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Influencer Marketing: Five Strategies for Social Media Success

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | Influencer Marketing: Five Strategies for Social Media Success

Social media marketing. It has been a core promotional business tactic for close to two decades. When used correctly, it can drive engagement, enhance brand awareness, and ultimately boost sales. As for getting it right with social media, there’s one tactic that has emerged as a powerful weapon: influencer marketing.

This is evidenced by the following statistic: In 2023, over 80% of marketers had a budget dedicated solely to influencer marketing. Back in 2017, it was just 37%.

Yet even if you have a budget, it’s essential you spend those dollars wisely. Here are five essential strategies to generate success through influencer marketing.

1. Identify the Right Influencers

As you would expect, the success of an influencer marketing campaign largely hinges on partnering with the right influencers. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean going for those with the highest number of followers. Micro-influencers, typically defined by having smaller but more engaged audiences, can sometimes offer higher ROI than their mega-influencer counterparts.

When identifying the right influencers, focus on these three elements: relevance, engagement rates, and alignment with your brand values. Social media analytics tools can help you to research and identify influencers that cover these elements and best resonate with your target audience.

2. Create Authentic, Relatable Content

Authenticity is necessary for influencer marketing to work. Audiences today are savvy, where they can easily distinguish between genuine endorsements and forced promotions. This is why you must encourage influencers to craft content that feels natural and follows their usual style.

As well as maintaining the influencer’s credibility, this approach ensures their content is both relatable and appealing to their followers. Authentic storytelling can significantly boost engagement and foster a genuine connection between the influencer’s audience and your brand.

3. Get Professional Help

Influencer marketing can be highly effective, but it’s not easy to pull off. This is why working with a digital PR agency is recommended. Agencies like AgilePR specialize in online brand building, where they have extensive networks of influencers across various niches.

PR agencies can assist in identifying the perfect influencer matches. They can negotiate deals and construct compelling campaigns which align with your marketing goals. Moreover, digital PR agencies are adept at crisis management. This ensures that your brand maintains a positive image online, even if unexpected challenges arise during the campaign.

4. Use Multiple Platforms

Don’t restrict your influencer marketing efforts to a single social media platform. Different platforms cater to different audience demographics and interests. By leveraging multiple channels, you can maximize your campaign’s reach.

Similarly, it’s wise to experiment with various content formats. You can use posts, stories, videos, or live sessions, and by mixing your content up, you can keep the campaign fresh and engaging.

5. Measure and Analyze Performance

Key performance indicators (KPIs) must be tracked and analyzed to gauge the success of your influencer marketing campaigns. These KPIs can include:

  • Engagement rates
  • Click-through rates
  • Conversion rates
  • Social media mentions
  • Follower growth
  • Sentiment analysis
  • ROI

With analytics tools, you can measure these metrics to gain insights into what works, and what doesn’t. Along with helping to evaluate your current campaign’s performance, it also guides future influencer collaborations and strategies.

Checklist for Influencers: questions for sellers, coaches, leaders, change agents

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Most of you are really good at what you do: as influencers, sellers, coaches, change agents, or leaders, your intuition, excellent skills, and history of success guide your ability to facilitate change for your clients. And yet… Using conventional models and questions – both designed to drive the predisposition of the facilitator – it’s inevitable that your interactions will have bias, and will unwittingly restrict possible outcomes accordingly. Here’s a checklist of questions to help you determine the extent of your bias:

When attempting to influence someone (as sellers, leaders, etc.) can you be certain that your natural assumptions, unconscious expectations, and goals play no/little role in biasing or restricting the outcome?

Are you aware of, and make allowances for, your full range of biases? Can you think of the role your biases play that might predispose outcomes?

Can you think of any of your Communication Partner’s (CP) biases that were overlooked but ended up determining the outcome? How do you manage your CP’s biases, triggers, filters, and assumptions to expand choice and possibility, and avoid unconscious resistance, fallout, and restricted results? (Not to mention lost sales and difficult implementations.)

Do you know what you’d need to do differently to enter a conversation without bias or assumptions to facilitate your client in determining their own systemic parameters?
Are you aware how your curiosity and questions are subjectively biased toward the goal you think you need to reach – and 1. potentially lose a more congruent outcome, 2. alienate many who might need your solutions?

How can you be certain you’re speaking to all the right people, or using the best questions for them, specifically, to gather the most appropriate information given their idiosyncratic knowledge and culture?

Do your current methods of avoiding resistance work?

Are you aware of how much your brain filters what you hear and how much more is being said than what you’re hearing? Are you aware of the cost of misunderstanding what’s going on outside of your goals and expectations?

How much of the early data you gather turns out to be accurate? How do you know when/if you ever get to the accurate data? How do your expectations and the bias in your questions interfere with the Other’s recognition of the full fact pattern (largely unconscious at the start)?

What would you need to believe differently to consider that your current skill set, biased mind set, and habitual set of expectations is creating a diminished ability to influence the full extent of real change and avoid resistance?

How often do you assume something is ‘working’ or was successful – a coaching client was changing, or a buyer was going to buy – and you were wrong? Do you know for certain what happened behind-the-scenes that caused the failure and you could have circumvented?

Are you aware of how your own biases, assumptions, triggers, and filters, have gotten in the way of success – or do you believe you’re right and the other person wrong/stupid?

What would you need to believe differently to be willing to add some new skills to use less bias? To enable your CPs to recognize and manage their unconscious systems elements that have informed all choices and need to be shifted for change (a purchase, an implementation) to occur so they can easily buy, change or adopt your terrific material?

Facilitating Choice

We’re all in the business of influencing, or attempting to get what we want. Yet we fail a very high percentage of the time; sellers loses 94% of their prospects; coaches lose 70% of follow on clients; implementations fail 97% of the time. It’s not our fault: we fail because our conventional skills are focused on:

  • content push
  • premature goal setting
  • the facilitator’s expectations
  • listening for pre-determined details

and miss the unspoken metamessages, values, history, rules, and consensus issues that make up our CPs status quo. It’s possible to enable our CP partners to do the change work from within, without us biasing and limiting possibility to our own subjective view.

I have developed a generic change management model with a unique skill set that facilitates decision making and change at the core unconscious, systemic level and avoids bias and resistance. I developed it over many decades by coding my own Asperger’s systemizing brain and designing a new form of listening, a new type of question, and coding the steps that happen unconsciously during all change. I’ve trained it to 100,000 sales people, coaches, leaders, and negotiators globally. It’s a model that must be learned and added to your current skill set; it takes some time to learn and practice because it’s so different from conventional models. But it’s scalable. DuPont, for example, trained 8,000 sales people and KPMG trained 6,000 consultants.

Using this new decision facilitation model, you’ll be able to help others determine how to quickly and congruently buy, change, implement, etc. themselves in the area you are facilitating. No more delayed sales cycles or lost prospects; no more failed implementations; no more resistance to change. You can close 40% of all qualified prospects from first call, in half the time; you can help coaching clients discover their unconscious incongruences on the first call; you can implement large change events with no resistance.

I can teach you how to unhook from your personal biases and enter conversations in a way that leads/ discovers/ creates all that’s possible through win/win, servant leadership and congruent change. Imagine being able to enter every conversation and have it reach its most ethical, financial, and creative possibility. Imagine.

About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

To contact Sharon Drew at [email protected] or go to www.didihearyou.com to choose your favorite digital site to download your free book.