It’s becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to capture the consumer's attention in today’s busy world. Consumers are surrounded with constant distractions everywhere they turn. This is one of the main reasons as to why influencer marketing programs have emerged as a powerful tool for brands seeking to connect with their audience authentically. This is evidenced by the fact that the influencer industry is now valued at over $21billion, which represents close to 30% growth YoY.   

However, establishing and scaling an influencer program requires more than just identifying influencers to showcase your brand—it demands a strategic approach and careful planning. At Lumanu, we recognize the importance of a well-executed influencer program and are committed to helping brands navigate this evolving landscape. 

In this article, we'll explore the essential steps and strategies needed to build and scale your influencer program successfully.

Form Your Team and Define Your Influencer Marketing Strategy

Initiating a robust influencer program begins with assembling a dedicated team. Define clear roles, with a program manager overseeing execution and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs). Whether focusing on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, or other platforms, a strategic approach is vital for scalability.

Establishing an owner for your influencer program is essential to have as your program scales because they will be responsible for tying all of the moving pieces together measuring success of partnerships. By having a dedicated team in place, you can streamline communication, enhance accountability, and drive program success. Influencer campaigns can improve your overall social media marketing 

Set Clear Goals and Budget

Before building out the actual influencer program, it's crucial to define clear goals and objectives for your influencer program. Your program manager should be responsible for setting the goals and aligning the team around these goals. The most common metrics to build your goals around  when it comes to influencer marketing programs include: 

• Traffic driven to your website through social media

• Measurable direct sales

• Brand awareness or earned media value (EMV) 

Goals should be measurable and have an impact on business results - things like engagement rate on posts and number of views should probably not be your focus even though those are the initial data points you will likely see. Establishing what each of these “goal-areas” looks like prior to the campaign launching is critical. Because once the baseline is established, you will be able to measure the impact that your influencer program has on impacting these areas.

Going alongside goal-setting, you must also determine and align on the budget for the program and the specific channels that you want to leverage for your program. Influencer programs can become expensive as you scale, both in terms of the number of influencers that you work with and in terms of the actual channels that you choose to leverage.  Establishing and keeping track of the budget will be yet another task for the influencer program manager to monitor. 

Identify Your Target Audience and Align with Influencers

Success in influencer marketing hinges on a deep understanding of your target audience. Selecting the right influencers, from micro-influencers to major social media influencers, is crucial. Their content creation should resonate with your audience, leveraging hashtags, Instagram stories, Reels, and other content formats to engage potential customers effectively.

Ensuring the content that gets published via your influencer marketing campaigns, both on your owned channels and the ones associated with your brand (i.e. that an influencer is promoting to their audience) resonates and represents your brand in the way you want it to is an absolute must. This is why selecting Tiktok and Instagram influencers whose values, content, and audience resonate with your brand is so vital to the success of your influencer program. Doing this the correct way will translate into a more highly engaged audience, which therefore puts you in a better position to hit the program goals that you set out to achieve! 

Given the above, it’s important to conduct thorough research to identify the demographics, interests, and preferences of your audience and make sure it aligns with the audience of potential influencers. You need to identify the best influencers to resonate with your target audience in order to drive results. This will be trial and error and once you find influencers that perform you can use tiktok and Instagram tools to find other creators that are similar to your best influencers while ensuring they align with your brand values. Follower count is important but is far from the only factor when finding relevant influencers.

In order to gain that alignment internally, it is suggested to have the influencer program manager share examples of the types of social influencers and type of content that fit the look and feel that the team is going for. This will help gather the team's alignment as to what the influencers content will look and feel like and will undoubtedly save time when it comes to actually selecting the influencers that you choose to work with. 

Leveraging Tools for Program Management and Scalability

As your influencer program grows, leveraging specialized tools becomes necessary for your team to efficiently manage and scale your influencer program. As such, it’s important to invest in tools that reduce your team's time, while driving value to the overall influencer program. Two types of tools that you will likely need to evaluate and sign-up for include:

• An influencer marketing platform to help with discovery and communication - it takes a significant amount of time, energy and communication to find an influencer for your brand. And once you find the influencer, you need to communicate and approve any content that they send you. Platforms like GRIN help you streamline those efforts in a centralized fashion. You can build out templates for influencer outreach but make sure to personalize these. 

• A procurement / payment solution: getting the necessary paperwork set-up for an influencer so they can get paid and then subsequently paying them will be a headache as you scale your program. So you must find a solution that makes it easy for you to onboard, authenticate and pay influencers quickly. Tools like Lumanu help do just that. And to make it even simpler, when it comes to tax season, Lumanu handles issuing all of your creators' end of the year tax paperwork, saving your team yet another headache!

Select tools early on that help you build and scale your influencer program because tasks like discovery and paying influencers can easily take up all of your time, and get in the way of you achieving your program goals. 

As we have outlined above, building and scaling a successful influencer marketing program requires careful planning, clear objectives, and the right tools for success. By assembling a dedicated team, defining goals, understanding your audience, and leveraging influencer-specific tools, brands can unlock the full potential of influencer marketing. 

At Lumanu, we're committed to providing brands with the tools and insights they need to thrive in the influencer economy. Ready to elevate your influencer program to new heights? Chat with our team to understand how Let Lumanu can be a partner to your success.

The Importance of Measurement in Influencer Marketing

If you don’t track the impact of your program it will be impossible to measure the overall success of it. These are a few methods in which you can measure your influencer marketing program:

Direct Path to Purchase

Measuring direct sales and the path to purchase is critical in assessing the effectiveness of influencer campaigns. This includes tracking conversions and understanding how content creators influence purchasing decisions, aiding in optimizing pricing strategies and content.

Indirect Sales and Retargeting Impact

Influencer campaigns also contribute to indirect sales, driving website traffic and enlarging retargeting audiences. The subsequent increase in sales from these efforts can often be attributed to the initial influencer engagement, demonstrating the campaign's broader impact.

Incorporating Key Terms and Strategies

Your strategy should also embrace terms and concepts like gifting, free products, giveaways, influencer collaborations, ecommerce, Amazon, and Snapchat to diversify and enrich your program. Engaging bloggers, utilizing marketing tools, targeting niche audiences, and exploring new product promotions are ways to expand your reach and resonate with new audiences.

Affiliate Marketing as part of Your Influencer Program

Affiliate marketing presents a compelling dimension to influencer programs, offering a performance-based approach that can significantly amplify results. By including affiliate marketing, brands can cultivate deeper partnerships with influencers, driving not only awareness but also tangible conversions. Affiliate programs can significantly increase return on investment.

Affiliate marketing transforms influencers from mere content creators into active sales partners. This strategy aligns the incentives of influencers with the brand's sales objectives, as influencers can make money from commissions based on the sales or leads they generate. This model fosters a more accountable and results-oriented relationship between brands and influencers.

Selecting the Right Influencers for Affiliate Programs

Not all influencers are suited for affiliate programs. The "right influencers" for your affiliate program are those whose audience aligns with your target market and who can authentically endorse your products. Micro-influencers, known for their higher engagement rates and targeted niche audiences, can be particularly effective in affiliate marketing, often driving more direct and impactful conversions than their larger counterparts. Not all influencers will be open to an affiliate relationship and it’s important to compensate creators upfront for their time and effort in content creation with affiliate revenue as upside.

Establishing Clear Deliverables and Incentives

In any affiliate program, clarity is key. Influencers should understand the specifics of the affiliate program, including how commissions are structured, payment schedules, and any performance benchmarks. Clear deliverables should be established, ensuring influencers know what is expected in terms of content creation, from blog posts to Instagram stories and reels.

Providing incentives, such as bonuses for hitting certain sales targets or offering free products for personal use or giveaways, can motivate influencers to go above and beyond in their promotional efforts.

Affiliate Marketing and Ecommerce Synergy

In the context of ecommerce, affiliate marketing can be a game-changer. By linking influencers directly to product pages through affiliate links, brands can track the direct impact of influencer content on sales. This not only enhances the ability to measure ROI but also provides influencers with a tangible connection to their impact on the brand's success.

Continuous Optimization

Like all aspects of influencer marketing, an affiliate program should not be static. Continuously analyze performance data to identify successful strategies and areas for improvement. Engage with influencers to gain insights into what resonates with their audience and adjust your approach accordingly. By treating your affiliate program as a dynamic component of your influencer marketing strategy, you can ensure it evolves in line with changing trends and audience preferences.

By thoughtfully integrating affiliate marketing into your influencer program, you can transform influencer relationships into a powerful engine for growth, driving not only brand awareness but also measurable sales results.

As we have outlined above, building and scaling an influencer program requires careful planning, clear objectives, and the right tools for success. By assembling a dedicated team, defining goals, understanding your audience, and leveraging influencer-specific tools, brands can unlock the full potential of influencer marketing. 

At Lumanu, we're committed to providing brands with the tools and insights they need to thrive in the influencer economy. Ready to elevate your influencer program to new heights? Chat with our team to understand how Lumanu can be a partner to your success.