Influencer marketing is gradually becoming a major part of every company’s social media marketing strategy. Though sometimes it may be hard to choose the right influencer to contact, it’s important to have a strong influencer strategy in our time. Here’s how to use influencer marketing to strengthen your customer relationships.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Definition

Before we go on, it’s important to understand what exactly social media marketing is. To put it simply, it is one of the types of digital marketing that involves close collaboration with a social media influencer (or a group of them). Instead of promoting your brand and products yourself, you pay powerful social media users to do it for you.

What makes influencer marketing stand out is its ability to be quite subtle. It is relatively cheap and easy to organize. It can also be very effective if the majority of your target audience spends its time on the social media platform you choose for influencer marketing. Lastly, it can truly help you strengthen your customer relationships.

1. Understand Your Audience

First of all, you need to understand your audience. This may sound too simple because everyone is saying it, but it should be a priority for anyone who wants to create a strong influencer marketing strategy. Even a simple customer survey can help you determine this.

For instance, you should know their age range and interests to determine which platforms they use the most. Then, you can either choose between those platforms or launch influencer campaigns on all of them simultaneously.

2. Set Your Long- and Short-Term Goals

The second step you should take is setting goals. This concerns both long-term and short-term goals because you need to know what you want to have in a year just as much as you need to know what you want to have in a day.

To set your long- and short-term goals, you should first understand your priorities. If your number one priority is your customer relationships, then you should definitely focus on that. For instance, you might want to grow your social media following and get to 10 thousand followers in one month.

3. Establish Your Content Strategy and Schedule

Once you get to know your audience better and set your goals, you will need to establish your content strategy and schedule. The strategy needs to consist of your aforementioned audience and goals as well as your content quality guidelines (e.g. the quality of your images). The schedule, on the other hand, will need to have your posting calendar (e.g. Monday 5 p.m.) After you decide on all the details of your content strategy and schedule, you will need to put it all in a comprehensive guide. Alternatively, you can hire a professional writer from a writing services reviews site like Best Writers Online who will do it for you after you provide them with everything you want to include in your content guide.

4. Create Several Content Examples

This is not a mandatory step, but if you haven’t collaborated with influencers before or published any brand content on your social media accounts, it can be very helpful. Basically, these content examples you create can be shown to influencers to better explain what you expect from them.

When you are creating these content examples, try to follow your own guidelines as closely as possible. If you decided on multiple post formats, then you should probably create multiple post examples in these formats to show all the different types of content you expect.

5. Make A List of Influencers to Contact

The next thing you should do is make a list of influencers to contact. The bigger your list is, the more chances there are that you will get a good number of those who will actually respond and decide to work with you.

To select your influencers, you should first choose the niches you want to work with. Then, you need to do some research and find out what influencers there are in each niche that do promotional brand posts. You should also decide whether you want to work with micro-influencers or macro-influencers aka with those who have a smaller or bigger follower base.

6. Prepare A Contact Message

Even after you have a list of influencers, you still can’t just get in touch with them right away. Instead, you need to first prepare a contact message that you can copy and paste to quicken the process of reaching out to influencers.

The contact message needs to state your aim and every detail of what you expect from the partnership. Remember that you can always hire a professional writer from a custom writing reviews site like Online Writers Rating if you are not sure about your own writing abilities. This writer will definitely craft a great contact message.

7. Get in Touch with The Influencers

Now, you have everything you need to start getting in touch with the influencers. The best way to do this is by going through the list in the order it was written in, but you can always go through it alphabetically or by niche.

Obviously, the best platform to contact every influencer would be the social media platform that you want them to promote on. However, some influencers prefer to be emailed, so you should make sure that you are reaching out to them in the right way.

8. Schedule the Influencer Posts

After reaching out to the influencers, there will be some who don’t reply, some who decline your offer, and some who accept it. Those who accept your partnership will constitute your new list of influencers that you are actually going to work with.

Then, once you have the new list ready, you will need to decide which influencer will publish their post at what time. Scheduling influencer posts will allow you to organize your campaign better and ensure that all the content is published consistently with each other.

9. Check Their Content Before Publishing

This step is incredibly important because skipping it can lead to the failure of your entire influencer campaign. Before any of the influencers you are working with publishes their post, you need to check their content and make sure that it meets all your requirements.

Not only does the image quality have to be good, but the grammar and spelling in the caption should be perfect as well. The wording is important too: even a small inaccuracy or vagueness can lead to a major scandal which will lead to bad PR for your brand.

10. Interact with Users Under the Posts

Last but not least, you will need to do one more thing after the posts are published and users start liking them, leaving comments, and sharing the posts – you need to interact with these users! After all, what was the purpose of these posts if not to strengthen your customer relationships?

Make sure that you answer all their questions, give them recommendations, and encourage them to check out your profile and browse your products without sounding too clingy. Interact with them like you would if these were your own posts.

Final Thoughts

To sum up, influencer marketing is definitely an important part of social media marketing and should be included in your digital strategy. Use the tips in this article to master influencer marketing and improve your customer relationships.

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