It’s no secret that garnering trust for your brand can be difficult. According to the Qualtrics XM Institute, trust between consumers and companies has fallen to its lowest level since 2017.
This isn’t a new marketing problem. For decades, brands have partnered with celebrities to build consumer trust—such as Nike with basketball star Michael Jordan. However, celebrity endorsements can be costly and put significant dents in digital marketing budgets.
“In the digital world, a new type of celebrity has emerged who’s more knowledgeable about products and how best to use them,” says Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta, who teaches the online course Digital Marketing Strategy. “These celebrities may not have the same level of international stardom as Michael Jordan or Serena Williams. In fact, some of them may have a very small fanbase.”
Gupta is referring to influencers, who can affect others’ purchasing decisions using their authority on digital channels.
If you’re considering incorporating influencers into your digital marketing plan, here’s an overview of how to use influencer marketing and measure its success.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is the collaboration between influencers and brands to promote products or services on digital channels, typically to increase brand awareness, website traffic, and sales.
Unlike celebrity endorsements, influencer marketing is a form of earned media—public exposure through word of mouth, customer reviews, social media mentions, or media coverage—and can significantly sway consumers’ decisions. According to Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising survey, 77 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product if their friend recommends it.
“Unlike paid and owned media, earned media originates organically outside the company,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “In other words, this is media that’s neither paid for by a company nor owned by it. Instead, it’s media that a company has ‘earned’ from its consumers.”
Before partnering with influencers, you have to engage with them. Here are five steps for doing so.
How to Engage with Influencers Before Partnering with Them
1. Ensure Brand Alignment
To maximize your influencer partnerships, ensure their content aligns with your brand’s image and story.
For example, if your company sells sustainable fashion, an influencer who promotes luxury goods likely isn’t a good fit because that industry is commonly associated with negative environmental impacts. Consequently, the partnership could upset your target audience.
To avoid such scenarios, monitor prospective influencers’ social media feeds before proposing partnerships. You can also ask them to describe their audiences to verify that theirs coincide with yours or highlight discrepancies that could diminish your collaborations’ impact.
Learn more about branding by listening to the The Parlor Room podcast episode below, or watch it on YouTube:
2. Verify Credibility
Verifying influencers’ credibility is crucial before partnering with them. Faking social media popularity can be easy, so be diligent during the vetting process.
“Some influencers buy fake followers, views, or likes,” Gupta says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “This practice has become an industry in itself. In 2017, vending machines popped up in Russia where you could buy 100 Instagram likes for under a dollar.”
Since influencers’ value is based on social media metrics, make it a point to identify fake accounts before conducting outreach. One way to do so is by scrutinizing followers-to-likes ratios. An account with a large following but few likes can suggest that its followers have been purchased or are bots.
3. Create an Authentic Connection
Authenticity is essential to any successful influencer partnership. Not only can it build trust between the influencer's audience and your brand but enhance their endorsement’s credibility.
Influencers who genuinely resonate with your brand are more likely to encourage their audiences to purchase your products organically and retain authority on social media.
In Digital Marketing Strategy, influencer, blogger, and podcaster Erica Ligenza shares how she vets inquiring brands.
“I say, ‘Send the product my way and I'm happy to try it out,’” Ligenza says in the course. “But I cannot sign a contract until I’ve actually used it and know that I can 100 percent authentically recommend this to my audience.”
Commitment to a niche audience isn’t uncommon among influencers. Seek an existing customer to partner with or send samples to a new one and encourage them to try your product in real time.
“If I'm testing it, and I already know, ‘All right, I'm liking this,’ and I know I can really, honestly recommend this, I probably am organically starting to share it myself already to prime my audience for when they see that ad,” Ligenza says in the course. “So that it's not just, ‘Boom, here's an ad for something that you've never seen me share, and you've never heard me talk about.’ It feels much more organic.”
4. Communicate Goals
Defining what you hope to achieve by partnering is essential. It ensures your expectations align with your influencers’ and can protect your company if they deviate from their contracts.
It can also help create a valuable dialogue and campaign roadmap.
“The vetting process is also a two-way street, where you’re asking for their goals as an influencer and being able to offer helpful insight to them,” Ligenza says in Digital Marketing Strategy.
For example, if your goal is to enhance your marketing efforts’ long-term return on investment (ROI), your influencers can primarily focus on evergreen blog articles or YouTube videos, which have longer shelf lives than short-form, temporary content like Instagram Stories.
Check out the video below to learn more about ROI, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!
5. Establish Metrics
Establishing metrics is also important when engaging with influencers. Unlike vanity metrics—which determine prospective influencers’ viability—you must identify what makes a good partner.
One metric to consider is productivity. While much of influencers’ value hinges on access to followers, remember that you're also paying for their content.
In Digital Marketing Strategy, Maggie Malek, CEO of modern brand lab MMI Agency, shares how she evaluates influencer productivity.
“One of the things that we really look for when we hire social influencers is that they create a ton of content on their own, outside of just branded content,” Malek says in the course.
That kind of approach can ensure influencers continue engaging their audiences and don’t deviate from the content cadence and quality that make them valuable partners.
“If you look at someone's news feed, and all of their content is branded, likely, they’ll have very few authentic followers because they're just in it for the brand paycheck,” Malek says in the course. “And so, they won't perform as well for you.”
But how can you measure influencers’ performance after vetting and partnering with them? Focusing on the following metrics can help.
How to Measure Influencer Marketing’s Impact
Brand Awareness
Increasing brand awareness is one of influencer marketing’s primary goals. However, it can be challenging because most marketing KPIs focus on engagement and conversions.
One metric you can focus on is impressions—often used interchangeably with “reach”—to track the number of times users view your brand-related content and estimate audience size across digital channels.
To refine your findings, consider surveying your target audience. Asking questions like “How did you learn about us?” can provide insight into where customers started their journeys with your brand.
Customer Engagement
Marketing metrics that help measure customer engagement include:
- Number of likes
- Number of views
- Website traffic
- Organic web searches
In addition to quantifying customers’ interest in and interactions with your brand, they offer insight into how effectively your content resonates. Yet, outside forces can skew the data.
In Digital Marketing Strategy, Ligenza warns about discrepancies during the vetting process.
“From a strategic standpoint, I like to recommend to brands that they’re taking into consideration the nature of the algorithms,” Ligenza says in Digital Marketing Strategy. “Because every post will perform differently, and not every piece of content is created equal.”
Affiliate Links
While customer engagement is an indicator of success, it doesn’t account for how many purchases result from your efforts.
In Digital Marketing Strategy, Malek discusses how MMI Agency employs affiliate links—unique URLs for sharing recommendations and monitoring website traffic or sales—to gauge influencers’ effectiveness.
“We give each influencer custom links so we can see exactly how many clicks they drive,” Malek says in the course.
That kind of real-time data can offer immediate insight into campaign performance and inform strategy decisions to improve ROI.
Make the Most of Your Investment
Influencer marketing can be powerful because of its reach, but not all partnerships are profitable—making it essential to know how to engage with influencers and measure their impact.
One of the best ways to do so is by taking an online course to enhance your digital marketing skills, such as Digital Marketing Strategy. Through real-world case studies and interactive exercises, you can learn from industry leaders and influencers to understand successful partnerships’ key elements.
Do you want to learn more about influencer marketing? Explore Digital Marketing Strategy to discover how to work with influencers and manage and measure their impact. If you’re interested in furthering your education online but aren’t sure where to start, download our free guide to online learning success.
