Establishing an Influencer Marketing Plan That Works

Creating an effective influencer marketing plan is essential to building a successful digital marketing strategy. It allows businesses to leverage the power of social media influencers and their large followings to promote their products and services. With the right plan, businesses can tap into new markets and expand their reach with relative ease.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what it takes to build an effective influencer marketing plan that works for your business. We’ll cover everything from defining your goals and objectives, to choosing the right influencers, and measuring your ROI. Let’s get started!

Step One: Define Your Goals and Objectives

Before getting started with any type of digital marketing campaign, you must first define your goals and objectives. What are you trying to achieve? Are you looking to increase brand awareness or broaden your reach? Do you want to drive more sales or increase customer loyalty? Knowing exactly what you want to accomplish will help guide the rest of the process.

Step Two: Identify Your Target Audience

Once you have established your goals for the campaign, it’s time to identify who you want to target. Who is your desired audience? Knowing who they are and where they hang out will help you find the right influencers for your campaign.

Understanding who makes up your target market means that selecting appropriate influencers becomes much simpler – after all, if you don’t know who looks up to them or engages with them on social media, then how can you be sure that they have any influence at all?

Step Three: Choose The Right Influencers

Choosing the best influencer(s) for your campaign is arguably one of the most important steps in creating a successful influencer marketing plan. You need to make sure that their followers align with those in your target market – after all, there’s no point in targeting someone whose followers may not even be interested in what you have to offer!

When it comes down to finding suitable candidates, paid partnerships tend to work best as they give brands greater control over who represents them online; however, there are other ways too such as talking directly with bloggers or researching potential candidates on social media sites like Twitter and Instagram.

Step Four: Create Engaging Content

Creating content that resonates with consumers is key when it comes to establishing a successful influencer marketing plan

Do you want help creating your Influencer Marketing Plan?

Visit EZMetrics.com to book a call with our team and get started today!

3 Key Habits for a Successful Business

Is your goal to run a successful business? Then you need to have the right mindset!

You’ll be most successful when you learn to trust yourself. Trusting yourself starts with holding yourself accountable. When you stick to your routine every day, it’ll be easier to check tasks off your list, even on days when you don’t feel like it. Whatever type of business you have or want to start, you’ll need to keep these three main ideas in mind.

Have A Vision

Sit down and write everything you envision for yourself and your business. Your core values will stand out to you, and identifying your values is a great place to start. Your customers can best relate to you when they see what is important to you. Then, turn your brainstorm into a vision board, or write it into a statement. Next, you’ll be ready to type up your plan and outline the roadmap of where you want to go. 

Your business plan will come together quickly when you’ve made time to get creative with it. The key to sustaining your vision and goal is to make time to get creative and brainstorm new ideas. So make time on your calendar for one hour a week to get your colored markers, and go for it!

Manage Your Time and Your Resources

Once you have your plan, devise a daily schedule to manage your time well. At first, it may seem like you’re spending a lot of time planning. However, all the work you do to set up systems to organize and plan will be helpful for you in the long run. Good planning and organizational skills can be practiced and will take some time to make into a habit. Make lists of daily, weekly, and monthly goals to remind yourself of the steps to get to where you want to be.

You’ll want to update your records promptly, keep a hard copy, and store them electronically. If your computer crashes, you’ll have everything you need to keep running smoothly. If things do not go smoothly and to plan, don’t get worked up about it! You’re going to hit roadblocks along the way. Take a deep breath and remind yourself that you got this. When you are calm, you’ll be able to figure out what isn’t working and what to do about it.

Attract People Like You

You’ll attract more positive people to your company when you stay positive. A positive attitude will look attractive to others, and they’ll want to work with you. Build positive relationships with your customers, and they will spread the word about your company. 

Be flexible and able to pivot quickly to changes. Growth requires constant change, and when you want your company to grow, you’ll have to be willing to learn and seek out knowledge. Do your research and understand your competitors. You may have to make quick decisions to stay ahead of the pack!

Business Success

Sometimes it can be hard to see the growth when you’re working away daily. However, if you want to be successful in your business, you will need to understand the market and your financial situation and jump at opportunities whenever they come to you. 

You can use a few strategies to increase your sales and keep growing your business year after year. One way is to boost your advertising, send out email blasts to your customers, or offer an incentive for referrals from existing customers. Focus on having a great product or service; remember, your personal growth will directly impact your company’s growth.

Take the first step to building, launching, and scaling your business. We make digital marketing easy. Our ultimate goal as your agency is to see your business increase its returns on paid advertising campaigns. Call EZMetrics today!

Balancing Family, Friends, and Your Business

Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, but it is hard to understand the impact that this will have on your friends and family.  When you take the next step of becoming a business owner, you can lose friends and your family relationships could weaken — without balance. This is because some entrepreneurs are so consumed with the role of creating a business that their business begins to consume their life.

Have you ever felt like when you are not at work all you can think about is what you need to perform in your business?

Have you begun to outgrow people as they do not understand your busy lifestyle?

Do you feel like you do not have time for small talk or to get caught up with friends?

A startup can consume your life — if you allow it to.  

You need to leave time for your own personal growth and spiritual growth. You can do this by prioritizing your time. You should create time in your schedule to spend in your faith and with your family.  

You can balance your family, friends, faith, and your business, and when you do, you will find that everything feels like it is happening with ease.  You will begin to see how the benefits of one area reflect in other parts of your life.

Zig Ziglar used a tool when he explained this concept called the Wheel of Life. In his presentations, he would hold up a wheel with 7 spokes.  Each spoke represented different areas of life one has to balance: Mental, Spiritual, Physical, Family, Financial, Personal, and Career.   When one is out of balance, it affects the other 6.

When you are spending time with your family, turn off your phone and laptop. Even though this can be extremely hard to do, it is important that you continue to build stronger relationships within your family and balance work vs. home in a way that is appropriate.

For your mental “spoke”, take for example your friendships.  You are in complete control of who engages with you. If you do not want to talk with someone, then you should not respond. If your friends are not encouraging you or celebrating your wins with you, you should eliminate them from your life. It is very easy to get run down within a business, therefore, you need to keep those around you positive and protect your energy as much as possible.

Even though it can feel challenging to make time for family and friends, it is crucial for your own growth and success!

The Future and the Essentials: 2 Books Worth Reading

Had I not heard Amy Webb on an episode of This Week in Tech, I would never have picked up her book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream (2016, PublicAffairs).

Had the first chapter not hooked me, I probably would have taken it back to the library and devoured one of the many novels on my pile.

What Webb proposes throughout the book is…well, it’s fun.

Especially if you’re a techie.

Even if you’re not a techie.

She begins, simply enough:

The future doesn’t simply arrive fully formed overnight, but emerges step by step. It first appears at seemingly random points around the fringes of society, never in the mainstream. Without context, these points can appear disparate, unrelated, and hard to connect meaningfully. But over time they fit into patterns and come into focus as a full-blown trend: a convergence of multiple points that reveal a direction or tendency, a force that combines some human need and new enabling technology that will shape the future.

She goes on to describe an experience she had in Japan in 1997, where she was first introduced to mobile web browsing…long before it became something so ordinary that we barely talk about it (unless you’re in marketing, and then you obsess over mobile).

Signals is a book that, Webb explains, “contains a method for seeing the future. It’s an organized approach that, if followed, will advance your understanding of the world as it is changing.” She spends the next 10 chapters and 250-plus pages teaching you the forecasting techniques she uses in her career as a futurist.

I couldn’t help but think that many of us — perhaps, in fact, all of us — should be reading books like this.

Webb’s approach is one of strategic thinking, a kind of thinking that the entrepreneurs and business leaders I’ve been working with for over two decades have long embraced. She’s outlined the exact steps she uses, and peppers the book with examples from both a looking-backward and a looking-forward approach.

I couldn’t help but smile as she outlined the cases for flying cars, or rather, the cases for not having flying cars. It became a shorthand conversation throughout the book, and I can’t say I minded it.

Do flying cars matter? No, not really. But how often are we blinded by the glitter of something like flying cars and lose sight of the very boring, very real, very obvious changes in the world?

Webb is challenging readers to see the future not as a big scary place, but as the next moment from now. The future, as it turns out, is something that’s not so shocking.

It makes me think, in fact, of a current commercial from CarMax. “I know this because I’m from seven days in the future,” the man on the screen says. At the end, after his monologue, he admits, “It’s pretty much the same,” referring to the differences between seven days and now.

But changes happen in small increments, gathering steam until it seems they suddenly take over: had you heard the “signals” that Webb teaches you to pay attention to, you would not have been so shocked (though you may be just as delighted).

How can we apply this to our lives? I can think of about 1000 ways, and rather than outline them, I would rather recommend this book and challenge you to read it for yourself. You might even want to highlight it, dog ear it, and come back to it later.

And that leads to the next business read that seems to reach far beyond my business background and into every nook and cranny of my life, from faith to parenthood and all the things in between.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown (Crown, 2014), was mentioned in a by-the-way manner on a call with my mastermind group. I really respected that person’s mention, took it as a recommendation, and ordered the book.

It then sat on a bookshelf gathering dust until we turned our house upside down rearranging and reworking our living space.

As I put it back on a different shelf in a different room, considering whether I would keep it or give it away, I remembered how Lisa had said, ever so casually, that it was a really helpful read.

I’m in a strange juncture right now, and “really helpful” triggered my desire to read it.

So I picked it up on a Sunday, instead of firing up my laptop to try to squeeze in more work.

Four days later, I was finished with it, but not before sharing images of it all over my social media channels and feeling my brain exploding.

The last time I had this experience with a business book, I was reading Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

In fact, I hate calling this a business book, because in so many ways, it feels like a “life” book. (The same is true of Covey’s writing.)

The way of the Essentialist is the path to being in control of our own choices. It is a path to new levels of success and meaning. Despite all these benefits, however, there are too many forces conspiring to keep us from applying the disciplined pursuit of less but better, which may be why so many end up on the misdirected path of the Nonessentialist.

On the page following this excerpt is a sentence that I could paint on my wall:

If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.

I need that reminder. And don’t we all, especially as we carry around an electronic tether and find ourselves treating Saturday as the new Friday?

So often, we approach our lives as though they are a tunnel, and as though there is only one straight way through. Even when we’re at a juncture, we consider that there’s an A or B choice, not that we could choose both (or neither).

Sometimes, we just need something to shake us up, turn us upside down, remind us of what’s truly important.

There are many ways this can happen, and surely a book isn’t just the only way. I’ve had more than one of these experiences in the last decade, and I’m sure you have too.

But what do you do with them? How do you actually change your life and your way of executing?

That’s one of the things I really appreciated about Essentialism. McKeown isn’t speaking in theoreticals, he’s speaking in practicalities. And he’s not wasting words doing it.

I’ll be rereading this, that’s for sure. And I’ll be doing more than just thinking about how to apply the concepts: I’ll be doing.