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!

5 Signs That It Is Time to Update Your Social Media Profiles

When it comes to social media, if you have been in business for any length of time, you will already know how important it is to have business pages up and live on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Not only is social media an excellent way to engage with customers, build meaningful relationships, and make lasting impressions, it is critical for outreach, brand visibility, and lead generation.

However, if your business is projecting the wrong image, is out of the loop, or has outdated tactics, information, and design, then your social media marketing campaigns will fail. With this said, it can be hard to know whether you are out of the loop or not, which is why we have compiled a list of a few tell-tale signs that it is time to update those profiles.

 

  • You Are Not Getting Any New Leads.
    If you are never posting on your social media profiles, never re-sharing content, and never interacting with those who do come by your profiles, than you are not going to generate new leads. If you find that you are not getting any messages from potential customers, are not getting comments, likes, or re-shares on content that is posted, than you are not generating enough interest in your business or brand. One way to fix this is to make sure that your social media marketing campaigns and paid advertising is targeting the right audience and demographics. Beyond this, post on a consistent and regular basis with a wide variety of content types such as video, live streams, infographics, images, and regular posts. Finally, make sure that you are responding to those who do interact with you in a positive manner that reflects your business’ brand personality. You may also want to check that you have proper call-to-action buttons located across your profiles as engagement is not enough to make those sales. Give your audiences specific instructions to “click here for more information about [product]” or “sign up here for our monthly newsletter,” and watch as the metrics closely to see which call-to-action buttons work best.

 

  • You Are Unable to Measure Your Metrics.
    If you are not tracking your social reach, your engagement, your social acquisitions, conversion rates, and overall activity, than how are you to know what your business needs to do to improve? You can’t without knowing the metrics. If you are unable to measure the listed metrics or do not understand how to, then your social media profiles need an update with this in mind. Utilize Facebook’s analytics program or Twitter’s engagement tools to gather these metrics.  When you track your reach, you see your audience growth rate; when you track engagement you see how your actions create growth; when you track acquisition, you get to see visitor frequency rates. As you can see, tracking these metrics provides you with invaluable information about the growth, profit, and visibility of your business.

 

  • You Have an Outdated Website.
    An outdated website is going to be difficult to navigate, which is going to cause users to move on quickly causing your website pages to have higher bounce rates. If your website hasn’t had a visual update in the past five years with regards to font styles, templates, image effects, background textures, and the layout of your written content, than it’s going to show when compared to newer, more modern renditions. This may cause people to ignore your business or brand completely as they will not feel attached to your website. Beyond this, if you do not have an SSL certificate on your website, which is used for data encryption purposes, than customers are not going to submit their data to you.

 

  • You Are Selling to Everyone and Not to Specific Audience.
    If you are sending your advertisements, messages, and products to all potential customers, then you are running a very ineffective marketing strategy. Rather, you want to segment out your customers based on their individually assigned categories; some may respond well to social media messages on Facebook while others may respond better to updates through LinkedIn, and others may prefer to see live stories through Instagram. When you identify who your customers are and segment them based on their preferences, you can find improved success in getting them to purchase your products, use your services, or engage with your business.

 

  • Your Website is Not Mobile Friendly.
    Any user who visits your website is a potential customer and a potential leads. According to Statista, about 52.2% of website traffic that was generated in 2018 was done through mobile phones alone. If your website does not adapt to those using mobile phones, you are going to lose out on conversions. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly by using mobile-friendly templates and website hosts that offer dynamic sizing for things like banners and images. Keep in mind that it is not just mobile phones that you have to worry about but also tablets and other small devices.

For more in-depth training and resources to leverage social media marketing to generate an unlimited supply of your perfect customers, join the EZMetrics Mastermind.  

 

Content Is King: How to Utilize Social Media Content Marketing Effectively

It is without a doubt that since the advent of social media platforms, the engagement rates for these platforms has done nothing but skyrocket due to the increase in internet use, tablets, and smartphones.

As a result, social networking is one of the most popular online activities across the globe, with 71% of internet users using their favorite platforms on a daily and weekly basis.

According to Statista, the forecasted user base for these networks will rise from 2.7 billion in 2019 to 3.02 billion by 2021, clearly indicating that social media remains a reliable vehicle for engaging a large target audience through content marketing.

Beyond being able to nurture relationships with a massive audience, a company that utilizes social media content marketing effectively, will be able to build brand awareness, influence prospects, and drive engagement to one’s product, business, or service.  

Here is how you can leverage social media platforms effectively to make your content marketing strategy shine.

 

  • Always Optimize For Each Individual Platform You Are Using. A major mistake that a lot of marketers make when spreading their content across their social media pages is not optimizing for each social media platform. Although automation of content is definitely something you want to do with regards to scheduling out consistent content, it is not recommended for spreading out the same content across all platforms. This is because each platform has their own audiences with specific expectations and preferences. An audience on Facebook may want curated content in their newsfeed, whereas, an audience on Instagram is looking for photos and live stories. LinkedIn is for professional content and job-related content, while, Twitter is more for news and GIFs. So, if you have an Instagram account and a Youtube account for your business, you will want to put photographs on Instagram and videos on Youtube, while news-related information could go on a Twitter account.
  • Consistency Will Maximize User Engagement.  Being consistent in how often you post to each social media network is paramount to keeping your audience engaged, however, you also need to be consistent in the tone, message, and aesthetics of your brand, product, company, or service. When these elements match up together, you will build your brand identity naturally, and a cohesive brand identity gives your users a personality to engage with. They will know who you are and because of that, you’ll gain traction.
  • Identify Where Your Content Is Relevant. Although it may seem like an excellent idea to have a social media page on every single platform, it doesn’t make sense to if your content doesn’t fit there. Figure out which platforms fit the type of content that you are putting out into the world, as any content that is spread on inopportune networks, will only be a loss on investment, both money and time wise. So, for instance, if you are running a bookstore, your content will fit really well on Pinterest and Instagram, but not so much on Facebook.
  • Use Analytic Metrics to Determine Which Content Works.  Social media networks have this amazing metric system built right into them, with which you can derive insight into your audience. Take a look at your content, see who is engaging with it, what the demographics are like, and then optimize it for what is working. Maybe big pictures and a call-to-action button works the best on getting people to your blog, or maybe a Youtube video does an excellent job of getting people to your products page. Utilize the content that works based on the metrics that social media kicks back to you.
  • Consider Promotional Posts for Your Content. Posting your content on social media platforms is not enough nowadays. If you want high conversion rates, you will need to get your content in front of everyone through promotional advertising. Paid ads will bring more visibility to your content and it will increase your reach. If you do use promotional posts or sponsored posts, you will need to customize the strategy you use for each individual platform based around that platform’s preferred content.
  • Remember to Always Engage Your Audience!  Once you have figured out which type of content works best for your website/business and on which platform, you will need to grow your social reach through engagement. This will show your audience that you are authentically interested in connecting with them. You can do this by re-tweeting or sharing your influencers posts, by featuring your partners on your social media profiles or even just simply liking and commenting back to your audience. Valuing your customer by responding will go a long way to building a positive reputation.
  • Consider Re-Purposing Viral Content for Other Platforms.  If you have one piece of content, say a written article, that gets a lot of views, comments, and likes on LinkedIn or Facebook, consider re-purposing it into content that can be shareable across Youtube or Instagram.  An article can be transformed into an infographic and placed on Pinterest or it can be made into a Youtube video. Doing this will help you reach new audiences with your content.

 

Social media is ever-evolving, and thus, the strategies and tactics that worked in the past may not be as effective today. It’s important that you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to What’s Working Now.  Join the EZMetrics Mastermind to access our digital marketing library that will help you generate an unlimited supply of your perfect customers.

Numbers Matter: How to Measure Your Social Media Campaigns

I’m a numbers guy. I’m such a numbers guy that it drives my wife crazy.

But here’s the thing: you need to be a numbers person, too.

If you’re spending money on advertising — and let’s not forget that time is money! — then you need to know if it’s working or not.

And the way you know that is, usually, by some sort of number.

Social media is a hot way to advertise, and with good reason.

You don’t always have to spend money on social media — we grew the Zig Ziglar Facebook page purely organically — but you can (and often, it makes sense).

If you have a budget, I’m a big fan of Facebook ads. (Which would be why I have a whole course on it…) They allow for targeting in a way that, quite frankly, makes every dollar well-spent.

Know why and what you’re measuring in a social media campaign

To be clear, I’m not a fan of numbers just for the sake of numbers.

You have to know why you’re measuring and what you’re measuring, because that’s how you find out what’s working.

And when you know what’s working, you can keep rocking it, tweaking it, and improving it so that you convert prospects into customers.

Two types of metrics for social media

We’re going to consider that there are two types of metrics for social media:

  • Ongoing metrics
  • Campaign metrics

Ongoing metrics are things you keep your eye on all the time: you want to understand the trends and activity from one point in time to another. You want to look at snapshots, but also at the bigger picture. This is something you check in on regularly and keep track of.

Campaign metrics are focused on a definite beginning and end. These numbers help you know whether your specific campaigns or outreaches are effective. You can look at these within the overall scope of things, and you can look at them individually.

Both types of metrics are critical: you should be looking at both and keeping track of both.

How to measure social media campaigns

Ask — and answer — these 5 questions to measure your social media campaigns. In fact, I’ve found it’s a good practice to revisit these on a regular basis.

1. What are your goals?

What do you want to accomplish and where can you best accomplish it?

Some goals might be:

  • To gain exposure
  • To sell products
  • To spread the word about something
  • To engage with customers or prospects
  • To share news and information

You may find that, due to limited energy or resources, that it’s best to pick one social media channel (i.e., Facebook or Instagram) and build that up before you attempt another channel.

2. What metrics matter for your goals?

What numbers tell you what people are doing and whether things are working?

Here are a few metrics to get you started:

  • What are people talking about? Your “conversation rate” helps you build relationships and helps you nurture leads, answer questions, and support current customers so that you have retention.
  • How many shares/retweets do you have? This “amplification rate” will tell you your reach and determine what kind of content to create and what channels to use.
  • How many likes/favorites do you get? This “applause rate” and it can tell you what your audience likes, which should inform your future decisions.

3. What tools will measure and capture the numbers?

Each social media platform has some built-in analytics, but there are also external tools that can help you. For example, Google Analytics should be installed and running on your website already.

You don’t have to spend anything on tools: if you’re starting in Facebook (and why wouldn’t you?), the analytics and insights are part of the dashboard. For more tools, do a quick search for free social media metrics tools.

4. What gets monitored and reported?

For some people, this is the hardest part. You have to sit back a bit, and at the same time, you have to watch and keep track.

You want to know how your numbers compare to what you expected. Are your conversions better or worse or right on target?

Take a look, too, at how often and what you’re reporting, even if it’s just to yourself.

You can help a good campaign go to great, and you can help a faltering campaign rebound, but only if you’re paying attention.

5. What needs changed?

The real power of the numbers is that they inform your decisions. You can change your tactics and consider if you’re missing something.

Maybe you’re not looking at the right thing. Maybe you see a trend that shows you an opportunity.

The next step

Social media can be a drain on your time and energy. It helps to understand the metrics that matter and adjusting your strategy in light of your numbers.