Influencer Marketing (On A Small Business Budget)

1. Influencer Marketing (On a Small Business Budget): are you interested in influencer marketing? Maybe you're just getting started on social media and you don't have that big an audience yet. Maybe you're looking to scale up really quickly, or your brand is new to the market place, and you need to build up trust with the right audience. If any of these sound like you, then influence your marketing might in fact be a really good fit for you. But a lot of people seem to think that influencer marketing means you need to be a really big brand with a really big budget to match. I'm here to tell you that that doesn't have to be the case. My name is Michelle, and I've worked in marketing for over 10 years now, primarily in advertising agencies, and as a result, I've gotten to work with a lot of different companies from those big budget beauty brands that you might think of when you think of traditional influencer marketing to local businesses and a lot of B two B business is as well, and in all of those cases, using word of mouth and advocacy can be really valuable as long as you find the right people to work with and have the right structure in place as you're working with them. So if that sounds like good information to you, please join me for this class, where I'll tell you about how to find the right influence or for your business, how to structure your program so that you're working with them in a way that's beneficial for you and how to measure things as you go along as well. And with that, let's get started. 2. What is influencer marketing?: So before we really get into the meat of our class today, I wanted to take some time to define what influencer marketing really means and what it means when we're talking about it on a small business budget. So influencer marketing. What is it? What do I mean when I say that Let's start off with a simple definition for what I personally mean when I say influencer marketing as we move forward with the class. Basically, we're talking about any marketing that uses individuals to speak on behalf of a brand product or service to their own networks of contacts. And you may have heard of some related concepts, such as word of mouth marketing or advocacy, and these were both sort of different styles of influencer marketing. Going back to that idea of There are individuals who have influence to get other people to do something or become more aware of something such a brand product or service. So why would you use influencer marketing? Um, this is one of my favorite statistics to go back Teoh and you know this was put together by McKinsey. Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50% of all purchasing decisions. So we're really highly influenced when we hear another person, whether it's someone we know personally or someone we follow on. Social Media recommend, uh, that we make a purchase of some sort. Recommendations from family and friends were rated the most influential by 84% of respondents in a Nielsen survey. Um, and so, you know, this is something to keep in mind when we talk about influencers. Sometimes influencers are those sort of celebrities that we look at, but it could be as simple as people that we are more closely connected with are also influential. So who has influence, right? The answer, ultimately, is anyone as long as they are someone whose opinion you respect that, um, has the ability to reach out to other people and share that word of mouth. So your influences were really going to very depending on what your business schools are for. Consumer brand influencers might be sort of that traditional celebrity spokesperson. So this is when you think of you know, someone being asked on the red carpet. Who are you wearing today? And they say the name of a particular fashion brand. Um, you know, it might be journalists if you think about sort of beauty brands and how they get the word out. Often they were sending their products to industry journalists and asking them to try it out. Sometimes that turns into a review that's very popular for a lot of different consumer brands. Maybe it's people that have a blogger or instagram channel or they're putting out content on YouTube. But I also think, you know, just their basic customers. And those people who are really super fans often turn into influencers for a consumer brand because they're going out and telling other people about their experience with that brand and therefore influencing others to be interested in it. So let's think about it like this, right? You have different levels of influence, how many people they can reach. But then you also have your ease of conversion to turn that person into an influencer. So you're super fans are already going out and talking about your brand, whether you've asked them to or not. Whereas that celebrity endorsement is really going to be something that you have to negotiate, maybe you have to put a contract together. It's gonna be a signature. An amount of financial incentive involved there. Um, So I like this chart because this kind of lays out for different types of businesses who your influencers generally might be, Um, and this is again kind of looking at how easy it is going to be to reach those people. So, you know, if you're a nonprofit, you have volunteers who are already sort of going out and evangelizing for your nonprofit for you to see, like we talked about. We have our super fans. And for B two B. Really, this is going to be your employees are the easiest people for you to reach because it is their job to go out and and, you know, um, spread the message about your brand. They have intrinsic motivation to do that. Um, and you'll see here. This kind of goes up the pipeline to that celebrity endorsement level at the hardest point , but there's a lot of different levels in between. So, for your homework, I want you to think about what type of influencer might be the right fit for your business . You know, going back to this chart, right? Just think about these General levels of people And where your businesses, You know, if you're just getting started, you might want to start at this top. Easy level. But if you've been around for a little bit longer, you know, maybe your reach is gonna be a little bit bigger than that. So I want you to think about these examples, but, you know, think up your own as well. Don't be boxed in by that. And make sure you write that down before you get started with the next video. 3. Influencer Marketing Case Studies: So in this class I wanna walk through a couple of case studies about influencer marketing that's been done really well. And some of these are case studies that I personally have worked on others or just ones that I have seen executed that I really admired. And if you have an example that you'd like to share, I'd love if you would share that with the whole class. Eso I highly encourage you to tweet at me. I'll put my handle in the class notes, and with that, let's get started. So these case studies are going to be a range of different topics, from consumer marketing to non profit. To be to be in this 1st 1 is a consumer marketing example that I worked on a number of years ago with a brand called S Key To that was looking to launch to a U. S. Audience and reach out to a bit of a younger consumer than they had traditionally been, um, having high levels of awareness with. So this was a brand that already had relationships with some of those celebrity spokespeople. Um, but what we really wanted to do was reach out through beauty bloggers and user generated content, um, to get much higher levels of awareness with a younger social, media savvy audience and we turned to Tumblr and Instagram is our primary channels for this campaign because both of those channels tended to index really high. Um, with a female audience who was the primary purchasers of this brand as well as a higher income audience And, you know, knowing that those channels were really visual, we wanted to focus on visual content. Um, so we worked with bloggers who were really good at putting out visuals on their own channels. We did want to work with bloggers who also talked about travel because this was a brand that people would frequently, you know, throw in their carry on and take with them if they were going to be traveling. And, um, you know, that aspirational lifestyle of travelling was really what we wanted to communicate, to go along with the SK to brand on. And we also had opportunities where we could get some in person, um, user generated content. So these were pop up shops that were in New York and San Francisco, and, you know, that was a good opportunity to get a lot of people through the door experiencing the brand and then capturing that on photos so that we could put that out on our social media channels as well. And you know, naturally, when user generated content is created, people kind of want to share that because it turns them into a little bit of the hero of the story. Um, when they see their own photos up on a brand channel, they've been are much more likely to go and share that out. So this next example is a nonprofit that I have worked with. And, um, you know, this is really the opposite example. So this is a, uh, no budget whatsoever for influencer marketing. However, it is caused that a lot of people would care about, and so they already were starting to develop a pretty large range of volunteers. All across the country, they had very small staff. Ah, but they had 16,000 sorry, 1600 locations, um, with individual volunteers in each of those locations. And these were people who had already, you know, kind of raise their hand and said I care about this cause and they wanted to empower those people to then go out and talk to the public about the cause. So what this campaign was really about was making sure that those people had the right information to do that. And we basically produced a series of webinars video how Twos created a Facebook group and also had email, marketing and downloaded website downloadable website content where these individuals could kind of get the information that they needed in order to be empowered to go out to the general public. But we wanted this to be a two way conversation as well. So we also had a user generated content component of this campaign. Um, where we ran a very simple photo contest around in this example the month of the military child to allow people to submit their own photography, um, and send that back to the headquarters location so that we could gather those assets and, um, use those to put behind our yeah, reached of going out to the press as well as put them on our blog's social and email channels. And, you know, you can see here just a little glimpse at the results of this campaign. So without any paid push behind it. We had a very sudden spike when we put this live of people liking the Facebook page much more than any of the other months that were around it. So this last example is not one that I personally had anything to do with. But I think it's an example that's done really well of, um, influencer marketing in the BTP space. And in this case, the influencers were individuals were going to be speaking at the 2018 content Marketing World Conference. Eso you know, these people are already kind of influential. They are leaders in their field. They've already raised their hand and said, I'm gonna be on stage and I'm gonna share my expertise. Um, and Top Rank Marketing, one of the sponsors of that event, went ahead and interviewed all of these individuals to put together an e book that was downloadable content. So this was a great example of kind of taking advantage of this moment of interest and that sponsorship that they had already invested in to do a little bit of lead generation and get people to submit their names and email addresses and kind of borrow on the influence of these beauty be influencers in order to support their business goals. So by now, you should have a pretty good sense of what influencer marketing is. And, you know, start to think about how that's going to come to life for your business. And I have a little simple project. Um, for between now and the next class that I want you to get started with were you write down free association just a list of words that define either your audience or your business. Andi really can be either of those. So if your audience, you know, has a certain personality is a certain type of person. If certain types of things you know, be the topics or social media channels or demographics just right all of that down and then also think about your business, you know what is the voice of the personality of your business? What, um, is the mission of your business? What type of, uh, industry is your business in all of that? Just totally free association. Write down as many words as you can think of, um, you know, devote 15 20 minutes to this exercise, and once you have that move onto the next class, 4. Define your goals: So in our last class, we talked about a few successful influencer marketing campaigns, and what all those have in common is that they have a very clear goal for each campaign on , and I think that's really important. A lot of people want to get started with influencer marketing, and then after they do it, they're not really sure how to say whether or not it was successful. So starting out with a really clear goal is so important. So let's talk about what success might look like for you. First of all, think about ways that you can align your influencer marketing campaign with your business goals. You know, if your coverage brand, this might be really easy. Can you look at whether there are actual sales that result from your influencer marketing campaign? Can you give your influencers a promotional code that their followers can use, or maybe give them a link to put in their posts so that you contract any activity back from them? For people like me to be campaigns, there must. This might be a little bit more difficult, you know, you might be looking to measure something that's more like awareness on DSO, it might be a little bit more anecdotal. You know, when you go out to journalists in your industry, are you seeing that it's becoming easier to actually place the story about your brand? So it's really important to make sure you're aligned with your PR folks any other marketing activities that you have going on as you're doing this? But, you know, maybe it's something as simple as tracking your Google analytics on your website and seeing whether you are seeing an uptick in those at the same time as your influencer marketing campaign. So for our next little bit of homework, I'm gonna ask you to really think about what is your goal for your influencer marketing program? You know what our thetacticsroom you're going to use so going back to our original homework about what your audiences and what they're looking for and what are you hoping that those tactics will lead to for a goal for your business? So I'm gonna give you a moment to go do that and then will happen in the next video 5. Creating Your Persona: so in today's class were really going to get into the heart of creating our influence or persona. And before I get started, I want to talk a little bit about what is a persona. How do you arrive at a persona? How do you use a persona? So a persona is a fictional character that really gives shape to your marketing activities . And we used these a lot when we're doing things like developing ah website or developing American campaign. It's really all about kind of putting a face and a name and Cem human characteristics to your target audience. In this case, our target audiences is really just going to be one or, you know, a handful of people because our target audience is our influencer. But I still find this to be a really useful tool when you're just starting to think about who you're influencer is and kind of put some shape around that. So you have, um, your persona worksheet and I havent example here of a completed one that I've done for a fictional product that is, you know, a food product that's being targeted. Teoh busy parents who want to have a healthy equal friendly meal option for their families . And you know you'll see here that I have developed my influencer, which is Kristen. She's 38. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and she is a wedding photographer. Um, you know, she has Instagram and YouTube as her favorite social channels, and she's primarily posting her photography and you know, instagram stories behind the scenes. Um, she's got an audience of about 15,000 people, and that's primarily on Instagram. But she does have 2000 YouTube subscribers where she'll boot, do some tutorials, and she has about 100 50,000 views on her YouTube videos. Now, in the bottom of this screen, I've got a word cloud which is generated from that, um, word list that I created earlier about my product in my audience as well as an example Mood Board, which just gives a visual sense of the type of content that I'm looking for so that you know, when I'm going forward and looking for riel influencers, I can get a very quick glance at their INSTAGRAM account. No, you know, is this person going to align with my brand and have sort of the same sorts of visual standards that I'm looking force that we have mutually agreeable content moving forward. So with that, let's look at how we can create our word cloud in our mood board, and then I'll let you get started with your persona. So I am gonna move forward into our first tool, which is building a word cloud. And this is just a free online world Word cloud generator of word clouds dot com. I can put that in the class notes, but this is super easy to use and, you know, it's just a ad supported online free tool. Um and so what, you're gonna want to dio, um, is this is basically generated off of a word list, and you can either have it pulling words from website or a document, or you can just paste and type in text, which is what I've done in this case. So, um, underneath file, that's where you choose to add your text. You copy and paste in your word list here, and you can generate your word cloud. And you know you can even make it different shapes or different colors if you want. So if you have something that's maybe, you know, specific to your particular product. That can be kind of nice. This is a little bit of a hard shape, so, you know, play around with it. Something kind of fun. Our next tool that we are going to look at is Adobe Spark and Adobe Spark is what I have used to create my, um, influencer mood boards. So just to go back to my example here, a mood board is basically just a visual representation of who my influencer is, and, you know, the types of content that they were putting out. So you can really see at a glance who this individual is and you know what? What they're like. So we're gonna spend a little bit of time talking about creating a mood board on, and I don't want to go too deep into this. But this is just one element that we're going to add to our influencer persona and really is just going to give us a visual sense of who this person is in the type of content that they create. So I'm using a tool called Adobe Spark. For this which is free. You do have to have an adobe account, but you don't have to have a paid account. Um, and you know, uh, feel free to scroll through and pick out a few things. So once you have that done, you can go ahead and either screenshot or download your image from Dobie Spark and add that to your persona worksheet. Um, and that's one step down in your class project. 6. Go Live! Activate Your Influencers: now that you have your influence or persona complete your really ready to get started working with influencers And, of course, doing that outreach and talking to different people, it's gonna take you some time. But I wanted to have you prepared so that when you do start working with influencers, you're ready to move forward with creating content with them as quickly as possible. So I have a couple of tools to tell you about today that those big budget brands are using when they work with influencers that even the smallest business can make use off. So number one thing I want you to think about is, of course, content creation being a collaborative process. So whenever possible, I highly encourage that you work with your influencer to make sure that both of you are having input on creating content. And this may be, you know, more of, ah, high production effort where you're actually working together to produce it. Video, you know, working with 1/3 party video production company, something like that. But it doesn't have to be that complicated. One thing I want to introduce you to is the idea of having a creative brief for your influencer. And what a creative brief essentially is going to boil down to is a document that really explains to this individual what the content is that your hoping will be created and you know what impact that's going to have on their audience. So it's really not about dictating this standards of the content, you know, giving them a script. This is more about giving them some key talking points and giving them some key insights into you know what your product or service is and how that's going to be helpful to their audience. And another thing I think you should think about is depending on who the influencer you're working with is. It might be useful to provide that individual with some content production tips, and this is really going to come in handy for those of you who are looking at working with , you know, influencers that aren't necessarily a traditional content creator. So this may be someone that is a volunteer. If you're a nonprofit or someone that's one of your employees. If you're a small business having some basic content production tips that you can easily give those individuals when they're going forward and creating content on your behalf can be really useful. And so I have an example I'm going to share with you a swell, but it's as simple as you know. Here are steps about how to go live on Facebook or here are some tips for recording, video or audio that are going to be helpful to you. And, you know, you really have to think about who this individual is and what their ability is already are . And what sorts of, um, you know, technical capabilities they're going to bring to the table. Are there going to be recording on their phone, or are they going to be using just talk computer editing software? But either way, you can give them some tools so that when they are moving forward, you are as successful as possible with. So the last thing I want you to think about when you are activating your influencers is, of course, content distribution and what I really mean when I say this is when and where is the content going live? Where is it going to live? Are you going to pull it together anywhere and how are you going to promote it to make sure it gets seen. So is it being posted to the influencers channels? Is it being posted? Teoh, Your social media channels, Is it both? I think in most cases that's probably the ideal scenario. And are you putting any paid media behind it? Do you have a landing page on your website where maybe you can invent some of that content or, you know, a blawg post that's going to bring it all together. So I highly encourage you to, you know, put all of that into your influence or creative brief and make sure that you're all on the same page so that when you start working with those influencers, you're really setting yourself up for success, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit more. In one of the future lessons 7. Measuring Success with Influencer Marketing: So we've already talked a little bit about setting your goals for your influence or marketing program, you know? Is this going to help you with driving? Awareness is it's going to help you scale up engagement on your social media channels. Or is this more about, um, you know something more like driving sales or driving visits to your blog's? And I wanted to give you a few tools that you can use in tracking those things. So you know, if it's going to be about driving actual traffic to a Lincoln, this is going to be one of the easiest things to track. I highly recommend that you use a service called Betley and Billy is free to use, and you can see an example here of a link for one of my past skill share classes. Um, and you know, this is great for a free service you convey. Get a short link that you can use in all sorts of places on your social media channels and the last you two very quickly see, um, you know when you are getting links through, so if you create a link that specific for your influence or when they're driving back to traffic. Even if that link is not one that you own, you will be able to see what kind of traffic you're getting from that individual influencer or individual piece of content. Um, and secondarily, I also highly encourage you to look at your website analytics if you are driving back to a property that you own. So I personally just have a squarespace website. It's very simple, but even with that, you can get some basic analytics even, you know, with the not not particularly high level painting count. And so this is important if you kind of just want engaged general awareness Ah, for your audience, you're going to start seeing more traffic coming through to your website as people start to learn about you and and look into you, you know? So, um, get yourself a sense of your baseline analytics and where you are before your influencer program. And then once you start with your influence or C, does that go up? Um, and you are you getting things in from, you know, mawr social traffic sources. If they are doing those referral links back to you, um, you know, if you are tracking. Ah, for instance, Google Search. That's going Teoh. Be helpful as well to just see that lift in organic search over time as you start working with more influencers. And then, lastly, I highly encourage you to look at your Social Media Analytics whether you're doing it directly in the social platforms themselves. So, you know, Are you growing followers over time? Is your engagement going up? Um, or if you were using a social media management tool, those can be really helpful for measuring analytics. And, you know, if you're interested in social media management tools, I have a whole other class all about that, so I won't go into it too much here, but very useful for measuring the success of your program. 8. The "Dos and Don’ts" of Influencer Marketing: Okay, so let's take a minute to talk about something that's a little bit more of a difficult subject When influencer marketing goes room, I'm sure you have heard of instances where a brand aligned themselves with an influencer and, you know, later on down the line, that person came out and said or did something that you know. That brand then was sort of faced with this really difficult challenge of Oh, no. Now we're aligned with this person who's in the news for negative reasons. What does this mean for our brand Or, you know, maybe a little less dramatic. But there are a lot of examples of influencer marketing where the individuals who are running the campaigns didn't start out with sort of clear goals in mind of what they were looking for. And as a result, Now they're saying, Well, influencer marketing didn't really do anything for me. It's not worth it. Um, I don't want you to go through either of those circumstances. So here are a few things that you can do to really set yourself up for success and some things you shouldn't dio, you know, if you're a little bit more worried about some of those negative repercussions. So first off go in with clear expectations. You know, whenever you're working with an influencer, make sure that you have sort of your list of this is what I'm actually looking for. Kind of agree to things in writing. And this doesn't mean that you have to dictate to your influence or what they dio. You know, you have come to them because they have built up a falling, so you should rely on them to, you know, come up with ideas a little bit. But it's really important that you just have agreed on your expectations. And some big brands actually go so far as to have contracts with their influencers. In most cases, you know, that's not really going to be necessary. But just going back and forth and email, make sure you're agreeing on how many posts they're going to do what they're going to put into those posts. You know what type of content it is? Are they going to tag you? Who's channels? Is it going to be shared on and just kind of hammer all that out between yourselves so that when you go live with something you, uh you know, make sure that you are on the same page about it. And, um, you know, another important thing to keep in mind is that your influencer has the ability to do what you need them Teoh. So that you can track success of your campaign, right? So let's go back to that conversation about what the success look like for you. Do they have a link that goes back to your website that they need to put into their post? Do they have ah, promo code that they need to use? Are you asking them to direct people back to follow your page? If so, make sure you have written down what your follower numbers were before this happened. So her, you know, be using a social media software where you can track your growth over time because otherwise you're not gonna be able to know whether this has been effective at all or whether you should continue that relationship going down the line. So, you know, when we're talking about relationships, here's another really important thing to keep in mind. Sometimes it's better to have influence your relationships with people who are, you know, kind of smaller just starting out, and you can build up more of an authentic relationship with these individuals over time versus those kind of bigger influencers where you might get a bigger bump. But it's much more transactional in nature, And the reason I recommend that is that you know there's gonna be a level of trust when you are aligning yourself with an influencer, you have to have trust built up between the two of you. You know, they need to be able to trust you as a brand to provide the aspects that you're going to provide. And you need to be able to trust them to not do something that reflects back negatively on your brand. You're really asking them to be a spokesperson for you. So you know, first off, just make sure you're really vetting your influencers. Go out and watch that person's videos. If they're on YouTube, you know, go and look at all the posts on their instagram. Make sure that this person is aligned with the same sorts of attributes that you want your brand to have. So this is where your persona is gonna come in really useful. Does this person this real life person actually match up with your ideal influence or persona, and if not, you know, maybe they're not the right fit for you. Maybe there's a few things that it's fine if they're not exactly the same. But if they're going out there with something that you're not comfortable with, better to not get started with that person, right? So we have. Make sure you have clear expectations. Make sure you have the structure in place to be able to measure success and make sure you've really vetted your influencers. And if you do those three things, you should be in a good place. So with that, we're ready to move on to our next video. 9. Influencer Marketing: Not That Hard After All!: This'll point. I hope that you're feeling fairly confident about influencer marketing. Even if your business is budget is relatively small or you're really just getting started in the space. You have your persona project, which is ready to help you as you're researching different influencers and a couple of new tools in your toolbox to help you set yourself up for success as you move forward with influencer marketing and, of course, measure your results, which is so important I really want to thank you for joining me for this class and please leave me a review and let me know how it goes. I'd also like to ask that you share your persona project so anyone else that's falling this class conceive what different personas looked like from all different industries because I think it's so important to understand that influencers can be all sorts of different people . So with that, I wish you the best of luck with your influencer marketing projects and let me know how it goes. Thanks