3 Key Points to Consider When Starting an Influencer Marketing Program in 2021

Our social team at iBeAuthentic attended the virtually hosted Social Media Strategies Summit to expand our education and understand the best practices involving influencer marketing for different brands. With so many insightful seminars, our team has been able to pull away some of our most essential takeaways of continuing to succeed with our influencer program efforts.

One of the biggest learnings? Operating a successful influencer program isn’t about getting as many influencers as you possibly can, and not everyone in the influencer marketing industry seems to understand this.

Make Sure to Customize Your Influencer Program

Making a campaign authentic to each influencer is crucial to the success of your program. Efforts to slightly adjust and customize the direction you give to the influencer may seem unnecessary. Still, it’s a key factor in driving the success of well-known programs. Rather than simply regurgitating the same information to every influencer that joins your program, have the mindset to grab the full potential you saw in the influencer when they were initially accepted. 

Customizing Campaigns Pays Off

How To Personalize Content

Now that we’ve made this clear, how do we establish this sense? Truthfully, the possibilities are endless no matter the brand, industry, or personality of an influencer you are dealing with. Whether placing the product alongside an influencer’s hobbies, everyday work, family life, or personal interests, there is no limit to what a brand can be displayed within. 

Live, Learn, Fail, and Move On

However, experiencing different ways a brand can be showcased to unique audiences brings uncertainty with this out-of-the-box thinking. So I’ll be the first one to tell you that not all experiments with influencers are going to be successful, and that’s okay. 

When thinking of different approaches to creating content and expanding an audience, it’s always better to give effort towards a particular practice and know you made a valiant attempt rather than initially turning it down due to caution of change. But with this experience over time, we must also learn from these practices to guide our time allocation into different audiences going forward.

Keeping an Audience Engaged

Once you find the right audience who can’t seem to get enough of your affiliate’s content and your brand, it is a fantastic feeling to know your efforts were resilient. However, with this accomplishment comes more obstacles to overcome, and the greatest of these obstacles involves keeping a new audience consistently entertained. Once you and your influencer know their audience is very intrigued with the presented content, the practice of repeat message displaying needs to be implemented, but correctly and appropriately. 

Repeat the Message, But Not the Content

When discussing repeat messaging in the online world, some people quickly jump to conclusions and say this tactic is inefficient. In reality, it serves as the core factor of driving sales and gauging interest for new audiences. Repeating the same message to a particular audience can be successful if the content frequently changes while meeting the audience’s needs. 
There may only be a few products for each influencer or the brand they are interested in showcasing to an audience. And with this, finding new ways every day to keep content both gauging and exciting in unique ways possible are almost just as, if not more important than their actual efforts to sell the products themselves. 

Quality Over Quantity: Authenticity Wins

Not only does keeping content fresh have a drastic impact on the ability to build a connection with an influencer’s audience, but the intentions of your influencers will play a role just as essential to this. It’s evident that with so many influencer programs established over time, the main driving factor for these individuals to join these programs is the commission they will earn through their efforts. And while there is no problem with this whatsoever, this cannot be their only reason to get involved. 

A significant role in what makes a great influencer and coincides with keeping an audience engaged is finding an influencer that has a genuine interest in your brand. Quantity over quality for influencer programs is not necessarily going to result in a higher dividend. Knowing if an influencer’s relationship with a brand is fake or personal is typically very clear in their actions for both the brand’s inside team and their audience. 

Instead of pushing all efforts to obtain as many influencers as possible, channel your focus into conversations with sourced individuals who are fascinated with the brand and care to learn about your values, mission, actions, etc. 

Ongoing Outreach: Standing Out From The Crowd

Along with the high priority of maintaining the attention of your influencers’ audiences, it is just as essential to keep the attention and interest of your influencers themselves. Therefore, as you launch and maintain an influencer program, it is critical to continually emphasize that your influencers are not just another worker and income stream for the brand but an important asset to their influencer marketing process.

Keep Influencers Engaged With an Inside Scoop 

There is an abundance of easy-going and straightforward actions that can maintain the relationship between you and your influencers. One of the best ways to show these efforts is by continually updating influencers with personalized brand news and product updates. 

Your influencers could easily find out about this information themselves, but making it a priority to let them know personally can really separate yourself from the crowd of brands in the eyes of influencers. Along with adding this personalization, you can provide fresh ideas and areas of focus for your influencers’ future content. 

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Besides continual updates of the brand’s status, another significant benefit to offer your influencers is frequent communication with them. This means keeping them up to date with the timeline of both their schedule and the brand’s. 
Making sure new content is consistently provided to your influencers keeps their creative mindset flowing with new products and concepts to promote while also keeping their audiences intrigued with the brand. 

Frequently reminding your influencers of deadlines, updates, and information can sometimes seem excessive. However, it still establishes that you care for the individuals within your influencer program and want to see them prosper alongside your brand. Furthermore, nothing seems to stand out to individuals communicating with a brand more than constant, personalized feedback, which can immensely benefit a brand’s reputation.

Notice Their Content and Give Feedback

Last but certainly not least, one of the most significant initiatives an influencer program can take to show their partners gratitude is to emphasize the impact they continually have on the program. 

We are constantly reaching out about tactics for improvement with operating influencer programs, but consistently compliment your influencers can go a long way in building these ongoing relationships. Praising your influencers when they perform well shows that you pay close attention to their efforts, and once again, do not look at them as just any other employee or customer. 

When it comes to influencer marketing, it’s not about strength in numbers in terms of the quantity of influencers you can get. Rather, it’s about engaging those key people who love your brand so they will produce quality, authentic content that resonates with your customers. 

To learn more about building an influencer marketing strategy, please contact Ryley Demmith (rdemmith@ibeauthentic.com) at iBeAuthentic.

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