. The best way to understand what an influencer is rates are is asking them through their media kit rate card or simply what their fees are when partnering with businesses. It's difficult to talk about specific numbers since there's so much nuance and many exceptions to the rules here. But in general, you can expect to pay these estimated rates for influencers with an engaged audience. Influencers with 150 thousand followers usually charge between a 100.5 thousand per post. If they had between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand followers, they often charge between 5000.20000 per post. And the folks that have between 500 thousand to millions of followers can charge $20 thousand to as high as six figured deals per post, depending on the circumstances. With those figures in mind, what should your budget BY when working with influencers? Well, according to a report from the research advisory firm, altimeter group, 25% of our brands digital marketing budget should go to influencer marketing. To me, regardless of the size of your business, that's a reasonable amount to allocate. If you only have $5,000 to spend on marketing, spending $375 towards working with a few smaller influencers would certainly help promote your business. Whereas if you had a $20 thousand budget than putting $5 thousand into an influencer campaign. It's a sensible way to start investing and influencers and experimenting to see what works. And that's the key, as there isn't a golden number you must start with, but instead, invest enough and influencer marketing to fund a substantial experiment. Then increase or decrease your budget from their. Lastly, is it always necessary to pay for influencer partnerships? A majority of the time? Absolutely. It's important to support creators for the effort it takes to partner with your organization and to access the audience They've attracted. But if you're a small business or a non-profit with a nonexistent or limited budget, you need to identify what Exposure, access, and association your organization can uniquely offer in lieu of compensation. By exposure, I mean providing them visibility amongst your audience so they can continue to grow their own following as an influencer, which is especially helpful for smaller influencers. So consider highlighting in your early negotiations the size of your audience, their demographics, and whether they're most active on your websites, social media or elsewhere. In terms of access, what products, people, events, and experiences can your organization uniquely offered to the influencer? In addition or in lieu of compensation? Could you send them free products, review, invite them to company events or introduce them to relevant people in your network. Recently a prominent influence or agreed to partner with one of my clients by being featured as a panelist at the company's annual conference and opportunity for both exposure and access. Association is another benefit to be mindful of as often one campaign for an influencer can lead to the next one, and so on and so on and so on. Think about how you could leverage your organization's reputation to help it influenced their land, their next project, maybe that's by allowing them to use your campaign as a case study for their portfolio or by introducing them to your contacts at other companies. In the end, what's most important is that you're fairly compensating the influencers you're partnering with and being mindful of your budget, goals and the results you're achieving.
9. Collaborating on a Campaign: Getting the small details of an influencer campaign right, can make a big difference. From the beginning, your organization needs to collaborate closely with the influencer and their team to communicate your expectations and work to align with their approach. It's important to achieve the results your actor, but also relinquish a certain level of control to the influencer. They know their audience bests and have their own creative process that's important for your organization to align to. Otherwise the collaboration is going to come off as overly forced. Once you decided to work together, share your expectations regarding goals, the message or product you'd like promoted, the type of campaign you've had in mind, and your timeline. Starting with the goals you're trying to accomplish, share with the influencer, whether this say, campaign focused on driving sales, engagement, audience growth, or all the above. While most campaigns aimed to achieve a few goals at once, it's important that you are clear on what the primary goal of this campaign is. So all efforts are focused on achieving it. For example, I previously worked with an engineering firm whose influencer partnership was focused on building their email list through downloads of their latest white paper. The company did earn awareness on LinkedIn and grew their accompany page too. But in the end, our time working with the influencers was solely focused on gaining email subscribers. Once you're clear on your goals, move on to what you're actually promoting. Are you trying to generate interests in a particular product, service, or message? Whether the influencer is promoting a pair of shoes, a workout routine, or highlighting your company's values related to protecting the environment. This impacts the campaigns creative, come prepared with documentation, videos, or any other resources available to present the product or messaging you'd like to partner on. The influencer can get up to speed, send them the product or service for free. So they've experienced with it and ensure they're genuinely interested in supporting and promoting it beyond the paycheck they're getting. This way. You're helping the influencer get familiar with your offerings and forming how those structure the promotional campaign in an entertaining, educational, and convincing way. At this point, you'll also want to share what type of campaign you had in mind. Is your team interested in a long term affiliate relationship? What about hosting a contest or maybe a giveaway? Did you wanna co-host and Instagram Live? Or do you think a how to video would be the best type of campaign to explore, regardless of what you're thinking, share these expectations so you and the influencer can discuss the available options and what is likely to resonate most with their audience. The last and most straightforward item to sync up on is the timing of your campaign. This is an opportunity to share your deadlines and get an estimate of how long it will take the influencer to plan, produce, publish, and promote the collaboration effectively on their own. These small details may seem insignificant, but as a whole, accounting for them can be the difference between a successful influencer campaign and a lackluster one.
10. Measuring an Influencer’s Impact: Without a plan in place, you won't be able to tell if you're actually reaching your goals before your campaign with an influencer goes live, you need to understand how exactly you will measure the progress of the program. This way, it'll be easier to determine whether it's a success or miss the mark. Based on the goals of the campaign, get clear on what metrics are meaningful to you. Metrics are the values you can measure it, understand your progress in reaching a particular goal. If your goal is awareness, then metrics like views and impressions would be worth monitoring to understand how many people saw the campaign. Or if the campaign is focused on generating sales, you'll likely keep track of the total sales and the number of conversions the initiative drove for your organization. Deciding what metrics matter most comes down to collaborating with the rest of your team. As you want the influencer campaigns you're investing in to get buy-in from the right folks. Most of all, you want them to align with your organization's overall marketing goals. So how do you keep track of these important metrics? Through analytics tools, affiliate tracking, and sometimes keeping track of the manually. By analytics tools, I mean the native analytics tools provided by the major social networks, as well as third-party analytics tools like Google Analytics tracker or keel. These analytics tools allow your accompany the influencer or both parties to see the performance of particular posts shared on social media or activity on your website. Some of these tools make it easier to access the analytics from the influencers account. This way your organization doesn't have to rely on the Creator to share the information. For example, when an influencer tags your business and an Instagram post as branded content and you approve it, you'll be able to view the analytics from that tagged post. Third-party analytics tools like tracker or Keyhole, allows you to monitor how often the campaign hashtag is used, the number of mentions of your organization and more. Some of these are low cost or free, like Twitter or YouTube's complimentary analytics tools. Others are more costly, mainly used by large brands and agencies. Tools like these are the most popular option for measuring and influencers impact because they automate campaign tracking and reporting, saving marketers time and effort in the process. Another way to measure and influencers campaign is affiliate tracking, which is basically tracking how often a unique promotional code or referral link is used. Both must be created manually ahead of time so the influencer can share the code or the link as the call to action in the Campaign. For example, if you work with an influencer who hosts a comedy podcasts, they might share a short blurb about your company with a special offer, only redeemable with a promo code. Or if you're working with an influencer active on Twitter, they could share referral link to your new product line, which allows you to track how many purchases the clicks on that link drove. This method of measuring campaign is most often used when you're focused on driving sales as a direct response to the ads you've created with an influencer. Most e-commerce platforms like big commerce or Shopify, allow you to create these promo codes. And there's also many tools like Google's campaign URL builder that let you create trackable referral links. And the last and most frustrating option is manually tracking the process of a campaign. No matter what tools or trackable codes you're using to measure the success of an influencer support. At times, it's important to gather qualitative data by hand. Reviewing comments, feedback, and diving into the campaign yourself will often provide another angle to its performance that's just not easily capturable. In a formal report. Don't forget to decide on these details during the planning phase. This way you'll say yourself up for success when it comes to measuring the program once it goes live.
11. Reviewing an Example Campaign: Nothing will better prepare you for running your own influenced her campaign than analyzing an example of a successful initiative like this one from the company Headspace. An app that provides guided meditations, articles, videos, and animations. Headspace has goals to improve their customers health and happiness through taking part in meditation practices online. Let's review their recent influencer campaign to promote their family plan, which is an annual subscription to Headspace for up to six accounts available to anyone in a household. In terms of what type of campaign this is. It's a short-term collaboration between headspace and ten Instagram influencers tasked with creating sponsored posts about the family plan. By working with multiple influencers on Instagram over a month, the headspace team significantly increase your chances of reaching more of the right people. According to a case study from media kicks, the goal of the campaign was to promote the app, share the experiences of people using it, and encourage other households to try it out. So based on that info at safe to say that the campaigns primary goal was driving awareness for the meditation app and secondary to that sign-ups for the apps family plan. In a sense, many of these posts were meant to act as a testimonial of their experience using headspace to help build trust and word-of-mouth for the service. With these goals in mind, their teams search and selected Instagram influencers based on how prevalent their family was in their content, whether that's kids or significant others. For example, side to Silva, known as scout the city on Instagram, regularly shares images and videos of her two kids, among her other content focused on style, beauty and wellness. And 6M, known as mini style hacker, also heavily features her family of five cross Instagram. You can also see by looking at her account bio as well. Choosing to work with ten family forward influencers was a strategic move as the headspace family plan was irrelevant product for them to discuss. And they likely have many families that fall them directly. Plus family focus influencers are far less likely to share any controversial content, making them more brand safe partners to collaborate with. As far as contacting these influencers, it's not clear how headspace reached out to them, but it's safe to guess that a likely email them and pitched on the campaign concept from there. Again, since I wasn't involved behind the scenes and how they campaign was negotiated. All I can tell in terms of compensation is that these influencers were most likely paid per each in Feed post that they shared on Instagram. As we've discussed, no two campaigns are the same, so there's a variety of ways this campaign could have unstructured compensation wise. Moving on to the specifics of how the influencers collaborated with headspace. Each of the ten influencers shared to sponsored posts on their Instagram feed. At a high level, each post featured the influencers family discussed the headspace Family Plan, and how they use the app to help distress over the holidays. A timely tie-in, given this campaign was shared in December. What was particularly unique about this collaboration as that these post didn't visually feature headspace in the images used, but instead, each post had a lengthy personalized caption. These captions were the detail testimonials headspace was hoping to promote on social media based on the genuine experiences of the influencers family using the service. Making the caption center-stage, which is distinct from how most influencer campaigns on Instagram or structured help the entire promotion feel more personal and authentic. Lastly, I don't have exact insight into how the impact of these influencers after its weren't measured. But we do know is that this campaign reached almost 3 million people on Instagram and generated over a 117 thousand likes and 2 thousand plus comments. That sounds like a successful and that should have on the surface. But since we don't know the costs of this campaign, only the marketers at headspace can answer whether this was a win or not. Take this example into consideration as you begin to create your own campaign. But remember to pay special attention to what made this one distinctive and results oriented.
12. Conclusion: Staying Relevant: And those are the fundamentals of influencer marketing. Again, I'm Brian Hoffman and I want to thank you for taking the time to complete this course. We review the different types of influencer campaigns you should consider. The goal is to keep in mind and the process of finding and selecting the right influencers to work with. From there we walked through a mock email template to reference when contacting influencers and talk through how to compensate influencers so both sides are happy. I went over what expectations need to be communicated when setting up a campaign and how to collaborate closely with an influencer to build an effective partnership. Afterwards, we discussed how to put the right processes in place to measure the success of the campaign before, during, and after it launches. Lastly, we delve into the specifics of an influencer campaign run by the meditation app Headspace to explore how a real initiative was structured to help your accompany continue to stay relevant. I recommend experimenting with different types of influencer campaigns to see what resonates with your customers. In fact, some of the organizations that I've had the most success with influencer marketing, especially lately, embrace a mixed approach of working with the same group of influencers long-term, and partnering with several other influencers in a one-off capacity to support more short-term endeavors and reach new audiences. I loved answer any additional questions you might have about influencer marketing or creating your own campaign. So feel free to reach out at Brian Hanuman.com. Best of luck to you and your future efforts partnering with influencers.
Brian Honigman, Marketing Consultant | Professor
