What are you trying to achieve?

When preparing for an influencer marketing campaign, think about what the overall purpose is. For example, is your campaign:

• Launching your new company, product, or brand
• Sharing a charitable initiative
• Amplifying a special offer, like a coupon
• Promoting a contest or sweepstakes
• Advertising an event

Your purpose might be one of the above, a combination, or all of the above. Whatever the case may be, start by thinking about what your marketing need is and how influencers will fit into that plan.

When we created the social media plan for Batkid we knew that when a major news event happens in real time, it gains traction and is shared and reshared on Twitter. Twitter, at the time of the Batkid campaign, was the best social channel to get the word out and let people know where and how to support Miles, so our entire social program was based on “advertising” the event on Twitter. We used our network of influencers to get the initial word out on Twitter, and it spread from there.

How will you assess your achievements?

After the purpose of your campaign is set, you need to decide how you’ll assess your achievements by selecting a few measurable targets. These targets can be anything you want — from the number of people who download a coupon to how many times a tweet is shared (tracking via your unique hashtag) — as long as they’re tied to sales or marketing goals (see Chapter 15).

If you’ve never done an influencer campaign before, set some metrics so that you can gather baseline data about your campaign, and then use that baseline data to gauge future campaign success.

Here are some suggested targets to get you started:

• The number of visits to your website
• The number of increased Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and/or Facebook followers
• The number of likes, comments, and/or shares a Facebook post gets
• The percentage of increase in sales due to a coupon or promo code
• The number of tickets sold to an event based on a trackable URL
• Increase in foot traffic to your retail store
• Brand awareness (more people talking about you online)
• Better data on your customers

One of the main reasons why it’s important to have business goals is so that you can track your return on investment (ROI). Influencer marketing isn’t free, and as with any marketing program you run, you want to make sure that the data you gather supports your spend.

How will you achieve your goals?

When you’ve decided on the purpose of your campaign and how you’ll measure your achievements, you need to think about how you’re going to git ’er done! Here are the main questions you need to answer:

• Do you have the time, expertise, and resources within your organization to not only create your influencer marketing campaign, but also find, vet, and hire the right influencers for the job?
• Are you familiar enough with social media analytics to gather and measure the data you’ll be collecting?
• Would you rather hire expert consultants and/or agencies to do the creative work, manage the influencers, and/or collect the data?

How you answer these questions probably depends on the timing of your influencer marketing campaign, your marketing needs, and your budget. If you’re in a hurry, you may want to hire outside help — but keep in mind that most agencies require several weeks of lead time and may charge a quick turn fee if you need a campaign to run sooner.

If you aren’t on a timeline, you may want to budget to hire a creative team, which includes a staffer who is knowledgeable about influencer or content marketing or an analytics expert. Think about what’s best for your company and your needs, and go from there.

When will the campaign run?

The timing of your influencer campaign is very important. Think about when you’d like your campaign to run. Is it seasonal? Does it correspond to a holiday? Is it tied to an event you’re promoting?

Let’s take a month-long holiday campaign as an example. You have a product that would make a fabulous holiday gift. Ideally, you want to start promoting that product in November having your influencers marketing your product all month long in advance of the holiday shopping rush. If you’re in the United States, you may want to launch your campaign around Thanksgiving and capitalize on the Black Friday or Cyber Monday shopper mindset.

Working backward from there, this means your influencers should be familiar with your product and know what their scope of work is (exactly what’s expected of them and what they’ll be sharing) and have all assets and materials needed (product photos, videos, and/or descriptions) by the date of your program launch. This means that the creative for your campaign — including goals, assets, and influencer scope of work — needs to be completed at least three to four weeks in advance of influencer selection, vetting, and hiring (including getting all employment contracts signed). Depending on the number of influencers you’re hiring, that process alone can take two additional weeks even with experienced professionals doing the selection and vetting.

Six weeks in advance of your November campaign launch puts you in mid-September, which means you should already be thinking about plans to lock down your influencer marketing holiday promotion in the summer.

Even if your influencer marketing campaign isn’t tied to a holiday, you should give yourself at least two months to come up with a plan, set goals, figure out how you’re going to achieve them, and begin gathering your data. When you’ve done all that, you’re ready to launch your influencer marketing campaign.

Who’s talking about you?

If your company has a social media presence, you need to know where your audience — fans and potential customers — is talking about you. Do you have a product or service that people tweet about or share about on blogs? Or are lively conversations happening on your Facebook page? Before starting any influencer program, take the time to investigate and listen in on conversations already happening about your company, product, industry, and/or competitors on social media and focus on who’s doing the talking.

Grassroots conversations may already be happening about your brand. Get to know those influencers. Introduce yourself to them, whether via a hello tweet or by leaving a comment on a blog post, as a way to begin a relationship (see the nearby sidebar). People who are already talking about your brand on social media are your organic influencers. They have the power to affect your brand in positive or negative ways. Establishing an authentic relationship with them — where you engage their opinions and ideas — is a way to keep their view of your company or brand positive. And when you’re ready to start your influencer marketing campaign, you can contact these influencers first to see if they’d like to participate.

Where are they talking about you?

It’s not just who is talking about you, but where. When you see where the most engaged social media interactions are happening, you can target your influencer marketing campaign to those particular channels.

For example, if you’re a fashion or beauty brand, you may want to focus your influencer marketing on Instagram, like Jimmy Choo (www.instagram.com/jimmychoo), Motives Cosmetics (www.instagram.com/motivescosmetics), Flash Tattoos (www.instagram.com/flashtattoos), or Christian Siriano (www.instagram.com/csiriano). All those brands leverage Instagrammers to share their content.

It makes no sense, for example, to focus on Pinterest for an influencer campaign if you sell cloud services. Pinterest is a visual channel, so it lends itself to sharing visual content like recipes, workout ideas, decorating tips, and fashion inspiration.

With our Batkid campaign, we knew Twitter was the best place for people to follow along with a live event. This was the biggest nondisaster local event to happen online, and Twitter helped it to go viral.

Know where your audience lives. If no one is talking about fundraising on Instagram, you’re wasting your time doing your campaign there.

Marketing plan = Rocket ship

We love to use the rocket ship analogy when talking about influencer marketing (see Chapter 14). Just as you wouldn’t attempt to explore space without a rocket ship, you shouldn’t engage in influencer marketing without a plan.

With our Batkid campaign, we made sure that our influencer marketing plan laid out all the social media activity for the entire week leading up to the event — including all the posts we asked our influencers to share — as well as an almost minute-by-minute script for all the social media activity for the entire day itself.

Messaging = Flight plan

With your rocket ship in place, you need a flight plan to get to space, and that’s exactly the purpose of your message. What will you be asking your influencers to do? Share a coupon code? Tweet a link for a charitable donation? Post a photo? Whatever it is, your influencer marketing flight plan needs to have one clear, consistent message. Pick one call-to-action so you don’t confuse your influencers and/or your potential customers.

For Batkid, our hashtag, #SFBatkid, was essential to our messaging and we put it on everything — every Tweet, every Facebook post, every Instagram photo, and every blog post. We also had one URL that drove everyone back to the Greater Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation website, where interested parties could find all the information about Batkid and how to participate in the day (whether in person or online), as well as how to make a donation. The message in all the social media activity was clear: Click here and you’ll find everything you need to know.

Social media = Rocket fuel

You’ve built your rocket ship and your flight plan is solid. Now it’s time to take off! The social media channels where your influencer marketing campaign will live are the rocket fuel you need to send your campaign into outer space. By tracking where your influencer conversations are already happening, and by leveraging those channels, you’ll be able to give your influencer marketing campaign the fuel it needs to take off. Influencers will be sharing your content in the channels where it makes the most sense, and you’ll be able to leverage the influencers’ audiences or communities within those channels to spread your message far and wide.

A marketing plan is your rocket ship, and social media is the rocket fuel that sends it to outer space or somewhere amazing. Without a plan, without a ship, you just have a bunch of liquid that can catch fire and burn down your launcher.