5 Lessons I Learned about Influencer Marketing in 2022

Influencer marketing was the big, shiny thing to do in 2022, and it’s not going away in 2023. Think of it as word-of-mouth marketing on an espresso shot or five! There are several ways you can leverage influencer marketing from driving e-commerce sales with new customer discounts to focusing on regional influencers to drive sales at retail to building brand awareness and driving lead generation. If you’re just getting started with influencer marketing, here are five lessons I learned throughout the year that I want to share with you! (If you have specific questions about getting started with influencer marketing, feel free to reach out to me at the email below.)

Okay, here we go!

#1) Be specific with your asks.

Trust me, you’re not being “agreeable” and a “good partner” when you ask the influencers decide on what trending audio and video they want to use for your brand. You are the brand gatekeeper and giving them direction starts the brainstorming ideas in the right direction! Scroll through their social media pages to see what they post about and how your brand can fit their lifestyle organically. Offer them 2 or 3 possible ideas to choose from or to build off of. By doing this, you make everyone’s lives easier and reduce the frustrating back & forth that sometimes comes with content creation.

#2) Define your KPIs (key performance indicators) for each campaign.

What are your goals for working with influencers? Is it to build brand awareness? Are you trying to drive sales on your website? Are you trying to get new customers to join your mailing list? Whatever it is, make sure you communicate that with the influencer (and any higher-up’s at your organization, trust me).

For us, our ultimate goal is always to drive consumers to brick & mortar stores to purchase Flybird from our retail partners, so the success of each campaigns was always hard to directly measure. We ask our influencers to call out two or three locations that carry Flybird when the post goes live (it’s also a legal requirement for bev alc to do so and not show any favoritism to one retailer), and we monitor the conversation, impressions, and sales in that region to determine if the campaign is successful.

#3) Work two months ahead of schedule.

Influencers work on their own timelines, and your fire is not their fire #sorrynotsorry. We have found that contacting influencers two months prior to their posts going live is the sweet spot! This give influencers enough time to film, us to review, and edits to be made without the stress of a looming deadline.

When deciding which influencers and how many influencers to use, ask yourself the following questions:

• What does our budget look like for the month? What is the maximum amount we are wanting to spend for one influencer? Do we want to have any leftover money for ad rights (see #5 for more info).

• What state(s) do we want to target that month and why? Ex: New placements in seasonal resets, floor features, or new products launching.

• What products do we want the influencer to feature? Be specific and send them ONLY the products you want featured.

• What kind of vibe do you want your influencers to have? Are they Target shoppers? Are you targeting mom’s? Gen Z? Millennials? Men? Women? Etc.

Once you create this roadmap, start the reach out process! We recommend reaching out to more influencers than less, just in case some ghost or say no to you. If you get a yes from all the influencers you reached out to, that’s amazing! You can decide who you want to work with and even push some out to the following month.

#4) Give yourself a little extra budget for advertising.

When negotiating the contract with influencers, make sure to be specific on how you plan to use their content. We always state in our contacts that we have the right to post their content organically on all of our social media channels for 365 days.

But, what if there’s a video that you absolutely love and want to use as a digital ad? That’s where this extra budget comes in! Make sure to reach out to the influencer for permission to use their content as an ad, and offer some extra compensation to do so. You can also include a set price in the contract as one of the payment terms if the video is used for an ad.

Going forward, I recommend working with the influencer to run ads from their profile for more exposure and a more authentic word-of-mouth ad. That’s what we’ll be looking into as part of our 2023 Influencer Marketing Strategy.

#5) Find an agency partner or hire a social media manager that actively works with influencers.

As a small department, there’s no way we would have been able to work with 25 influencers this year without the help of our agency partner, Raising the Bar Communications. The work required to build the contracts, project briefs, and communicate daily with our influencer partners is more work than it sounds, and you do need someone dedicated to influencer marketing if you want this investment to be successful.

Influencer marketing is more than just throwing a dart on a wall - there’s a strategy and goal behind every decision and partnership! Need help getting started? Email me to see how we can work together!