10 Preparations for Small Businesses before Using Influencer Marketing

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If you’re here, then I guess you already have a solid understanding of what influencer marketing is and how small businesses can leverage it to their advantage.

You’ve got everything worked out and set out to take your small business to the next level using influencer marketing.

While in a rush to see your strategy in action, you might want to take a moment and do a thorough recheck to make sure you’ve got it all right.

Influencer marketing is indeed an effective marketing tactic that can lead to tremendous results like improving sales and generating more profits for small businesses.

To help you make sure you haven’t missed anything, we’ve put together a checklist of all the preparations we think are essential to consider before launching your influencer marketing campaigns.

So without further delay, let’s cut to the main point. 

Keep in mind that this checklist has no particular order.

Influencer Marketing Preparations for Small Businesses

Set Clear Goals

The first item on our checklist is setting clear, measurable goals.

What is it that you plan to achieve with influencer marketing? Your goals can range from boosting awareness to increasing sales.

Ask yourself the questions below so that you’re better able to zero in on your goals:

do I want to influencer marketing to:

  • Spread the buzz around my business using influencer marketing?
  • Bring new products?
  • Reach out to prospects?
  • Use influencer marketing to drive up sales?

A well-detailed influencer marketing strategy will help you achieve many goals.

However, this marketing tactic works best for those wanting to increase brand awareness and generate more leads.

Alongside setting goals, you also need to define your business’s KPIs (key performance indicators).

Some of the KPIs and their description can include:

  • Increase brand awareness: sharing content on social media, mentioning the brand name, media exposure, audience access, direct web traffic.
  • Increasing sales: the volume of quality sales leads, products, and services sold.
  • New audiences: increase the number of people who read your content, visit your website, buy your products and services, and so on.

Identify your Target Audience

After the goals are set, it’s time to designate the right market.

This is the phase where you want to make sure you’ve done enough research on your prospects and know a great deal about the audience you want to reach. 

If your business already has a website, you can use its data to better understand your visitors’ behaviors, which will help you do proper customer research.

You can easily do this by viewing the top-performing content of your website.

Moreover, you can assess your competitors’ target market by researching their performance.

Determine the Budget

Moving on to the third item, you need to set the campaign’s budget.

Since influencer marketing is relatively cheaper than other marketing tactics, you don’t need to spend a lot to see results.

Determining the budget mainly depends on one factor: the number of influencers in your campaign and their reputation.

So, for instance, nano-influencers will charge less, or you may even be able to compensate them by giving them free products.

Create Personas

Next, you need to check whether you have created buyer personas.

This is where you should outline a clear picture of your customers.

In other words, you should ask yourself, “Who are my customers?” and come up with a fictional representation of their personalities.

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There are some relevant details you have to include:

  • Income
  • Age
  • Marital Status
  • Interests
  • Problems
  • Fears
  • Goals
  • Online Behavior
  • Social Media Activity

Choose the Appropriate Social Channel

To get the most out of your influencer marketing campaigns, you need to choose one of the popular social networks that are often used for this purpose.

Generally, Instagram is widely considered the powerhouse of influencers.

So, for instance, using Snapchat as your primary platform might not be a good move.

You will also need to consider your audience when looking for the right channel.

If your current customers and target market are more active on YouTube, then choosing a different platform could negatively affect your overall efforts.

Influencer Marketing Hub reports that in 2021 Instagram will continue to dominate the sphere, followed by:

  • TikTok
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Curate Alluring Content

You need to specify what content you want to share with your audience. Based on this, you should produce appropriate visual and textual content. 

Framework and the structure of the content provided by the influencer must be observed, and the necessary authority must be given to the influencer to be able to provide the creativity required in presenting content.

For example, you might define an ad campaign using storytelling and ask your influencers to introduce the product based on storytelling. 

Find the Best Influencers

This step is super important.

If you end up collaborating with the wrong influencers, all your efforts will waste away.

In general, you want to work with influencers that:

  • Have good engagement rates
  • Are consistently active
  • Have a niche

Remember that influencers will be responsible for delivering your brand’s message and helping you achieve your goals.

So it’s highly important to choose the ones that perfectly fit your brand’s identity.

Finding the best influencers can simply be done using old-school methods such as Googling and browsing through popular content on social media.

However, you should take a shortcut around these and use an influencer marketing marketplace.

Ainfluencer’s Do-It-Yourself marketplace allows you to access an extensive, diversified database of influencers.

It contains all the relevant information, such as influencers’:

  • Engagement rates
  • Following count
  • Recent profile activity
  • Avg likes per post
  • Avg comments per post
  • Industry
  • Campaign manager
  • Content library
  • Post scheduler

And so much more.

Their user-friendly website has made it possible for everyone to do influencer marketing and benefit from it.

You can join their VIP waiting list and get the chance to enjoy a complete walkthrough of their services.

Schedule Campaigns

You need to set a specific schedule for your campaign. 

There are some details you should keep in mind like:

  • Campaign period
  • Collaborating influencers
  • Content format and publishing date

Your campaign should follow a timeline, with everything being precisely detailed.

Monitor the Campaign

A successful campaign isn’t only about a starting and endpoint.

It’s the course of it that really matters.

You should keep a close eye on its direction after launch.

Things like the specific time and date of publishing content, the way people interact with it,

Measure the Outcome

Finally, it’s time to evaluate the campaign’s results.

Assessing all the available metrics and measuring the outcome is what you need to do now.

In this phase, you should analyze all the data you collected throughout the campaign.

By data, we mean metrics such as:

  • Clicks
  • Conversions
  • Impressions
  • Profile visits

Wrapping it Up

That was Influencer marketing preparations for small businesses for drawing up an influencer marketing checklist, simple and easy to follow.

The steps introduced in this blog will help you extract the best possible results from your influencer marketing strategy.

Do you feel we missed some items? If yes, then feel free to leave a comment and let us know.

Cyrus Nambakhsh

Cyrus is a serial entrepreneur, product-led-growth expert, a product visionary who launched 7 startups. He has built scalable platforms to help businesses and entrepreneurs. Contact: Cyrus@ainfluencer.com