Influencer Marketing Playbook: Free e-books and frequently asked questions

In a way, they bring word-of-mouth to the next level. They amplify the reach and expose your business to a bigger audience, sometimes even on a global scale. Getting business from referrals and recommendations is a powerful tactic for growing your bottom line, and influencer marketing is a great tool for accelerating and supporting this source of leads.

In this Playbook, we cover the top three benefits of working with influencers.

Creators work hard on building a community and developing their personal brand. By trial and error, they've discovered what works for their followers and what does not.

If there's only one thing that you'll remember from this Playbook, here's the most important conclusion: Influencer marketing is a powerful tandem between your business and an influencer.

Your team has an in-depth knowledge of your product or service, its benefits, and its most competitive features. This knowledge coupled together with the way creators understand their followership can lead to results that are not easy to get with other channels.

Bear in mind that no Playbook, however detailed, can give you a magic pill for creating viral campaigns. Each situation and each collaboration is unique.

The relationship between creators and their followers is built on trust and common interests. If they talk about your brand favorably or aptly integrates it into their story, this gives their followership a subtle and engaging way to learn about your brand without interrupting their experience.

Since influencers already have won the trust of their community, their recommendation is a powerful tool that can help you achieve your goals.

The charm of influencer marketing lies in its complexity and versatility. There exist many types of collaboration formats, posts, and categories. On top of that variety, the impact of sponsored posts can be amplified by paid advertising.

If you want to find out more benefits than the top three outlined in this Playbook, have a look at this checklist.

One of the most important steps in your campaign is finding the right creator whose voice will complement your strategy and help deliver your message. To figure out who the best fit for your brand is, you can use our template, which we call the framework of 4 C's.

In this Playbook, we'll briefly walk you through all of the four C's and what they mean.

Know your buyer personas and have them clearly defined. Your perfect profile is the one that has your target customers or clients. If you find an influencer with high engagement rates, top-quality content, and values aligned with your brand but their audience is not interested in your products or services, then is there really any point in running this campaign?

We want to emphasize this in the Playbook: influencer marketing is a three-way street. It involves a collaboration between you, an influencer, and their followers. That's why the search for the perfect fit should begin with deeper questions about whom you want to target.

What type of content does your audience prefer? Do they want to watch videos or use a downloadable template or an e-book? Different influencers are good at creating content for different types and platforms. Knowing what you need and what platform your potential clients prefer narrows down your search significantly.

KPIs can be tricky. Some of them are the so-called vanity metrics: they look good on paper but don't necessarily bring the expected results. For example, if an influencer has hundreds of thousands of followers, this doesn't say much about the quality of their posts, let alone their audience.

Set some time aside to explore how authentic their followership is. Do they have real followers? Does the quality meet your expectations? Will they be able to communicate your message well and the way you want it to be communicated?

This is a rather subjective question and it will require a bit of an in-depth analysis of the profile. Depending on your industry and the world's agenda, you might need to dig deeper into the personal beliefs and values of an influencer. Do your values match or complement each other? Will there be a seamless and mutually beneficial collaboration?

Working with an agency can give you an extra benefit. Agencies usually have several years of experience with campaigns across industries and tight connections with influencers.

A good agency will not only help you run a campaign but you can also learn from them. For example, from their template for creating goals and objectives or a template for the campaign plan (timeline, milestones, and so on). By working with an agency, you'll also get an opportunity to see the creative process behind the scenes and get a better understanding of how your creative brief template should look in the future when you're ready to do influencer marketing on your own.