Influencer marketing has seen exponential growth over the last 5 years, and it isn’t slowing down anytime soon. The hype was all around Instagram influencers, but, as competition increased, brands are starting to look into TikTok influencers. Regardless, if your brand hasn’t started using influencer marketing to go to the next level, now’s the time to start.

Outreach Strategies

Influencer marketing is a broad term that encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics. One of the most common ways for marketers to jumpstart their outreach efforts is by sending free packages to desirable influencers. Influencers (particularly micro-influencers) are fairly likely to share the product you sent them with their audience, for free. Your brand gets exposure, while the influencer gets a free gift from you and shows other brands how receptive they are to gifts. Both parties benefit and you spend less money for a shoutout.

The more traditional strategy is cold-outreaching. In this case, you’ll find influencers in your product or service’s industry and send them a personal message, asking for a shoutout in exchange for a monetary incentive. Unlike the free gift strategy, now you’ll know exactly what you’re paying for. You’ll know exactly who is going to promote your product or service. Unfortunately, this typically comes at higher costs since the influencer has all of the leverage. Similar to the free gift strategy, you also won’t know if you’re hitting your target audience.

The most commonly used strategy nowadays is using research tools in conjunction with the cold-outreach strategy. There is no shortage of tools available out there, but Tensor Social is one of the best. Using tools like Tensor Social, you’ll be able to know if an influencer you plan to work with has your target audience following them. Tensor Social goes above and beyond just the demographics of a follower list. It unravels the psychographic, geographic, and engagement elements of an influencer’s following.

Tracking Influencer Revenue

The process of Influencer marketing is arguably more simple than any other marketing channel. The problem marketers in this space commonly face is attribution. “I spent $XXX on this post, but how many sales did it bring in?” There’re a couple ways to go about this. The more simple version is to use a platform like Tune to mask and track your website links. Platforms like Tune will track a user’s journey and attribute sales that come from an influencer’s promotion, to said promotion. This is definitely the easiest way, but it can come with a hefty price tag.

The other option is to utilize UTM tags. This is completely free, but is more tedious and error-prone. Instead of paying for a service to track the traffic that converts through certain links, you’ll append UTM keys and values to the end of your website’s link. The UTM tag will be different for every influencer post, to differentiate traffic that came from different posts. In any script tracking software (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc.), you’re able to sort through and organize sales and traffic that came in through certain UTMs.

Influencer marketing and the success of campaigns all depend on choosing the right influencers. Whether you’re looking for a full-scope campaign or just getting connected to influencers, platforms like Tensor Social can do it all for you. They match you with the right influencer, provide performance metrics, and manage the entire process so that you can put in minimal effort to see your investment work!

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