Why you need a data-driven influencer strategy

If you’re looking to increase your reach, drive sales, and build a sustainable brand, influencer marketing is one of the best strategies you can use. And with three out of four consumers saying they spend around $629 on purchases that were recommended by influencers, it’s easy to see why marketers are paying close attention to influencer marketing strategies.

Influencer marketing allows you to find your true reach, but only if you’re accessing the right data. It can also help you gain a holistic view of your brand and have full control over your marketing budget.

But the question is: how do you design and build an influencer strategy that’s based on data? That’s what we’re going to cover inside this blog post in five simple steps.

 

1. Understand your target audience

Before you can start any marketing strategy, you need to understand your target audience. To create a data-driven influencer strategy, you need to do a deep dive into where your target audience is spending their time, what their buying habits are etc so that you can choose the right influencers, the best platform, and the type of content that will resonate the most.

Here’s how you can do that quickly:

  1. Define your audience. This is where you’ll learn more about your audience demographics. You can do this through social media analytics, surveying your email list, or using focus groups. This will help you determine the age, gender, education, location, income, and more of your target audience. Take it a step further and use social listening and monitoring tools to understand your target audience’s buying habits and interests.
  2. Once you’ve got this information, you can use it to find influencers that your target audience trusts. Then you’ll have a clear path forward for the types of platforms and the social media content you can create.
  3. The determining factor in the success of your influencer marketing campaigns is knowing where your target audience is spending time online. This data helps you choose the right platform rather than guessing or taking a “spaghetti at the wall” approach.

This is the first step in creating your data-driven influencer strategy. The next step is to choose goals that align with what you want to achieve.

2. Choose your goals

Now that you’ve got some initial data to help determine the potential influencers you’ll work with and the platforms you’ll target, it’s time to ensure you have clear goals that will get you to your desired results.

To start, you need to decide on the type of influencer campaign you’re wanting to run. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, engagement, or sales? Maybe you want to focus on customer retention or getting in front of a new audience. Whatever your goals are, they need to be defined before you approach an influencer.

A good way to set goals is to use the S.M.A.R.T. approach:

  • Specific: define what you want to achieve with your influencer strategy. Choose a specific end result like increase customer retention by 25%.
  • Measurable: decide how you will measure the performance of your influencer campaign. You can do this by choosing goals that have quantifiable metrics to allow you to track and measure your results.
  • Attainable: choose goals that are achievable based on the resources you have and the influencer you’re working with.
  • Relevant: choose goals that make sense to your business objectives.
  • Time-based: set goals that have a deadline. This is particularly important when working with an influencer. It could be a couple of months or a year. Determine this before you invest money into any marketing campaign.

Once you’ve defined your goals, the next step is to choose an influencer.

3. Select your influencer(s)

Now that you’ve got data to influence your decisions, it’s time to find the right influencers that you and your brand can partner with. It can be a challenge to find the right influencer, particularly when there are a number of influencers that have large followings and great social profiles.

This is where data is your friend. Creating a data-driven influencer strategy becomes a lot easier when you’ve got the right data.

Here’s how you can use the data you’ve gathered to develop your influence strategy and find the right influencers to work with.

Audience

Using the information you gathered at step one, you can now ensure that any influencer you’re approaching has the right audience that matches your target market. Work with influencers who can provide this information up front in the form of audience analytics so that you can ensure they match the demographics of your target audience. This will help ensure that you receive a good ROI and don’t waste money on influencers who have fake followers.

Content Review

Another way to determine if an influencer is a right fit is to review their past sponsored posts to see how well they performed in comparison with their organic content. Make sure you pay attention to the hashtags they use in their organic content and the mentions so you can also ensure they are a good fit for your brand.

With all the data you’ve collected, you’ll be able to determine the right key performance metrics for each influencer campaign you start. You’ll have an increased awareness of your ROI and determine which influencers you’ll want to build long-term relationships with.

The bottom line is this: building a data-driven influencer strategy starts with understanding the data points that are important to your business to help determine the influence campaign goals and objectives.

. . . . . . .

A great influencer strategy starts by ‘trend-spotting’ and doing your research on influencers. Research can be labor intensive and expensive, so you might want to consider outsourcing that work. Impact Enterprise’s highly skilled data specialists can get the data, cost effectively and efficiently. Test pilots are always FREE.

Impact Enterprises was Established in 2013 and recruits skilled talent from bright young professionals in Zambia, Africa, where 59% of graduates find themselves unemployed and without an opportunity to showcase their skills and dedication.

Impact Enterprises lead generation services include, lead validation, data enrichment, contact research, data entry & CRM hygiene; content services include content management, influencer mapping and moderation for social media; AI Data Annotation services include image labelling, language processing and geospatial analysis. 

For recurring projects, the company provides a dedicated team to oversee operations for each client and guarantees an exceptional standard of delivery.