Influencer marketing is an excellent way to broaden your reach in a natural, seemingly organic way. The idea is simple: you work with select influencers, and they leverage their following (usually for a price) to help you reach your business goals, whether that’s to increase traffic, drive sales or boost brand impressions.

Getting your strategy in place is critical to being effective. If you don’t have a plan, the work will quickly turn into a chaotic mess that’s hard to track. And if you can’t track your results, you won’t be able to determine ROI and overall success.

To make tackling this incredibly rewarding strategy a little bit easier, use the following checklist as a guide to structure the strategy for your efforts. Return to it when you want to refresh your plans and try something new.

Set Your Goal(s)

Like any other marketing campaign, your influencer strategy and subsequent efforts need to be executed with goals in mind, both granular and high-level. For example, a high-level company goal may be to increase sales in Q4 and a granular level goal may be to boost traffic to your top five blog posts; both of these are achievable with influencer marketing.

Below are a few common marketing goals; consider which ones apply to your future strategy and add those specific to your organization as well.

• Improve SEO
• Drive Sales
• Increase Traffic
• Establish Authority/Branding
• Gain Impressions/Reach
• Grow Followers
• [Insert your goal here]

If you have multiple goals, build a variety of campaigns into your strategy to achieve each one. Perhaps you’ll focus on social media influencers to drive brand impressions and blogger influencers to drive traffic and sales—more about this next.

You may also need to set a budget at this point. Most influencers will work with you for a price; knowing how much you’re willing to pay, and for what will help you determine which influencers you can or can’t afford to work with.

Choose the Influencer Platforms

There are two main overarching platforms that you’ll use to run your influencer campaign, and each one helps you achieve different goals in different ways.

Standard influencer tactics for each platform are as follows:

• Blogs: Free guest posts, mentions, product or service reviews, and paid blog posts.
• Social: Mentions, RTs/Regrams/Facebook shares, social media takeovers, and creative posts about your product or service.

Each one of these will help you achieve different results, which means you need to turn back to your goals to determine which, if not both, will be your focus.

• Blogs can drive: SEO, traffic, sales, and authority/brand.
• Social Media can drive: Sales, traffic, authority/brand, impressions/reach and followers.

As you can see, a mix of the two may be best, allowing you to maximize your reach and the likelihood that you’ll meet your goals. Determine which platforms and influencer tactics (ie., guest posting on blogs versus influencer shares on Instagram) will be best for your goals during this part of your strategic planning.

Set and Check Metrics

Before emailing anyone, it’s important to review your metrics. Again, the metrics you choose will depend upon your goals. If your goal is to drive traffic, you’ll want a website that has a high click-through rate (CTR). If your goal is to grow your Instagram following, you should connect with influencers who have high engagement rates on that platform.

Ask potential influencers a series of questions about their metrics before you decide to pay them for their services. Use the cheat sheet below for a simple breakdown of possible metrics:

• Click Through Rates: If they have a blog, ask them about their website’s click-through rate (CTR) and reach for each social media channel. If they’re legitimate, they’ll be tracking their website traffic with Google Analytics and social following and reach with a tool like Rival IQ. , If they want to charge for their influence, they should be able to provide these metrics readily.
• Site Value Scores: Most organizations use trust flow (TF) and domain authority (DA) as metrics for determining how valuable a website is. These site value scores are based on extensive algorithms that look at a variety of factors, from outbound link profile to traffic. I focus only on sites that are 40 DA or higher and 20 TF or greater. Learn more about trust flow and domain authority to determine what your score minimums will be.
• Social Metrics: This one may be obvious for many marketers, but don’t forget to set minimums for followers and stick to it. For example, you won’t work with anyone who has less than 50,000 followers.
• Engagement: If your focus is on social media, you’ll need to check engagement metrics for potential influencers. Use a tool like Rival IQ to track engagement rate, percent change in followers, and more.

Outside of metrics, it’s important to do a qualitative “sniff test.” Your sniff test is a quick check-in with your instincts.

Ask yourself

• How legitimate does this website or social profile seem?
• Does it seem like most of their followers are bots?
• How often do they publish?
• How consistent are they?

Create a Process for Research and Outreach

Research and outreach are where the tedious work comes into play: researching websites, digging through influencers’ metrics and pitching to them. To make it easier, turn to tools and processes.

Research: One way to research influencers is through good ol’ manual research. For my outreach, I search various terms in Google and then begin sifting through the results. However, you can also use tools like Authority Spy, BuzzSumo, FollowerWonk and Cision to research influencers based on keywords and industries.

Outreach: Clearbit makes it easy find valid email addresses for most websites and blogs you’ll find. Most personal blogs list the owner’s email address, which you can grab directly from their site instead of using tools. The Gmail add-on is free to use, and likely all you’ll need to get started.

Other tools that combine all this with one influencer research and outreach platform include Group High, Upfluence, and Traackr. Ask for free trials and web demos for any platform before buying to be sure it can do what you need it to do.

Set up processes for both your research and outreach. With this type of work, consistency is key to seeing results. For example, “the team will spend 2 hours every Tuesday and Thursday doing research and outreach for the first two weeks of the month. They’ll write/create assets/etc. every Tuesday and Thursday for the second half of the month.”

Track all your research and outreach in a Google Doc, where various stakeholders can track and monitor progress. Below is a screenshot of how my outreach docs are organized, to help you start organizing yours.

Test and Track

Finally, test and track everything you do, based on the original goals your and your team set. One way to track your influencers on social media is by creating an influencer landscape in Rival IQ. With your list of influencers in hand, pull their social data (from all their social media channels) into Rival IQ with their social handle. Rival IQ allows you to track the activity of all your influencers, analyze the social data on those posts (like the reach, engagement rate, followers, etc.) and spot which types of content seem to be working best so you can adjust and optimize your strategy. You can create you influencer landscape here.

Another way is to create a new tab in your tracking doc for monthly data updates. For example, you may want to track sales, click-through rate and total traffic driven or total shares, new followers, and click-through rate; etc. If you do not see increases month-over-month, assess why and make adjustments as necessary. Do new outreach, drop influencers that aren’t delivering, or try new influencer tactics.

Start Finding Influencers

With your strategy in place, it’s time to get to work. Use this checklist to set up a strong foundation for your campaigns. You’ll likely build out your tracking sheets, find more tools, and uncover trade secrets along the way, allowing you to maximize your efforts and optimize over time.

The post The Ultimate Influencer Strategy Checklist appeared first on Rival IQ.

It’s safe to say if you’re not advertising on social, it’s time to start thinking about paid social and a strategy to take your piece of the pie.

While starting your first social ad campaign may seem like a large and daunting venture, especially to small businesses with budgets to match, the process of setting up a paid social strategy is similar to setting up any other marketing plan. With the right foundation in place—goals, metrics, and tracking—and a little knowledge about how to choose the best platform, you’ll be well on your way to reaching a wider audience.

Set Your Goals

As with any piece of your marketing strategy, goals are critical. Without them, it will be nearly impossible to track success—because you don’t know what “success” looks like to you. Start by looking at your overall business goals. Are you trying to drive sales for a new product? Do you want to drive sign ups for a free tool? Are you trying to promote a gated piece of content that will help you drive potential leads?

Of your top three goals, choose just one to focus on with your first advertising campaign. Focusing on one goal will allow for more effective testing, which you’ll read about in a little bit.

Once you have your high-level plan set, it’s time to determine metrics and quantifiable goals. For example:

Quantifiable Goal:

• We want to drive 100 leads per ad, with a 5% conversion rate from lead to paying customer.
• We want to drive 10,000 visitors to our gated ebook landing page, which should lead to 5,000 downloads.

Choose Your Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter all offer paid social ad options and choosing which platform you want to go with is an important place to start. Most marketing professionals recommend starting with Facebook, where 79 percent of all U.S. social media users are active, according to Pew Research Center. That’s compared with Instagram at 32 percent, Pinterest at 31 percent, LinkedIn 29 percent, and Twitter 24 percent.

Not to mention, Facebook consistently outperforms all social platforms in advertising ROI, as you can see below, according to the 2016 eMarketer report graphic:

Not to mention, Facebook offers a large library of resources, with guides for creating ads, ad delivery, and performance and ad management tools. Because Facebook owns Instagram, you can also create Instagram ads within Facebook’s Power Editor tool—allowing you to manage multiple platform ads in one space, if you choose.

With all that said, it’s important to consider your audience and the audience of the social platform, not just the revenue metrics. For example:

Facebook

• 83% of women have a Facebook Account
• 75% of men have a Facebook Account
• Gen X and Millennials (ages 18 to 49) spend 7 hours per week on the platform

Instagram

• 38% of women have an Instagram Account
• 26% of men have an Instagram Account
• 90% of users are under the age of 35

Twitter

• 15% of  women have a Twitter Account
• 22% of men have a Twitter Account
• Majority of users are ages 18 to 29

Pinterest

• 45% of women have a Pinterest Account
• 17% of men have a Pinterest Account
• Even distribution between ages 18 to 64

(Data reported by Social Media Today, 2017)

In addition to age and gender, consider style and format. Retailers tend to do well with the visual aspect of Pinterest and companies with strong brand imagery fit in well on Instagram.

Pro tip: If you’re not sure which platform to choose, start with the one where you already see the most organic engagement.

Test, Test, and Track

Once you’ve run your first ad, it’s time to test and optimize for better results. The key with testing is to change only one element of your ad or the landing page (yes you should be testing the landing pages your ads are leading to as well) at a time. That way, you can be sure that any increase or decrease in success is likely due to that change. For example, if you change both the header text and the image of your Facebook ad, and your clicks skyrocket, you won’t know which one of those changes caused your results.

Tracking Changes

To keep track of your changes and the increases and decreases, set up a simple spreadsheet—work in Google Sheets if you can, so the document can be viewed and edited by all stakeholders. Basic data to include your tracking sheet should include the date, change made, testing duration (one week versus one month, etc.) and results.

Over time, you’ll develop a blueprint for what works and what doesn’t through patterns in the results. For example, you may start to notice that ads with images of people are more effective at driving clicks than abstract imagery.

Don’t forget to track the success of your campaigns themselves as well. This tracking will be based on the goals set when you started the process. For example, if you want to drive leads to a free sign up page, you’ll be tracking how many clicks come through from your ads in addition to the cost of those clicks and the percentage of those clicks that convert.

When starting, you can use a resource like this Facebook Ad Benchmarking report from WordStream as a way to determine if your first few ads are successful compared to industry standards. After 2 to 3 months of testing, you’ll have your own benchmarks to measure against.

Now it’s time to get started. Begin with your goals and choose the platform that makes the most sense for your business. Set up all your tracking docs and start noting monthly ad and testing results; soon patterns will emerge, allowing you to be most effective with every new ad you set up.

The post 3 Fundamental Elements of a Successful Paid Social Strategy appeared first on Rival IQ.

It’s nearly impossible to keep up with new marketing trends these days—much less have the resources and time to build them into your marketing plan and execute. This year, choose just a few new things to try, even if they aren’t new in the industry (hello, guest posting). A refresher may be just what your plan needs to boost engagement, impressions and overall marketing success.

Video Marketing Tests

Video marketing is one of the fastest growing areas of the industry, with 65 percent of marketers planning to increase their mobile ad budgets to account for video (Hubspot). This year is a great time to test your video marketing chops and see what excites your specific audience.

Despite being a newly popular frontier in marketing, there are already many resources available to guide your efforts, see a few below:

· 7 Tips for Launching a Video Marketing Strategy
· 3 Steps to Creating a Video Marketing Campaign
· 10 Practical Tools to Help You Start Your Video Marketing Campaigns
· What to Know About Instagram Live Video

A Guest Posting Program

Guest posting gets a bad rep thanks to “spammy” outreach and poor link building practices. However, I’ve now successfully run three guest posting programs and, as I explain in this article for Bitly, it’s actually one of the best ways to get high-quality content for free. If you do it right, you’ll get free blog posts, from experts in the field, on a regular basis.

Not to mention, it’s an excellent way to get high-quality links back to your website if you choose to write a blog post for them as well. However, guest posting is only valuable when you follow a few basic, but important, rules:

• All websites that guest bloggers want to link to must be high quality. Use traffic, domain authority and trust flow, social presence, the frequency of posting and more to measure. If your company uses different metrics, consider checking for those as well.
• Authors must be experts in some way, whether they’ve written on the topic multiple times for other high-quality sites or are professionals in that field.

Create guidelines to ensure the work that’s coming to you will need as minimal editing as possible. You’ll slowly build a pool of authors who are good writers, passionate about the industry, and can contribute more regularly.

Regular Non-Sales Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the best methods for reaching customers. In fact, a shocking 80 percent of marketers said email was their primary channel for lead generation, according to Mailigen.

To keep customers interested, it’s important to send a mix of emails—not just sales-based. One too many sales emails will cause subscribers to lose interest; soon enough, they’ll see an email from you and delete it right away because they know it’s going to be another sales pitch.

Here are a few new types of emails to send:

• Content-based: Send a weekly blog roundup of your posts for the week, or write an article in the email with a link to finish reading on your website or blog.
• Video: Most email platforms don’t allow you to embed videos directly into your emails (due to spam security reasons), but there are ways to get around it. Take a screenshot of your video or create a .gif and link the screenshot to your video or to the webpage version of your email (If you have selected to have one). Try this with your audience and check the metrics to see if they liked it or not.
• Discount or coupon announcement: Email is a great distribution channel for sharing coupons and discounts with customers (see below). Make it exclusive and add a timeframe to boost urgency and effectiveness.
• Freebies: Everyone likes a freebie. For example, a free tax resource from a CPA provides value outside the paid interactions between business and customer.

A Coupon Distribution Plan

Coupons, or online discounts, are an excellent way to drive new and recurring customers. In fact, coupons have the potential to increase monthly revenue by up to 40 percent, according to a November 2016 survey by CouponBox. Surveyed retailers reported earning $29,435 in monthly coupon sales.

However, if you don’t distribute your coupons and announcements about discounts well enough, they won’t be effective. What good is a BOGO deal if no one knows about it? While adding a banner to the top of your website is smart, there’s more you can do to drive coupon-based sales. Here are a few ideas:

• Email the coupon to the segment of your audience that you think would be most interested, based on your research and knowledge of the customer. Look at past purchases, demographic data and more to determine who will be in this segment.
• Share a “new customer only” deal on your Facebook page and boost the post to be seen by more people.
• Create content with your coupon or deal featured prominently. If a particular product is on sale, for example, write a fun or interesting piece about the product, and announce the sale at the top and bottom of the article. Remove the discount or coupon when the sale is over and keep the article as a stand-alone piece of content.

Drip Email Campaigns

Companies like Hubspot make it easier than ever to set up drip email campaigns. These allow you to stay in touch with every potential and current customer, whether they’ve just signed up to receive announcement emails or purchased a product.

The process is simple: You create a variety of tracks for each type of potential or current client and set up a timed email flow, which automatically delivers the email you’ve created and specified based on the parameters you’ve selected. For example, a free trial campaign may look like this:

• 1st Email: When they sign up for free trial—“Get ready to be blown away…”
• 2nd Email: Five days into the trial—“How do you like it so far? Did you know you can use this feature…?”
• 3rd Email: 20 days into the trial—“Don’t forget, your trial is up in just ten short days…”
• 4th Email: One day before the trial period ends—“We don’t want you to go, for just $20/month you can have…”

Whether you’re interested in video marketing or plan to expand your email marketing portfolio, 2017 is the year to do it. Every year it gets increasingly harder to stand out among a crowded group of competitors, but being forward-thinking with marketing is one of the best ways to set yourself apart from the rest.

The post 5 Details to Add to Your 2017 Marketing Plan appeared first on Rival IQ.

There are a few specific people and departments to speak with when developing your content plan for the New Year, including sales, the CEO and the CFO. With their insights, you’ll be better prepared to attract readers, speak to potential customers, and drive sales.

Talk to Sales

Goal: Answer the right questions

Content needs to be valuable to be effective. One way to increase your value is to ensure you’re answering the questions your potential customers have: “Today, the role of content is to provide practical solutions to problems your customers face. Your customers need to know that you have their best interest at heart,” says Adarsh Thampy of Conversion Champ.

Your sales team is a treasure trove of valuable information about frequent customer questions, concerns, needs and more. Talking with them will give you important insight for the foundation of your content plan.

To get this information you can send a quarterly email or sit down with the team to have an in-person discussion.

Key Questions:

• What questions do you get most often?
• Are there specific concerns people have with your products/services?
• What do people say they like most about our company? Brand? Product?
• Has anyone mentioned a competitor and why they did or didn’t like them?
• Has anyone asked about a specific piece of content, like a white paper or ebook?

With this information, you can determine what types of content you should create, topics to focus on and product or service features to highlight.

Talk to the Social Media Team

Goal: Identify content performance insights

Social media promotion is a significant part of content success, and insights from the social media team will help you develop a content strategy that followers will love.
The social media team can also help you determine which types of content to create based on your top social platforms—because not all platforms are created equal:

“Gone are the days where one carefully crafted message will reach the masses. With the increasing number of social platforms available to businesses, content must be platform specific, and you must build a presence on each channel,” says Holly Rollins, President of 10X Digital and CMI Content Maven award winner.

For example, if Facebook generates the most leads, you want to create engaging branded content catered toward Facebook—your social team will know exactly what that content should look like.

Key Questions:

• What content does best on what platforms?
• What content do our followers like most? What do they like the least?
• Which content drives the most clicks vs. shares vs. likes?

Talk to the CEO

Goal: Learn high-level objectives

While the CEO likely has a hand in every area of the business already, including content, it’s smart to sit down one-on-one to gain more insights into the company’s high-level objectives. For example, one might be to increase sales from marketing by 20 percent or while another is to improve brand authority.

With these goals in mind, you can create a content plan that makes them a reality. Perhaps the best way to develop brand authority is through finding influencer authors to guest post for your blog. Maybe to increase sales, you plan on creating a white paper that potential customers can download.

Key Questions:

• What would you like to happen with content this year?
• What objectives are the rest of the company focused on right now?
• What have you seen competitors doing that we could do too?

Talk to the Tech/Dev Team

Goal: Understand the limitations of your resources

The tech team is of utmost importance for content—they likely manage and maintain you CMS backend, whether it’s a blog or proprietary platform. As such, they know what can and can’t be done, making this an excellent opportunity to vet all your top ideas that may require development of some sort.

For example, if you plan to create a white paper, you’ll need a new page that can host the download form. That may be something this team handles.

Key Questions:

• What content related updates are being made to the site this year?
• Can you help me do X, Y, and Z? If so, what do you need from me?

You may want to create a list of questions about metadata, content functionality and more to determine what development needs you’ll have in the coming year before the meeting.

Content is a company-wide asset, and as such, it should be created with multiple goals, departments and team members in mind. Make time to get all your questions answered before creating your rock-star content plan.

The post How to Involve the Whole Company in Content Planning appeared first on Rival IQ.