It’s no doubt, email marketing, influencer marketing, conversational marketing, and viral marketing are some of the most potent yet cost-effective marketing strategies to propel your startup to scalable heights. Still, and akin to all marketing strategies, without a practical and proper approach, you might as well be setting your yet-to-be-established venture for failure. 

Influencer marketing or branded content is a new and fast-growing customer acquisition method businesses of all sizes have to capitalize on to reach broader audiences and, in general, expand their outreach. And as social media platforms continue to set up as the norm of this modern era, there is no doubt influencer marketing will keep rising for the foreseeable future. 

While most prominent and established firms have found appropriate paths to capitalizing on the immense power of influencer marketing, startups and SMEs are struggling or are yet to discover the conventional strategy of utilizing this marketing technique. As a result, we will look at how startups can start and create a productive approach to increasing their brand visibility through influencer marketing. 

How to Create An Influencer Marketing Strategy For Your Startup

Much like any strategy, research, planning, and optimization are a sure way of getting an adequate Return on Investments for your venture. Even better, work with experienced social media influencers who share your brand values, and you will reap the full benefits of branded content. Still, there is more:

Determine Your Goals

The primary role of ventures using influencer marketing is to broaden their target audience. Also, you must know what else you want to achieve from your influencer marketing campaign. Again, Is it to elevate brand awareness, increase your social media platforms followers, or do you want to convert already warmed-up leads to paying customers? 

Essentially, it would be best if you created measurable and realistic goals. For example, it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect to make sales right from the top of your first influencer marketing campaigns. Instead, it would be best if you prioritized reaching potential customers. Also, note that you might need multiple influencing programs to achieve your objectives. 

Define Your Audience

Akin to all marketing campaigns, you have to be wary of who you want to target and influence. And in particular, their age, gender, location, income, lifestyle, etc. You have to communicate with your appropriate potential clients with the right social media platform and significantly with content creators. 

An effective strategy to define your audience is by creating audience personas. As a result, you will understand who you are trying to reach. For example, is it entirely new customers or existing customers? Once you lucidly understand your target audience, you will find it more streamlining to discover what content they respond to and competent influencers to push your campaign. 

Set a Budget and Management Strategy

Bear in mind; there are four types of influencers. Nano influencers ( they have the least number of social media followers ) are the least expensive, as you can expect. On the other hand, Mega influencers are high-end and might be unfavorable for your startup for the moment. Finally, micro-influencers might be the best fit for your growing venture, budget-wise and in terms of engagements. 

Nevertheless, you have to define a budget matching your content creators’ level of influence. Also, factor in time for planning, executing, and inspecting your influencing campaign. 

Secondly, you must consider whether you will offer incentives or offer your product/services to test for the influencers’ followers. 

Finally, bear in mind influencers are typically human beings and, in most cases, might be indulged in multiple influencing deals. Consequently, expect some to fall behind with their scheduled postings, or worse, fail to post at all and might make errors in your requested tags. Therefore, especially for startups with a broad pool of influencers, it’s vital to incorporate managers or an influencer marketing strategy to coordinate and supplement your content. 

Understand the Influencer Landscape

Before finding the right influencers and beginning to work with them, you have to understand the landscape. For example, and as we have mentioned, the type of influencers and disclosure guidelines available in your region or country. 

Then, once you are confident in what you are doing, find the right influencers. Having identified your target audience, this will be much more streamlining—a content creator with loyal followers who constantly engage with their posts. On top of it, you have to find a creative influencer who can also create content that complements your own. 

Once you settle on the proper influencers to push your campaign, reach out and see if they are willing to work with you. You can contact them through email, direct messaging, engaging in their posts, and many more. Ensure they are well aware of your goals and will put in the work to develop a solid marketing strategy. 

Incorporate Influencer Management Tools

According to the platforms you want to run your campaign, some incorporate tools that come in handy in several ways. For instance, InfluenceGrid can help you find influencers within your niche in TikTok. Alternatively, Hootsuite will go a long way in ensuring you can manage multiple networks and profiles, including influencers, for an effective campaign. 

Analyze, Measure, and Optimize Your Results

When your campaign gains traction, measure how much engagement it’s receiving. A wrong approach to this is by focusing on the likes or comments a post gets. We are not saying that you can’t gauge the effectiveness of the marketing from the engagements your content creators receive. Instead, we are insinuating that ‘’vanity metrics’’ do not prove the value of social media activity. 

In this case, the best alternative is incorporating UTM parameters to track the success of your online marketing campaign. For example, by assigning each influencer unique links with UTM codes, you can efficiently calculate the engagements they receive. Also, you can figure the sales an influencer brings along by assigning them a discount code. 

Your utmost priority when analyzing and measuring the effectiveness of your influencer marketing program is to identify what’s not working and optimize it to get the desired results. 

What to Avoid in Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

• Using a one-size-fits-all approach. What worked for other brands may not be suitable for your campaign.
• Only relying on influencers with a high number of followers. As already outlined, opt for influencers with loyal and authentic followers who receive high engagements.
• Not forming a relationship with the content creator. Instead, focus on building a mutually favorable relationship with influencers and, subsequently, with their followers. 
• Relying solely on only one social media platform.