Insider Tips on Promoting Your Brand with Influencer Marketing

Are you on TikTok? Sharing reels and stories on Instagram? If not, you really should be. Not that we’re telling you to post your trendy dance moves (but you totally should!), but because if you aren’t posting on these platforms, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity — a fact we repeatedly bring up when it comes to social media marketing.

Of course, social media marketing isn’t without its challenges, among them being establishing your brand and growing your follower base. What if you could leverage a page with an established online presence and an engaged following to promote your brand? Well, when you partner with a social media influencer, you get just that.

A Very Powerful and Influential
Marketing Tactic

Influencers are loosely defined as social media users whose posts drive the purchasing decisions of other users. When an influencer highlights or endorses a given product, service, or experience, that brand can expect increased interest — a seemingly new concept that’s rooted in the time-honored tradition of celebrity endorsements. And oh yeah, it works, especially for younger audiences. According to Morning Consult, 50% of millennials trust influencer endorsements while Hubspot reports 33% of Gen Z-ers follow through on purchases based on influencer recommendations. Marketers are onboard too with 92% agreeing influencer marketing is an effective online strategy. And according to Convince & Convert, businesses also report an ROI of $6.50 for every $1 invested in influencer marketing.

So, how do you get in touch with an influencer anyway? Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as saying “pretty please” in the comments, but the process isn’t complicated if you know which tools to use. Klear is an intuitive influencer marketing platform that allows our firm to establish contact with influencers and set up campaigns while setting your budget and estimating your ROI. Klear crawls all major social media networks like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and builds a database of influencer accounts for you to choose from based on your brand and interests you’re targeting; for example, tourism brands can browse a list of travel influencers.

Klear also allows our team to manage relationships with influencers all in one platform — establish contact, set up campaigns, and preview content before it’s published in one location. Best of all, Klear provides an estimated media value/ROI based on your budget and the estimated number of impressions from the campaign, giving you a good idea of what to expect from your investment.

But, as we’ve said before, showing goes much farther than telling. So, let’s see what an influencer campaign looks like in action. We recently organized a partnership between Instagram travel influencer @krismariawanders and Lake of the Ozarks CVB. Here’s what she delivered…

In this case, partnering with a social media influencer gained 23 times the investment — an overwhelming success by all measures. At the time we are writing this, there have been 29 social media posts across Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest promoting Lake of the Ozarks that have reached over 83K users! So far, the posts have garnered 3.6 million impressions with an average of 142.6 engagements per post. This campaign has an Estimated Media Value (EMV) of $75.8K and a Social ROI of 15.85x. The beauty of influencer content is that it stays on social media forever so it will continue to gain impressions and engagements over time.

So, what did McD Digital learn from this process and how can it help your influencer marketing campaign? If influencer marketing is uncharted territory for you, don’t head in blind — let us be your guide. Check out our five-step process to building a successful strategy.

• Know Your Audience — Just like anything else your brand is putting out, your marketing content should speak to your core audience. For example, longform video may not be the best content to publish on a platform like TikTok, nor is a video aimed at an older audience. Understand first who you’re marketing your brand to and tailor your content plan around those users and the platform they’re on. McD Digital can create a content plan that aligns with your goals and is tailored to each social platform.
• Micro or Macro? — You don’t need someone with a Kardashian-level following to make an impact. In fact, social media experts Sprout say micro-influencers (i.e., influencers with a following of 10,000-100,000 users) have a 60% higher engagement rate than those with much larger followings and may drive up to 20% more conversions with their content.
• Vet Your Influencer — We do our homework, selecting an influencer relevant to your brand and making sure they’re legit before committing. Klear makes this process easy, allowing us to narrow a shortlist of influencers by topics and offering a good understanding of each creator’s impact on social media with the Klear Influencer Score. This essentially quantifies their level of influence and even accounts for the number of fake users in their audience (i.e., bots).
• Collaborate — We talk to your influencer, scheduling calls between us, them and your team to clearly outline what you’re looking for and what they can deliver. Many influencers will want some guidance on what content you’re looking for, so having this information laid out beforehand is important. We’ll help outline your content plan and explain what you want — dates for travel and publication, sites to see, destinations to promote, and types of content to publish — then draft a formal agreement for the influencer to sign along with an itinerary when they arrive.
• Set a Budget & Be Bold — We’ll help define your budget; this will ultimately determine how the influencer you’ve selected fits into the overall campaign. When we meet with the influencer, we’ll communicate your budget in plain terms with the influencer. Don’t be afraid to be bold in what you ask for — you may be surprised and get additional deliverables/engagement for the same cost, but if you don’t ask, the answer is always no. Since there are no standards for pay and compensation, influencers set their own rates and rules. So, simply asking for something — even if you may think it’s a little unreasonable — never hurts.

Ready to leverage the power of influencer marketing? We’re ready to share your brand with a wider audience — all you have to do is reach out. Contact Jenna Ferrell at jferrell@mcdmarketing.com or call 309-346-6974.