Designing Your Influencer Marketing Program

Five questions to ask that will form the foundation for your influencer marketing

In this article, we take a look at how to gather the information you need when designing your influencer marketing program, ambassador program, or affiliate program. Before you begin reaching out to potential influencers or ambassadors, there are questions that need to be answered. The way in which you answer these questions builds the foundation for your program. Think of each question as a stone or brick, and with these you are laying the ground for a powerful…marketing engine…to mince metaphors.

(I’ll be using the words influencers and ambassadors interchangeably throughout this post by the way. They’re similar enough terms and programs that this really applies to both.)

Maggie

If you’re reading this post thinking that I’m going to give you all of the answers and tell you exactly how to design your program, this is the wrong place. I’m happy to do that, after a lengthy discussion about your brand, your business model, your products or services, your market/industry, and your customers.

You can read the first post in this series to get your bearings here.

This post is more to guide you, to give you the tools that you need to successfully design and implement this marketing strategy. If it sounds like a good deal of work, you’re right. It is. But if you do the work well, you’ll reap the rewards.

Before you start designing your influencer marketing program, do your research.

There are few industries anymore that offer virgin ground for influencer programs. Health and wellness, fashion, home goods, almost every industry or market is gaining more and more programs. Simply put, it’s because they work. They offer better engagement and often higher sales than paid advertising campaigns. This is because you have a trusted source referring a product to you.

Have you ever been standing in a store, oscillating between two options, when someone leans in and says they’ve had a great experience with one of the two? If you have, how many times have you put the item they recommended back? Influencer programs or ambassadors are just like that.

Now that we know there are other programs in your space, take some time to research them. Pick some brands that are complimentary to your own, and take a look at some of your direct competitors. There’s a good chance you’ll spot some trends. IE in your industry brands might be more likely to give product away in exchange for reviews. In others, brands might require ambassadors to purchase the product at full price and offer an opportunity for these individuals to recoup their money.

In either case, your potential influencers and ambassadors will already have certain experiences with other brands. Aligning yourself with these can make designing an influencer program have less friction. Or, you might find that there is room to improve upon these existing programs and reap even more reward. The point is, you won’t know until you do some digging.

What are these questions that will help so greatly when designing your influencer marketing program?

Who? What? Where? When? And Why (or How)?

In this post, we’ll take a look at each of these questions at a high level. Think of my last post as the 50,000 foot view. In this post we’re dropping down to 25,000 feet. Together, we’ll go into each of these in greater detail in upcoming posts. But it’s helpful to look at them all together, in order to see how they interact and build off of one another.

Who

The very corner stone of your influencer marketing program will be the actual influencers doing the ground work, promoting your products or services. There are loads of people out there vying to become ambassadors for their favorite brands, and even more who are looking for free stuff. Making some decisions about who you will allow into the program is the first step in designing your influencer marketing program.

What

This is where a good chunk of your research will come in handy. The what is actually the “what is the partnership agreement?”. This is where you will design what you will offer to your ambassadors, and what you expect to receive in return from them. Being clear in this is essential so that you get the most out of your program, with the ability to remove people who do not fulfill their end of the agreement.

Where

You have done a good bit of marketing legwork before arriving at this point. You’ve chosen the social media channels that connect your brand to your audience, and you’ve been creating professional content for dissemination on those channels. Now, you need to make those same decisions about your social media influencers. You might have put the effort into Pinterest, but notice that your potential influencers are killing it on that platform. Just one example.

When

When is a double question. First, it seeks to answer broad questions that help to frame your program or approach. It does so by identifying whether your product impact your customers during a certain phase or period of their life? An example would be pregnant or breastfeeding mothers. This will affect your outreach efforts and shorten the lifespan of an effective ambassador. This might impact whether you decide to offer free product or an incentive program where influencers can recoup their cost.

The other “when” speaks to the frequency with which you expect your ambassadors to interact with the product or service, and brand publicly. Do you expect them to post weekly? Are you doing a solid month of weekly posts? Will you offer them special incentives or additional product, giveaways, and how often? Will each ambassador qualify for one giveaway per year? These are all questions that will affect your budget and ROI, so they’re good to think about (or at least start thinking about) now.

How

And now we’ve made it to the nitty gritty details. How will you search for, locate, and engage these influencers, ambassadors, and affiliates? How will you track their posting and brand engagement? How will you track the number of sales inspired by each, and the efficacy of your overall program?

There is a wide spectrum of possibilities here, from doing everything manually to full automation. From programs and platforms for engage new influencers, to tracking and reporting tools there are new options everyday. As you would expect these various tools and technologies carry different price tags which are dependent upon the amount of flexibility and automation afforded. We’ll take a closer look at some of these in a future article.