There was a time when big fashion brands relied on opening flagship stores or having highly visible concessions in department stores. But as the retail scene has changed so has the way that successful brands communicate with their customers.
Today a sizeable proportion of any marketing budget has to be directed towards influencers who now have a disproportionate amount of power to make a brand appear relevant and desirable.
But it’s not enough just to link up with an influencer. There’s a great deal more to using them to get the right message across to the right audience.
Know who you’re talking to
The first step is to have an accurate picture of who exactly you’re trying to speak to with your influencer campaign.
It should be that there’s some pretty well-defined parameters already for typical customers. But if it’s a new range or product line then some deeper digging might be needed. Think about demographics, their likely interests as well as their preferred social media platforms. That way you’ll be building on firm foundations as you develop the campaign.
A clear example of knowing who you are branding an item of clothing to is to know the culture or genre you could say of the clothing item. For instance if you have more streetwear inspired clothing like a stacked jeans range, you will want to brand that marketing to the audience that associates most with streetwear like rap music fans, people that are interested in surfing.
Identify the right influencers
Once you know who you want to reach, then it’s time to start searching for the right influencer, or influencers. They’ll need to align well with your own brand values. For example, if you’re all about sustainability then choose an individual who is too. And don’t always look at influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers. Micro-influencers whose followers number just tens of thousands can be perfect for tightly targeted campaigns.
Define your goals
All successful campaigns also start with a strictly defined set of goals. Share these with your chosen influencer. These don’t always need to be judged in terms of sales. Influencers can be equally effective in increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to a website or strengthening customer loyalty. It’s in the last of these that influencers can be particularly effective. As a trusted online presence for their followers, their opinions and recommendations carry a great deal of weight.
Establish guidelines with your influencer
Obviously, one of the strengths of influencers is that they appear to give genuinely neutral and impartial advice, based purely on their own opinions. That said, there will always be some key points that you need to get across. So, it’s essential to communicate these at the outset of the relationship. It’s also important to agree in advance both the schedule of communication and the pieces of content required. This should probably be a combination of posts and videos with the appropriate messaging in each.
Deploy user-generated content
If possible, influencers should also be briefed to start initiating user-generated content. If influencers create an atmosphere of authenticity, then this takes things further still. Consumers then feel even more invested in the brand, even part of it themselves.
Check the numbers
Given that this is likely to lead to more influencer-driven campaigns in future, there are valuable lessons to be learned from this one. There are plenty of metrics to study which can yield a great deal of invaluable data. The first of these are the engagement rates. These can be judged by monitoring the numbers of likes and shares that have been recorded.
These should also be measured against reach and impressions, namely the number of people who saw the content.
Brand sentiment will also, hopefully, have seen an upturn thanks to the campaign. You can either commission bespoke research to gauge this, alternatively, analyse comments that are made about the content regarding the brand.
Naturally, sales data is also going to be a key consideration. You can help to track this more accurately by giving the influencer a discount code to offer their followers or using affiliate links for the same purpose.
So, there you have them, six ways to run a successful influencer campaign – do it right and you’ll never look back.
