Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, welcome to my Skillshare class on Influencer Marketing. I'm Will and I've worked with some of the world's top brands and talent on influencer campaigns. I've created campaigns for brands like neta porte and Penguin Books. I've been an influence myself for brands like Samsung and Xbox and I've worked with influencers from [inaudible] to Dan and Phil and many more. I've boiled down my experience into this class, which is a detailed but easy to follow Introduction to influence on marketing. I'm going to share with you exactly how you create an influence, a campaign, from researching the right influences for your brand all the way through to measuring your results. It's a very easy to follow and digestible course regardless of your level of expertise and I'll explain everything very clearly as we go and show on screen exactly what I'm doing. There is a class project, so you're going to fill that in along the way and when we get to the end of the class, you'll have your very own influencer marketing campaign. Let's get started.
2. Campaign Plan: Let's dive into building our campaign. The basic structure of this class follows the process of executing an influencer marketing campaign, and by the end of it, you'll have absolutely everything you need to get started. The steps are, make a plan. I have got a template for you for that, we'll talk about it shortly. Next, brainstorm and come up with some creative ideas that meet the client objectives. Next, find your influencers through research tools and techniques. I'll show you how to do that. Next, contact them in the right way, in a way that is going to get a response, which is very important. Next is actually execute the campaign and collaborate with your influencers. Finally, reporting, which I'll tell you all about at the end. Again, I've got a place for you to put your results in the project. One thing to bear in mind is that these steps, they are pretty non-linear, particularly in the first half of your campaign. You may well find that when you get to research and influencers, that throws up some interesting creative ideas and you go back and revise what your creative idea is. Then you may even go back again and revise the plan because you work out actually, we need six months to do this, not three. It's absolutely fine to jump about, it doesn't have to be a perfectly linear plan. Talking about the plan, I've created a spreadsheet file in the project which you can download in either numbers or Excel format, depending on whether you prefer Mac or a PC based Software. There's three sheets in that for you to fill in. The first one is going to be the results of your influencer research. You're going to list all the influencers that you want in your campaign and there's places there to put all the important information. Who they are, what they talk about, their favorite topics, hashtags, how many followers they've got, and that thing. The second sheet is a times plan for your activity. Again, I've put a template in there for you to fill in. Lastly, is a reporting template for you to plug all your results into, in a way that will make sense to you and will make sense to your client if you have one. The times plan, that's based on my experience of influencer campaigns. Again, I say this all the time, there are no rules, there's no right or wrong. Yours might be very different to mine. Whilst these are the likely steps and timelines you'll work with, every campaign is unique. Feel free to edit that when you use it your own work, however you see fit. At the outset of the campaign, we would fill this in and the only thing you've got to go on is the client's brief, the client's objectives, the client's timings, so you plug that in accordingly. Then what I'd advise doing is uploading that to something like Google Sheets, so that everybody involved in the campaign can view the plan anytime, and they know they can see in the latest version and also contribute. Select people can be given access to contribute and edit the plan and write notes in and that thing.
3. Creative Ideas: We have a provisional plan in place and this may change, but let's talk about what we want to do in this campaign and how best to work with influencers in general. Just before we do that, when we say influencers, I want to be clear that what we mean is lots of different types of people. There's not just one homogenous group of people on earth called influencers. I really love how this infographic does a better job of explaining this than anything I could create. This is from tracker, they're in influence the market, they create some great content about influencer marketing. The top half of the infographic sets out the different breeds, if you like, of influencer from the celebrity and the authority all the way through to the expert, very niche influencer who is probably an academic, the respected industry, insider, the journalists always after the story. We respect the fact that there are lots of different types of influencer, but the bottom half of the infographic is very useful as well. This gives some idea of different ways to engage, different way to use those people in your campaigns, different ways to approach them. Because they are very different, they care about different things. That's the crucial thing. A celebrity is all about boosting their profile. Whereas, an activist is all about furthering their cause, and so on and so on. You really need to make sure that you're using the right people in your campaign and targeting them and engaging them in the right way, that's relevant to them. Now, you may not be able to read all the text on the infographic, but I've put a link in the description of this class so you can download it and use it in your own work because it is very useful. Just as there are different types of influencer, there are many different types of influencer marketing campaign. To keep things simple, I've outlined the most common six that you will find in the world today. We can talk about real-world examples of them. The first one is a co-creation campaign. You co-create something collaboratively with the influencer. More on that later. The second one is to offer them a giveaway or voucher, something for them to offer their audience. It gives them an opportunity to give their audience something of value The third one is product review, is probably the most traditional type of influencer campaign, where you send them something and agree that they will in some way talk about your product. Fourthly, influencer takeover, something that's becoming more popular and certainly was popularized when Snap-Chat became really big, I think. But more and more people are doing that on Instagram as well. Where you basically hand the keys over to your social account to an influencer or group of influencers, usually for a day and they just do whatever they want and create content for you, which is great because it is a bit risky. That's what's so fun about it. Fifthly, influencers as models. We've seen a lot of this, particularly in beauty and fashion, where brands are, rather than using models in studios, perfectly sharp, perfectly airbrushed, and post produced more and more using customers and influencers as models. A beauty brand called Glossier, who've become huge in recent years are a fantastic example of this and I'll show you another one in a minute. Lastly, a unique and exclusive experience. This is where as a brand you try and give an influencer or group of influencers, some really unique experience, perhaps coming to see how you make what you make or meet their creator of your products. Do something that most people just never get to do in their life. Because ultimately you've got to remember that influences are offered a lot of stuff, a lot of advice to parties and events and things, they're offered products and freebies. We really need to find ways to stand out and that can be a really effective way of doing that. Let's look at some real world examples of those different campaign types. The first one talks about co-creation. This is a campaign that I ran for Net-a-Porter. Net-a-Porter luxury fashion outlet, one of the biggest e-commerce sites. What they wanted to do is they wanted to create lots of very interesting and engaging content around a new beauty product that was launched in on their platform from a very well-known established beauty brand, they were launching a new product. What we went out and did, was a mass a team of bloggers and influencers from around the world and from different categories that were in some way linked to this, to the ethos of this beauty brand, so fashion, beauty, lifestyle, health, and wellness. We formed a small team of influencer creators, all of whom were predominantly Instagram influences. We got them to create stuff that was very much in their spirit, very much what they do best, but we creative directed that. I would feed back to them on the content, pick the best of it, perhaps take it and re-define some of it with our designers in house. Basically, what we ended up with was a huge amount of content that was very unique and original, very creative, very relevant to the audience for Net-a-Porter and the beauty brand. That content was completely multipurpose, so we could use it in print and online. We could use in editorial, in ads, in social, on product pages, everywhere you can imagine essentially. We've got a lot of very useful content that really stood out was probably far more interesting than what a brand or an agency would have just created without their input. But of course, as within all influencer campaigns, we got the benefit of the shared audience. There you go exposure to Net-a-Porter's audience which is great for them, because what an influencer wants is more profile. We got access to their audience and exposed to their followers as well. That was a win all around. Secondly, the voucher campaign type. Again, this doesn't seem very sophisticated, particularly. It is essentially just giving someone a voucher code. But it's actually very nice, I think, because it's rather than trying to give the influencer is something of value and end in there, it's allowing them to give their audience something of genuine value. In this case, NA-KD fashion gave Jannid, who is a popular fashion and lifestyle influencer from Holland. They gave her a unique discount code, which was Janni20. Anybody who used that got 20 percent off all purchases for the next 72 hours after that was posted on her Instagram. It gives her reason, it gives her something else to talk about beyond I'm wearing stuff from NA-KD fashion. It gives her followers more reason to pay attention rather than just, Oh, she's wearing something from NA-KD fashion because, hang on a minute, there's a unique discount code. There's a really nice bit of added value there that goes above and beyond the usual campaign type. It's very basic, but I really like those campaigns. Thirdly, is the product review. Now, we talked about this being the most kind of traditional influence of marketing campaign type, it is. Just send in some on products and hope for him for if for a review is not particularly original and it's not likely to be hugely effective. Brands are going a little further now. In this example, Huawei, who are one of the big smartphone brands, trying to challenge the bigger brands like Samsung and Apple. They sent unboxing therapy, who has a very big YouTube channel. They send in their latest smartphone and they sent it in exclusively before anyone else had it. Because he's an unboxing channel, they rather than just sending them in the standard retail packaging, they really went to town in how they packaged it. It was in layers of luxury packaging. Then in this flight case, it lit up as he opened it. It was this incredible unboxing experience. It obviously had a brainstorm around, what would be the ultimate slick unboxing experience and they created that. I think that's great top marks to them. What they get out of that of course, is they get a huge influence at talking about their products. Obviously, they have to pay him, but they've given him something that allows him to create really great content, rather than just send him a product as it appears on the shelf. They get content from that. This is not only just ceded to a massive audience, but it's different, it's unique. It's different from all their other marketing in tone and in look, so a very successful campaign. There was 8 million views on that video, definitely it did well. The next campaign type is influence to takeover. This is becoming more popular. This is a really nice example from New York University Sydney, Australia campus. They took two students from two of the New York American campuses and had them go to Sydney and enjoy all the sights and sounds of Sydney and show what a great place is to study and be a student. These two, Bella and Ellie, basically, spent a number of days actually with the keys to their Instagram account, just documenting everything that they erupt to. What happens is with influencer takeover like this, you go from having one or two brand posts a day, which is reasonably interesting, I suppose. Suddenly, your feed becomes a lot more interesting. There's a lot more content. It's got a totally different approach, different perspective, it's a lot more creative and kind of candid and free. People really love that and they respond to that. Also, the algorithm responds to that. People like the risk. People love it when brands take risks. They love the kind of feeling that everything is not perfectly nailed down and tight-lipped. They like the kind of riskiness and the freedom of these kind of things, and people seem to respond really well to them. It shows a much more fun and creative side to your brand. It just generates lots of content, and of course, you get the benefit of sharing the audiences again, like all the campaigns. We get to influence audiences and they get exposure on the brand's channel as well, which is great for them because they love more exposure. Next is this idea of influencers as models which I mentioned Glossier, the beauty brand, who do this really well, they use their customers. To them, every customer is an influencer and their customers are their models. This is Gymshark. What you find with Gymshark is that absolutely every single social posts is by or of influences wearing their clothes and influences of all sizes and all sorts. But a lot of them, do have quiet huge audiences. What that develops over time is firstly, a massive piece of what we call social proof. This isn't just a brand timers how awesome they are. This is real people, real users of their products. People are putting their reputations on the line, telling us how awesome Gymshark are. It's social proof that what they produce must be great because otherwise why would these people put their name to it. We also get, whilst it's very consistent and the executions consistent and of course their clothes are very consistent and it's always in a kind of a gym setting. The content is quite varied and you get different types of fitness influencers posting. Here there's obviously a massive sense of shared audience because every single social post is with an influencer. Every time they're posted in social, that's going on a different influencer's account and the Gymshark account, and everybody wins. They are just collaborations, they are just ways for each party to kind of cross-pollinate audiences, so everyone's a winner. Overtime, it just puts very respected fitness voices at the heart of their brand. It doesn't even feel like a corporate company anymore. It feels like a collective of people, a movement, something bigger and better than just a corporate company selling clothes. They've really achieved that, Gymshark. Through this, they've achieved absolutely spectacular growth just in the last couple of years, so it's definitely working. Finally, is the unique brand experience that we talked about. This example is really perfect, execution of that is by Chanel. They invited a group of influencers to their factory in France, which is great in itself. But what the influencers then got to do is create their very own unique strain of Chanel N'5, which is a real once in a lifetime opportunity. If you're into beauty and fragrance and what have you, you're going to absolutely love this as a very, very unique and valuable experience. It is something that they're going to remember for years to come. It really stands out amongst the other kind of influencer campaigns they will have been involved with, or the collaborations they'll have done with brands. There's so much more motivated to create great, unique, interesting content on the back of that, rather than do the bare minimum that they're obliged to contractually produce. Think about how you can make a very unique experience that's about them the influencer. It's not just about you, the brand. It is how can you make it special for them. Because if you make it special for them, they will then create special content for their audience that gets actually seen and engaged with. That's what we're trying to do here. Those six examples covered the main types of influencer campaigns and that should give you lots of creative ideas for your own campaign.
4. Avoiding Pitfalls: As someone who's been both an influencer and an influencer marketer, I've seen the same mistakes made again and again. I thought I'd share them here and [inaudible] them down into the main four general topics that I see coming up again and again. The first one is a running theme, this idea of niches and micro influences. A lot of marketers have really overlooked the importance of this and get really hung up on the idea of scale, and of size. Actually, it's far better to engage, not just micro influences, but micro topics. How can you go to the most niche subtopics of your subject area, and create something that's truly valuable for those people there? Because if you can win with the people who are the most obsessed and the most into what you do, that will naturally spread out to people who are a bit less into it and so on, until it reaches out to the mainstream. Whereas, if you pay to try and reach everybody and pay to reach the mainstream from day 1, what you are doing is just spray and pray marketing; just putting it out to the world and hoping that someone, somewhere cares about it, and that's very likely to fail, so embrace niche topics, embrace niche influencers because they're the people who really get listened to, and that is where trends start. That's where the very embryonic trends start. They don't start anywhere else. They don't just start out in the ether. They start with these very core passion groups, so don't worry about size, just worry about relevance. Even if it's 20 people you're talking to. The second thing is about building relationships. All too often, I've seen marketers create an influencer campaign, recruit some influencers, utilize them and just move on. It's such a shame. It's such a waste. Actually, what you should be doing is from campaign to campaign, try and retain and use the same influencers again and again, develop relationships with them. Become on speaking terms, become friends with them. Because ultimately, you benefit in each other. You're both helping each other and you probably got lots of creative ideas that could help each other, that would only come up in a more informal conversation and a more long-term relationship. What you find is, when you work with the same influencers over time, you'll find that they come up with ideas of how they could make your campaign better. You also find that some of that and more natural advocacy and ambassadorship comes out, where it's not that every single post or mention on their feeds has to be paid for it or it has to be in a contract. You might find that over time, you start to get a few more natural organic mentions, in their social feeds that you didn't pay for because they start to believe in you as a brand and want to help and feel like part of the team essentially. Build long-term relationships with influencers and of course then as they grow in size and in reach, you grow with them and so be part of their story early on, if you can. The third thing is very similar point really, but just look back at those creative executions, we just looked at. Look at how they go beyond, just sending out free stuff, which is sending out an invite to a party or have you. How can you go beyond free stuff? How can you go beyond paid placements? Lots of marketers still do that. It's quite lazy and one-dimensional, and uncreative. It's the easy thing to do, just send them your product or send them an invite or send them a template e-mail and tell them about a new product, but it's just so likely to fail now more than ever. Try and go beyond that. Lastly, what's very important is probably the hardest thing to do as a marketer especially, if you're an agency and you've got clients, is to give influencers genuine creative freedom. What I've seen all too often is a marketer recruiting an influencer into a campaign because of what they do on their own social channels. But then try and change what that is and try and somehow make that fit the client brief and make that safe for the campaign. What you end up doing, you end up essentially ruining the campaign and ruining the content. Because quite simply, you're not allowing the influencer to do what they do best. If you can't handle the stuff that they produce already on their social, if you can't handle that exact flavor of content being produced for you and the brand, don't recruit them in the first place, don't try and sanitize what they do in any way because their audience will instantly smell that it's marketing and something seems off. This is not like that normal content. It will get a lot less engagement and you'll end up really disappointed in your client because they all see that, hang on a minute, this brand collaboration content got half the amount of views and likes and comments as their usual stuff. Why is that? That happens all too often, so try not to do that. Try and recruit influencers where you're absolutely happy to let them do, what they do best in the campaign and you wouldn't feel compelled to have to try and sanitize it.
5. Influencer Research with Buzzsumo: Now we've looked at how best to work with influences, what creative roots work, what ideas we might have. The next thing we need to do is go and find our influences for the campaign. We're going use a few different tools, all of which have limited free versions and then paid for premium versions with some extra features on locked, but they're all free to try in some way. I'm going to start with Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo is primarily a content research tool. They scan the internet for content, articles, videos, social posts. They allow us as marketers to be able to find out what content is working in particular topics, and who are the people creating that content, who are people sharing that content, who are the people driving the success of that content and driving what people think about and read about and look at in that specific subject area. We're going to use that to find who's driving the conversation in blogs, on Twitter, and on Instagram. Then we're going to follow along and tweet reach to find some specifically Twitter influences. Then with Instagram, we're going to use Instagram itself and NinjaOutreach to identify Instagram influences. Then we're also going to look at social blade, which allows us to analyze the growth of an Instagram influencer just to check that they have legitimate looking levels of growth and genuine audiences. Let's start with Buzzsumo. If you go to Buzzsumo.com, you'll land here. The nice thing about Buzzsumo is even if you're not logged in, don't even have an account. You can enter any topic here and it will show you the top content, and therefore, the top influencers for that topic. It's a very useful tool even if you don't have an account, but I would suggest signing up. Also if you find it useful, I would recommend going on their lowest paid plan, which is less than $40 a month and gives you full functionality pretty much. I'm going to just login. Here we are, here's my Buzzsumo dashboard. It's actually a very simple product. At the top you can see there's three tabs, content, research, influences, and monitoring. We're going to be using just the first two. The first one is the one that I think that users spend the most time in, the content research area. The classic way that a content marketer would use this tool is to enter a topic and just see what their top content for that topic is to give them a steer on what the trending or popular aspects of that topic are, and perhaps take some of that to inspire their own work. If I put in cocktails, let's say, and I look in the past six months. I can see that the most popular pieces of content around cocktails and how it's audit currently is by total engagements. That's a total of all these metrics. It looks at Facebook engagements, shares comments, likes, Twitter shares, Pinterest shares, ready engagements, number of back links from other websites. The Evergreen score, which isn't an engagement metric, but that's just a score that defines how permanently relevant entities in the long-term. Something with a high Evergreen score wouldn't be highly topical. Just about this week's news, it would be relevant for many weeks moments and better perhaps even years to come. Something about a new story this week we'd have a very low evergreen score and something about,10 tips to make your cocktail garnishes absolutely fabulous, would have a very high evergreen score because that will still be relevant in a 100 years. Anyway, the total engagements is how it's sorted by default. If you are interested in content that's popular on a particular platform, say Twitter, you can click that and look that, but I'm just going to keep it total engagements. What's interesting here is there are a few topics coming up pace. There's obviously a story about alcoholic push pops that took off sometime in this year and this very things to do with cocktails there. The initial thing that strikes me here is we can see what websites are influential around a particular topic. Here we can see Delicious.com and people.com and Pop Sugar.com, BuzzFeed, LA times, the verge, I guess the outlets you'd expect to be influential about anything really. But where we can find real influences is where next to any story you can click this View shares, and this shows you the people that shared this article or piece of content on Twitter. If you look at that, we can look at the people who essentially made that piece of content popular, because it's sorted by the most engaged users. The per hour of all the people who shared this on Twitter, the person that gets the most average re-tweets on their content is Harry. That's his name and that's his website and he is tagged as being a blogger himself. That's someone interesting. If I was to write some cocktail content or either cocktail products, I would want him to know about it. We could also saw by a more traditional, but in some ways controversial metric of Twitter followers, but it would show us some of the people with the biggest audiences, and then it would be up to us to work out how relevant and real those audiences are. We can see here that when we saw in that way, the person with the most followers shared that piece of content was Janice. We can see what Janice is into, she's clearly a food blogger and a travel blogger and someone who is very interested in Disney as well, which was a new topic of the article. Here we can see that it's called out her Instagram handle is deduced that from a Twitter profile. Also given her an authority score on Instagram 60, which is high average if you like. What we can do is we can then save that influence or into a particular project and we can start building a list of them. But what we're going to do of course, is we're going to use our sheet where we're going to put all our influences into. If we go to the first sheet of spreadsheets for the project, we can see here that I've put in some basic information about my first influence, which is me. We've put in the influence name, but all the profile URLs are generally put them in order of importance, are the most important one first. Hashtag or topics of that person is known for or regularly talks about. Sometimes people do put these in their bio, but often you'll have to have a look down there content and just get a better sense of the main hashtags and topics that they cover. Also, it's worth putting in some unique facts or interests, because these can be used when you're coming up with ideas to engage the person and thinking about ways that they can be of most use in your campaign. Looking at me, you could say, "Well, Will is vegetarian and we're doing a thing about cocktail ingredients and we can specifically ask him to create content about vegan or vegetarian cocktails, etc." You could somehow make the way that I participate in the campaign unique to me. Instantly, you've got a much more compelling thing to talk to me about when he first contact me. Secondly, it could shape the way that I embrace the campaign. Ultimately, you're going to get me far more invested in your campaign, and you're going to get me creating content that is more in line with what I already produced and so is more relevant to my existing followers. That's just a very important thing to note here. Think about, which city the person lives in, what hobbies they appear to have, things that they clearly are interested in outside of their core hashtags and topics. The next column, column A, that's where we put the total number of followers. That's the total sum of my Twitter and Instagram followers, 51,000. E-mail address. Now, you're going to have to do a little bit of detective work to find this. Mine is very easy because it's on my website and for most people that would be the case. You'll usually see on something like Twitter or Instagram, people will put their website URL. If you go to that, there is almost always some way to contact people. Some people have forms, but almost everyone has some e-mail address. Lastly, any notes just as you progress through the campaign and also contact notes. You would put things in here, like e-mailed on the 21st of November. He replied a week later. So any kind of running those commentary on how your contact is going with me, put it there. So that's how to use the first sheet on our project spreadsheet, which is very simple. It's probably the simplest sheet on here. So back to BuzzSumo. So how we got to find these people was we were in content research. We looked for content related to cocktails, we found the top content, and then we looked at View Share as to find the people that share that content on Twitter and kind of drove the success of that content. Now, there's quite a few other things going on in Buzzsumo but this is probably the page that most content marketers look at most of the time. What we can also do is we can start off in the "Influencers" tab. So at the top we click the "Influencers" tab and now we can start off here, just search in influencers straight off. So if we look at, maybe we want to find some bartenders some mixologists. So let's search bios for bartender and see what we come up with and, yeah, we've got a world-class bartender of the year 2013 publisher of a bartender newsletter, etcetera. So some very interesting people here. Now, again, we can sort these people by the average amount of retweets they get, by the page and domain or authority of the website that they linked to in their bio, the amount of followers they've got, etcetera. So let's maybe look at the bartenders with the most followers, see what we get. We get some pretty interesting people there and yeah we can see that quite a lot of them are on Instagram. This one here, you may have heard of because it has got quite an eye-catching name. I've got very high Instagram authority score, so may be someone that's worth knowing about. We can do various things with these people we can tweet and then, we can follow them. Again, we can save them and put them in a folder, save them for later. Interestingly, we can also look at the links that they've shared. So this is an interesting way of looking at what kind of stuff does this person share, are they likely to be interested in sharing my content, etcetera? So we can see the domains, the kind of size that they share content from, and also just the most recent links that this account has shared on Twitter. So we get a really good idea of what they're interested in. Actually, as you do this over time, what you get more broadly is a really good idea of what matters in that world, in that topic area. Even if it's a topic area that you'd spend a lot of time thinking about, perhaps you work at a spirit brand, you still find surprises when you actually start to dig into this stuff and see what people are really interested in. You will be surprised and you'll find new things that interest you in new ways. So it's a great way to just become more plugged into what the tastemakers in any particular field are thinking about. So that's great and that's very interesting. Another thing we can do here is just at the top here under the Influencers tab, Top Authors it's a slightly different way into this, but we can find some other types of influencers by doing this. So if I just search for cocktails in here, let's just see what we come up with. Now this search does tend to take a little bit longer, usually about seven or eight seconds, because it's got to scan quite a few different types of content and people. We've got the top authors for the topic of cocktails here. These are authors that have written content of articles. Now what's interesting here is the top person is Rachel Andrews,huge engagement metrics, only published 15 articles. Now, when we look at Rachel and her publishing output, what we find is that she's a different kind of influencer. Let's take a look at her on Twitter for a start. So this is her Twitter, she's got 211 followers. She is not what I would call a Twitter influencer by any means. However, she rides for some incredibly influential sites. So a large part of her authority comes from a few articles, actually, particularly this one here. So this was an article on Ladbible, which is obviously an absolutely huge editorial site. She wrote this, it's got 41 thousand shares. This is about a certain type of cocktail being served in a bar. This is a type of influence you definitely wouldn't have found if you would have just scan social media or use some of the more conventional tools. This is a person who is undoubtedly influential, just not in the way that we think. So when we engage her, we're probably not going to ask her to tweet her 200 followers. We're going to ask her what she's working on, what she's writing about next for people like Ladbible, pretty52.com, etcetera. We can dig in more deeply and look at more content by Rachel and get them. We can see that it wasn't a one-off. She does write various things for Ladbible and pretty52.com and those two site to thank or blame for her actual relative fame. I mean, she gets absolutely huge engagement metrics. So that's something very interesting to look out for in the Influencers tab. When you're thinking of search of influencers do. To use this Top Authors functionality because what you'll come across is some incredibly interesting people. So just to recap, when you do that, you get the authors. You get to click on their Twitter handle, if you like, and go and visit them on Twitter and crucially, you can see their top content. So it's a really good way of seeing what the top authors in any particular topic are talking about and who they are and where their influence lies. What you'll find is it's often not in the obvious places.
6. Followerwonk & Tweetreach: With Followerwonk, we can use this to find some Twitter influencers. Let's search here for cycling Twitter profiles. Do it. Twitter users with cycling in their profile. This is going to just basically show us the people with the most followers who are clearly into cycling. We can see how many people they're following, their followers, how many tweets, their account age, and their social authority and we can sort by those things. Let's search by social authority. By sorting like that we can see some quite interesting results here as well, and over time we can pick out some really interesting people that we can click there and have a look at their Twitter profile. That person's private, fair enough. There we are, someone who is certainly an influencer in cycling and would be someone very interesting to talk to if we spoke French. We can find lots of different types of influencers here by searching for Twitter profiles. We can also just keep that to Twitter bios but I prefer searching by Twitter profiles because it looks not only in their bio but also in their content. By then sorting that by social authority, we can get a really good view into who is the most influential person in that topic. Another tool that is worth knowing about is something called TweetReach. Now TweetReach is actually primarily a very useful tool for finding the reach of a particular tweet. If you run a certain campaign with a specific campaign hashtag on Twitter, this is a great tool for finding out the exact reach metrics. It's specifically for that campaign. You can really get a sense of how many people you reached. But you can also just put in a keyword there. Let's do cocktails again. Looking at the results for the topic of cocktails. What TweetReach is showing us here is a sample snapshot of this topic. It gives us some idea of the amount of noise and buzz there is around this topic and it also gives us the top. What it sees is the top contributors to that topic. The most retweeted tweets in the last couple of hours. A timeline of tweets around that topic, and a long list of people who've contributed to that topic, sorted by followers. That's another way in, when you use different tools, you will find different people. Ultimately that's all we're doing and there's no single perfect answer to this. Potentially if you're prepared to spend a lot of money, you could pay for one of the very premium tools and spend a couple of $1000 a month. But it's quite easy to do this for free with these tools and TweetReach is just another way into a topic to find interesting people. Have some fun with that and see what you can find and as always, put them into your sheet and get your influencer campaign started. As part of the project, what I want you to do is I want you to find your first 10 influencers which will be filling all the vacant rows on the sheet. I don't want you to find 10 influencers who could potentially be in your next campaign. They don't really have to be because this is only an example campaign that you put in together. But I wanted to put 10 influencers in the sheet and that will form the basis of your project.
7. Ninja Outreach and SocialBlade: Having used those tools which are quite Twitter focused, although both seem most great for finding Instagram influencers as well. What we want to do is find some people who are primarily active on Instagram, and believe it or not, one of the best places to do that is Instagram itself. If we go to their search at the top, you can see I've been searching for dogs, maybe I'll search for cats this time. Keep it interesting. What we can see is we can see some suggested accounts which would instantly influence the suggestions. But also we can see hashtags. If we click on any hashtag, what we will get is a page full of content for that hashtag. The very top section, the first nine posts are top posts for that topic, as we can see here. So these are recent posts that are the most popular on Instagram, and this is a great way to find influencers who are active right now and creating the best, most engaging content in any topic to the point where you don't really need any external tool to help you with this, you could just use that. But of course, we have a limited amount of results. We only get nine results per hashtag, but of course you can try different hashtags. This was cats of Instagram. We could put in "Cats" and see what that serves up and see if that's slightly different. There's some of the same content there, but some of it's different. If we try a few related hashtags which find various other bits of content, but we will use an external tool. Let's take a look at an Ninja Outreach. If you go to ninjaoutreach.com, there is a free trial. You can try out for yourself. Now when you login, you land on this screen, which is the first of the three tabs at the top lists. This is lists of saved influences. A bit like we saw in BuzzSumo, where as you search for influences, you can bookmark them and put them in certain folders. I have only created one folder called cocktails here just as an example, but could create any number of folders of influences or lists as they call it. We'll come back to this screen when it comes time to actually start reaching out to these people. But first, I want to go into search. This is where we're going to try and find some influences through endure outreach. Now in the search section of the tool, there are six tabs. Mostly are going to spend time in Instagram influences and Twitter influences, but the others are important and they're useful and I'll show you the difference between them. The first one is promotion opportunities. I'm gonna put in cocktails, and I'll do the same thing to cross all the tabs so you can see the difference between the results. What we do when we search promotion opportunities, we're finding size that specificly feature the type of content that is relevant as someone like myself who might want to place a mention of a product or a new brand. If I go to the filter section, I can demonstrate what I mean by that. These are all the different types of content that these sights clearly feature a lot of giveaways, guest posts, infographics, interviews, podcasts, product reviews, resource pages, and sponsored posts. So these would all be reasons for us to get in touch. Maybe we want to place an infographic, maybe we want them to do a product review, maybe they've got a resource page about a particular specialist topic that we want to suggest that they mention our product and they may clearly do sponsored posts. They may have a podcast that we could propose ourselves as a guest on. So these are all opportunities to get onto influential websites, that's essentially what these are. You can filter by these as well. So you could say, let's look at just sights that clearly do product reviews. You could make sure it's just people definitely have their e-mail address. Because ninja outreach, part of this value as a tool is that for many of the websites and blogs and influences on its algorithm has gone and found their email address, which is very useful. You can filter this size by domain authority and the amount of backlinks that page authority and Alexa rank and things like that. This is a useful tool if you're trying to place a very specific type of content onto influential websites, and that is very useful. The next tab is Instagram influencers. So just close the filters there, and I will put in "cocktails" again, see what we get there. Here we have the top influences on Instagram in cocktails. We've got some interesting information here as we look down the list. We've got the profile picture, how many followers they have, what their name is, where they're based, what their biography is, so we've got some good info about what they're about generally, and then crucially their engagement rate. That's a very, very important stat, which is why it's highlighted with a color. Because it very easily allows you to scroll down and find the ones that have an average or good engagement rates. This is very important. If someone's got a zero percent engagement rate, you really have to wonder how valuable their audience is to you. What you really want to look for is people who have engagement rates of at least one percent. Now you will find at this higher-end where you're talking about people with a million followers. There is of course going to be very low engagement rates. So that's just how it works at scale. Whereas smaller influences will have higher engagement rates because as you scale up, and you amass more and more followers, it's just a fact of life that engagement does go down a little bit. But it shouldn't perhaps go down this much. I might I avoid some of these ones with a very low engagement. Let's just say, I'm interested in having licensed to distill, I love that name it's great. So what we can see here, 21,000 likes per post is pretty good. Replies per post, nearly 300 cost of a promotional posts. This is estimated by Ninja Outreach's algorithm to be over $2,000. Now that's just a guide and that's just an estimate. Of course we can look at his Instagram profile, which you should always do. You should always take a look at people's Instagram profiles before adding them to a list and getting in touch with them. It's very important, not just so that you know who they are before you contact them, but just more importantly so you can initially make a bit of an assessment of who they are and what they're about, whether they are relevant to your brand, whether their audience seems really truly engaged and real, whether their content's consistent, whether it's high quality, whether it does indeed stick to this core theme or does it branch out into other things? Are you happy with those are the things? etc. Now looking down this, if I'm into cocktails, there is very little doubt that this account is interesting to me, it is a very interesting account. There's lots of video, there's some humor as well, and some great how tools. I mean, this is just a fantastic account. There's a mixture of candid, but also high-quality and glossy contents. This is a great account. There's no two ways about that, and I'm definitely interested in getting in touch. Over here is where I can start my engagement with this account. The first one here, that's just the Instagram URL, so you can click that, or copy it whatever you want to do with it. The second button is one that allows you to get in touch with them, and the third one is one that allows you to add them to a list. Now, if you add people to a list, you can then go and contact that list in one go. That's part of the value of Ninja outreaching. You go round searching for your influences, create a list, doesn't matter how big it is, could be five people, could be 50, or a 100, and then you can contact them all in one go. It does make our reach very simple and easy. It does also make it very templated as well as we'll see. It does take some of the personal nature of it, and you might be more comfortable as I often am contacting people individually. But it really depends on the campaign's. Sometimes a campaign does require that it's a large amount of influencers and it's a very low friction engagement. Whereas some campaigns will be a very small amount of influencers and you'll have a very deep relationship and close collaboration with them. If we were to click this male button, we get a pop up which gives us the opportunity to contact them through the Ninja Outreach system. This is where I should explain that whereas for influential bloggers, influential websites, and Twitter influences, Ninja Outreach gives you their e-mail address. It very cleverly goes and finds their e-mail address somewhere, and offers it to you, and you can e-mail them and do what you want with it, that's fantastic. You can message them through the system, or you can message them from your own e-mail inbox. However, with Instagram influencers, they say it's for data protection reasons, they do not give out e-mail addresses so you have to message these people through the Ninja Outreach system. That will all happen in the Outreach tab that I'll show you in a minute. The first thing we need to do is select a budget per posts. Now, this may not be relevant to your campaign, you may not be paying per post, and just in general, this is not set in stone, but it just gives the influencer at the other end an idea of what this job is worth to them essentially. Now, you can base that loosely on the cost of a promotional post. Here, his calculators banner around $2,000. I will click that one. Then I can write a subject line and a message. Your message will be a lot more interesting than mine. What we can do is then click Send, and that will be sent through the Ninja Outreach system to him on Instagram. Any replies will show up in our Outreach inbox, which I'll show you in a bit. Because of data protection, Ninja Outreach don't give out the e-mail addresses of any Instagram users. All the message into Instagram users is done through the Ninja Outreach system. Then we click send, and off our message goes to the influencer. We can get in touch with people individually like that, or if we want to, we can click this button and add them to a list. Once we've added any number of influencers to a list whether it's five people, or a 100, any number really, we can then e-mail them all in one go. Which is a less personal approach, but maybe the specific nature of your campaign requires that you need a lot of influencers involved. We're going to save this person to the cocktails list that I'm using, save, and there we go, and we'll have a look at that in a minute. Once you've saved an influencer to a list they're grayed out and so it's easy visually to see who else you've got to add to your list. That's Instagram influencers. Pretty simple. The next tab is Twitter influencers. Very similar but with some slightly different features.The first thing you notice when you search for people on Twitter through Ninja Outreach, is you don't get quite the same level of insight and statistics. You don't get engagement rate, which is a very useful metric. We have to do a bit of digging ourself. We just get basically the amount of followers the person has, and they're ordered by the amount of followers. You've got the biggest accounts first. But as you probably know, follow accounts on Twitter are in general easier to inflate artificially and engagement rates do vary a bit more widely on Twitter, because in general it's not as an engaged a platform as Instagram. As on any other platform, it's really important to do your own research here, not just add people to a list then blast a message out to them, but to look up every single profile. Let's look at this guy's profile. When we go to his Twitter account we can see the content he posts, what the ratio of following to followers is, how much engagement he gets, etc. It's really important that you do that for each of your influencers, but more than ever it's important on Twitter because you don't get quite the same level of insight. The next tab is most shared content. Now, this is basically very similar to what Buzzsumo does. It finds the most shared articles and pieces of content in relation to the topic, in this case, cocktails. It's quite useful, but I find Buzzsumo is a bit easier to work with. What is nice about this is on some pieces of content, it tells you who the author was and what their e-mail address is. That is useful, but in general you are going to get better results using something like Buzzsumo, which is a proper content research tool. The fifth tab along there is find leads. Well, essentially this is websites. If I put in cocktails here, what we'll get is a list of the most influential websites in relation to cocktails. It's very useful because we get the name of the website, a bit about it, and some details. We often get the e-mail address of the person who runs the website and we can also see their social followings here below. That's really useful way to find specifically websites that are influential in your topic and some good information about them as well. Then lastly is the E-mail finder. This is a handy little tool they created so you can find the e-mail address of an influencer. Let's say you've happened upon my website, willfrancis.com. You want to find that e-mail address. If you do that, you'll actually see that their crawler has actually scraped my e-mail address from somewhere, probably my website info@willfrancis.com. A handy little tool if you're really trying to find an influencer's e-mail address. There are different ways that you can search for influencers using Ninja Outreach. Now, you can add all different types of influencers to a single list. They could be bloggers, websites, Twitter users, Instagram users, and when you've done that, you'll see all your lists here on this page lists. Now, we can look at the people on the list if we like. Here we can see the people that I have added to that list. You can see information about them, their email address, their social profiles, and we can type some notes about the type of relationship we have with them. If they have agreed to guest post or product review, et cetera. You can make some notes and keep track of them here. What you can do is crucially one of the things that Ninja Outreach is very useful for, is you can actually perform the outreach from here. Now, my personal recommendation, would always be to try and contact people on a personal and direct level. I would do it through email first and then I would follow up with social. I'm not a big fan of huge templated campaigns, but there are times where for some reason a client wants to reach a 100 influences, and it makes sense to use something like this where you can just contact them all in one go. If we click start outreach on my cocktails list, what we can do is we can send them templated emails. At the top I'm going to select the list cocktails, select the email address I will be sending this from Will@willfrancis.com. In my settings, I have earlier connected my Google mail account so it can send emails on my behalf, and then thirdly, is the template I'm going to use. Now this is an Ninja Outreach's, preset templates. But again, in my settings, I can create new templates and write my own templates. Let's just say we are going to do a guest post product review. Use that preset template. How many emails per day? Well, if it's a large number of influences in a campaign, you might want to stagger the amount of emails you are sending per day. Do you want to send them now? Then you can also add email follow-ups. You could, for instance send a different template, let's say template number five. You could send that five days after. There is no right or wrong. I would say three to five days after you send the first email would be a good time to follow-up. Like I say, I wouldn't continue to follow up over email. If you are not getting a response, I would follow up in a very personal, one-to-one fashion in social, either with a public tweet or a comment on a post on Instagram, or a private message to them. What you can do is when you've set that up, is you can then also check what that would actually look like to each one. You can see what each email would look like and what the follow-up would look like. If you are not happy, you could say, say that I know his name is John, I could type in John and I could maybe edit the subject line as well just for that one person. In the follow-up, I could do the same thing and maybe put in some bespoke stuff for them. You might find that you want to tweet the template as it is for each different influencer and just check that it looks right and it reads correctly and it has got the right stuff in. Finish, and then you could click "Launch Campaign", and those emails will go out. Where do those emails go? Where do you get the reply as well? In under outreach, you will see inbox. If you go to your inbox, you will see all the conversations you are having with influencers. Whether they are through Instagram, which is all done by the Ninja Outreach system, or if it is over email, again through the Ninja Outreach system. This is where you can manage all the conversations you are having with influencers. That's the value of Ninja Outreach as a system as the name would suggest. It's very much a tool for outreach, for managing the whole process of outreach, keeping it out of your personal email, your work email inbox, and keeping it in this place where you can just focus on just doing influence or outreach. It keeps it all in one place and that's really, really useful. That is ninja outreaches. That's how to use it to find influencers, to build lists of influencers for your campaigns, and to do outreach to those influencers. If you are doing large-scale campaigns, doing it in a way that saves you a lot of time through templates and automated follow-ups. The final tool I'm going to show you is something called Social Blade. Now, this just helps you to analyze the growth and verify the validity of an Instagram account. Let's just say we find this influencer through their top piece of content, Coby The Cat, clearly very popular. Let's copy Coby The Cat's username, and then we will go to Social Blade and paste that in there and see what we get. We can see Coby The Cat is on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, that's interesting. If we go to them on Instagram, we can see that we have got some quite interesting stats here. Total grade of A minus, which is pretty good. We can see how many posts the media uploads have created, followers, following, engagement rate 3.86 percent. That's very important. We can also then go to see how they amass followers. This is one of the main things that people use Social Blade for, is just checking that their own suspicious spikes in follower ship. Now, Coby The Cat is clearly a legitimate influencer, but you will come across certain micro influencers that perhaps appear to add up why they have got so many followers. Social Blade is a good place to come and just check that they are not experiencing strange spikes in follower ship. Because this would suggest that they are in some way artificially acquiring or at worst purchasing followers. We can see Coby The Cat has got nice, gentle growth of the followers. Actually the engagement rate here is very useful metric, 3.86 percent. Anything above one percent is definitely significant, 3.86 is really good. Thus, they take that from the last 20 pictures. It's the ratio of the amount of engagements they get per post compared to the amount of followers they've got. If I get one engagement and I have got a 100 followers, I've got one-percent engagement rate. That's how that is calculated. Social Blade is just a nice way to come and look an influencer through a different lens and just get a feeling of how legitimate they are and how engaged they are. Which is really useful because that's the reason that you're getting this person involved in your campaign, is that they are legitimately a very engaging and important voice in their field.
8. Making Contact: Now we've got our list of influencers, which is great. We're going to have to make contact with them. There's no magic source to this really, actually the best thing you can do is be yourself, be genuine, and be just very clear about what you're offering them. Some rules here for me. Firstly, try not to use a template with high name et cetera. With all the templated content there, you will find them on the Internet. But my experience is that they don't work. The best thing to do is write an e-mail that's personal, warm, and friendly. Feel free to mention that you've seen something that they've done, that you liked something specifically about their content. Tell them what, why is that you're e-mailing them. Because that shows that you've actually engaged with their content, that you've read, their content, that you're interested in them, and they're not just the recipient of one of a million templated identical e-mails. Be warm and friendly, don't feel they have to be over businesslike. Crucially, this is the point that I think most marketers ignore actually, keep it short and sweet. You don't have to explain the entire campaign in the e-mail. This is just the beginning of a conversation. Just put the important, most interesting stuff in there. Keep it to a couple of paragraphs. Just be very clear and straight to the point. You don't have to dress it up, you don't have to try and excite them about your brand, because they're not and no one is. Just tell them very honestly and candidly what it is that you'd like to do with them. Crucially make an offer, not an ask. Don't e-mail them and say "Hello, I love what you do on YouTube. I'd really love you to do this for us." It's, Hi, I really like your Instagram or YouTube or whatever, and I'd like to offer you something unique that's going to allow you to create some content that you wouldn't have been able to create before. What can you offer them? What are you doing for them? What I've seen work really well, is when you send that e-mail, by all means follow up by e-mail a few days or a week later. But also follow up on social, try different channels. Try and follow up in different ways. That's a great way to get their attention and show that you're a real person trying to make contact. But then again, they're not just the recipient of a million identical e-mails. Because that is likely to take a little bit of time, I'd recommend making contact two months ahead of your campaign going live. You're going to need at least two months to get that conversation going. Then agree some terms, get contracts exchange and signed, and start prepping creative assets, creative work for that live day. At least two months ahead is a good rule of thumb. That's something that you'll see in the template plan I've created for you. Now in case you wondered what success looks like, when you e-mail it influences, there is some benchmarks here. This is from a tool called Reelio. They took a 1000 outreach e-mails to influencers and worked out what the benchmarks were. They found that 90 percent of e-mails got opened, they found that 28 percent got clicked, and that 64 percent got replied to. If you connect, see those averages, that's great. If you're hitting below those, then it's time to maybe rethink what's in your e-mail. Is it short and sweet enough? Is it to the point? Am I being friendly enough? Does it look like a templated e-mail? Am I following up in different channels? Et cetera. They're the benchmarks of success that you want to work with.
9. Executing Your Campaign: We found our influences, we've made contact, and now, it's time to actually run the campaign. What that essentially entails is once you've got a broad agreement from the influence to be involved, you then need to start getting specific about what's actually required. The first thing you got to do is agree the deal. Now, this is where you need to be able to tell them what the exact specifics of their output is, so what they're posting, what the content and technical requirements are, what it needs to look like, whether it's images, text, how many words, what size of images, how long your video should be, very specific outline of that, where exactly which platforms you want them to post on, and exactly when agreed times and dates, and then also obviously what you're giving them in return in terms of money, product, exposure, etc. Then what you're going to do is take those deliverables on both sides and put them in your timeline plan. A few tips on campaign execution around that point is, what I would highly recommend, and it's hard to get the time to do this, but it really would pay dividend, is to get some time talking to the influencer, great if in person, but more likely that's going to be over the phone. If you can just get them on the phone and have a chat with them, talk them through the campaign, for them to hear it in your words and hear your voice and get to know you as a person rather than you as an e-mail, is absolutely invaluable. Crucially, you can get their input and ask them what they think and what they would like to do and what they do with it. So do try and do that if you can. Now, once you've gotten to that point where you understand exactly what's happening, like I said, be very specific, don't be afraid to then be very specific, if you've agreed it's going to be a video and you've chat about different creative roofs, don't be afraid to be specific about how long it has to be, what text description has to be with that, what links need to be in that text description, etc. Whilst you want to give them a feeling of creative freedom when it comes to the actual deliverables planning, you need to be not afraid to be highly specific about the requirements for that. The other thing I'd suggest you do, which is easy not to do, is to stay in touch throughout the campaign. Let's say you get in touch two months ahead, and then by the time it's 5-6 weeks until the campaign, everything's sorted, try not to just disappear for five weeks, and similarly wants to campaigns run, and if there are lows in the campaign, just take the time to write a short email and just drop them a line, and update them on how it's going, how happy the client is, and how the campaigns performing in other channels, some of the other content from other influences and what have you. So just to keep them abreast of what you're doing and make them feel like they're really part of something, rather than just being commoditized as an advertising channel, and you'll find that that absolutely pays dividends.
10. Tracking & Reporting: Finally, it's time for the exciting bit. Debatable is reporting, and this is where we're going to put the results of all our hard work into that spreadsheet that I provided, which is going to give you a sense of exactly how your campaign stacks up. Now, once you do this, you will then be able to benchmark future campaigns. It's very hard for anyone to tell you what good looks like. You will only know that once you run a few campaigns yourself. However, I have structured the spreadsheet in a way that tries to categorize the different metrics. All the reach metrics are in one row, all the engagement read metrics and click metrics are in other rows so that you can start to say, well, we've got this much reach, this much engagement, this much clicks, and you can then compare it other advertising channels, such as social media advertising or organic brand content, etc. The third sheet in the spreadsheet is where you're going to put in your results of your campaign. But before we do that, I want to talk about the fourth shape. Now what this is is a very simple tool to create URLs that allow you to track clicks later in Google Analytics. Let's just unpack what I mean by that. Very simply what we do is rather than giving the influencer this URL to use across their campaigns. If indeed you are doing, you may find in your campaign, it's not necessary to try and drive traffic and that's fine too. But, if you're talking about a specific product and you want them, some points are linked to that product, for instance, you would give them a URL, as we can see here in the first column. However, if you just give them that URL, you will not be able to track very much. You can certainly look in your Google Analytics for the sources of traffic that can send. You'll be able to see traffic from e-mail, from Twitter, from Facebook, and places like that. But you won't really know if it's that influence post or that piece of influence or activity that's driven those results. The only way you can truly track that is by creating these longer URLs with certain query strings in. It's very simple, what I have done in this spreadsheet, I've created it. You just basically paste in the URL you're going to give every influencer. Then you give these tags some names and it will automatically spit out the final URL here which you're going to copy and then give to the influencer for them to share. Now, it's quite a long URL, so you may want to shorten it with something like Bitly so it seems a bit neater for the influencer to use. You might be wondering, well, " That's great. I want to have all this tags and how would I use them?'' Let me just show you Google Analytics for a second just to give you an idea of how you would use those. This is a Google Analytics dashboard for a website, and here, if you look on the left-hand side, we've come to the section about acquisition, the section in Google Analytics that deals with how you're acquiring traffic. If we go into all traffic and look at source/ medium, we can see the sources and mediums that are driving the most traffic. Here we can see the biggest source and medium is Google as source and medium being organic search. Almost all organic search traffic is from Google of course. But anyway, that's the biggest sector. Now we can also then set a secondary dimension. We can say look at specific campaigns, so split it out further by specific campaigns and some of these were tagged actually this is from Mail Chimp these tags. What we can do with these links here, just their source medium, source, medium keyword. Or you can put something else in like campaign or content. We can start to sift through and traffic and look at how it came to the website through different channels. Now, how about then relates to your influence a campaign? I'll give you an example. Let's say your destination URL is my web site, which would seem unlikely, but that's the example have put in. The source would be quite simply. What I would put there would be the social network or if it's a blog, just put blog with the influences name. If it was me that you were talking to and it was my Twitter, it'd twitter-will. This link is going to be later. We are going to be able to identify all clicks that came through my Twitter to your site by sorting by source in Google Analytics. If we go back to Google Analytics, we said the primary dimension is source. If that happened, you would see in this list, you would see twitter-will as a source of traffic, and you'd be able to see exactly how many sessions, how many visits are driven, and whether those people were bouncing off the site, how many page views they were looking at on the site, how much time they're spending on a website and all that stuff. It really allows you to get a sense of the value of the traffic that an influencer is sending you. More broadly, the medium tag is simply just, for almost every one of these it will be social, I would say, because everything will be social apart from perhaps blogs will all be social. Now, the most specific tag is the content. Let us say there are three tweets that I am going to be putting out over the course of the campaign. Whilst twitter-will, would be the same for each of those URLs you give me, so you could copy down like that, and twitter-will for all three of those, and maybe not every tweet would be how a cat jumper, maybe a different tweet would be about a cocktail shaker and another tweet would be about a red shoe, for instance. Later in Google Analytics, you can look all the traffic that I had driven from my Twitter, but you could further split up into, well, which one of the tweets generated the most traffic and what did those people do when they go to our website. Depending on how sophisticated your Google Analytics set up is, you can even look at how many purchases each tweet drove, etc, by sorting by content. In Google Analytics, I could set the secondary dimension to content which is called add content, where you would be able to see the separate tweets listed there and how many visits they driven pageviews and pages per session, and purchases, and whatever else you want to look at. That's the reason for doing this and campaign, I would name that after this particular campaign. Again, for the purposes of this exercise, I would imagine that they will all be the same because it's all just one campaign that you're running. What you do is put your URL in here, maybe the URL is the same for all the campaign influences and tweets. But then these would be the tweets. These would be the links that you're giving me to put on my Twitter. You may even give me one to put on my Instagram, and they would all be social. Let's say the image on Instagram that I posted for you is one of me wearing a dog jumper, and all the campaign ones are the same, so we just do that. What we can see there is we've now generated four totally different URLs. Oops, that you're going to give me. You can see the tags have been put in there. These are the four URLs you're going to give me for each piece of activity. You're going to say to me, I want you to put this URL in your Instagram bio when you post this piece of content, I want you to put this URL in a tweet about the red shoe, this URL in a tweet about the cocktail shaker, and this URL in a tweet about the cat jumper. Now again, what I would do if I were you, I would take each of those URLs. I would go to Bitly and I would shorten them, so you've got a bit of a neater URL to give your influences. You just paste it in there and then copy that and give that the influencer. That is essentially why that fourth sheets exists and what to do with it. If Analytics is important to you and it really should be, then you need to ensure that you are giving yourself the best chance of analyzing the impact of influencer activity when the campaigns finished. It's very important. That's part of measurement and reporting the way. Let's talk about the third sheets in your project spreadsheet, which has influenced the metrics. Now the way I've set this up for you is I've created a few entries there. They're all exactly the same. Each one is just this bit repeated again and again. What you're going to put in here is you're going to overwrite. The name of the influencer is well, Francis, that's me, let's say, and if any of these are applicable, some of them won't be, it's absolutely fine. Put them in. Currently, we can see totals. We can see reach engagement and click totals here, all reading zero. Now, I split the matrix into these three categories because I think that we can group things like alike on Instagram, alike on Twitter, a reaction of Facebook into one bucket which is engagement. Similarly, views and impressions can all be amalgamated into reach and a click. It doesn't really matter where a click comes from. They can all just be amalgamated as clicks. Let's say, for instance, that I got 2,000 impressions of a tweet on Twitter, 20 likes there, three retweets, and then on Instagram, I got 1200 views, I got 23 likes and five comments, you would then see that the total reach was 3,200, total engagement was 51, and zero clicks. But let's say you got three clicks on Twitter, and I got five clicks from Instagram, eight clicks. There you've got your influence symmetric dashboard and you would do that for each of your influences, and then you would see over time the totals of all the activity there. But of course, that's just really scratching the surface where things get interesting is where you do use these Google analytics friendly URLs, and then you later track that traffic through Google Analytics and see what actions that you drove on your website. Now, an influence campaign isn't just about driving traffic as we've talked about. One of the main reasons you would do it is for engagement with your social accounts. These numbers are very important to particularly reach an engagement. They show how many people you've reached and how many people you've engaged in social media, which is a very important thing to do as a brand. Once you reports filled in, this is another thing that you couldn't blow to something like Google sheets, so everybody in the project has the chance to go and view the information. You could even give some people access to put metrics in themselves as well. It's a collaborative thing, and that's another thing that you can share with clients, particularly and any other stakeholders you think are relevant in the campaign. Once you've done that, you have completed your very first influencer marketing campaign. I hope you've enjoyed this class and I hope it's useful. If you do have any questions about any of the sections of this class, do feel free to drop me a line, I'll be more than happy to answer them. I look forward to seeing your projects all filled in with some influences that you found and some ideas about how you're going to engage them, and your outlined plans for your influencer marketing campaign. Good luck with your influencer marketing, good luck in your business, and of course, most importantly, enjoy and have fun. I'll see you again soon. Thanks a lot. Bye.
Will Francis, Digital marketing and advertising
