The Ultimate Guide to

Influencer Marketing

+
 Table of Contents
Chapter One: What is Influencer Marketing?

Chapter Two: Why is Influencer Marketing Important?

Chapter Three: What is an Affiliate Program?

Chapter Four: Who Are Influencers + How Do You Find Them?

------Examples of Successful Influencer Marketing Campaigns at the Macro,

------Micro, and Nano Influencer Levels

Chapter Five: What is an Influencer Marketing Campaign?

Chapter Six: Dos and Don’ts of Working with Influencers

Chapter Seven: Influencer Marketing Challenges

Conclusion

01 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Chapter 1
What is Influencer Marketing
Whether content development happens internally or in collaboration with an
agency, it’s critical to implement a message approval workflow that facilitates
team publishing and ensures consistent, on-brand messaging.

Key Influencer Marketing Terms

Macro Influencer
Well-known online presence with 100,000-1 million followers. A macro influencer’s
reach usually spans a broad audience, like young women or teens. These influencers
are available for higher budget campaigns.

Micro Influencer
A micro influencer typically has between 1,000-100,000 followers. Micro influencers
have more defined and specific audiences and are respected experts in their field.
These individuals are less expensive than macro influencers and have great
engagement rates.

Nano Influencer
Nano influencers are the smallest in terms of following, but have the best engagement,
typically within a local or super niche community. Nano influencers usually have less
than 1,000 followers and are selective about the products or brands they endorse.

Influencer Marketing Channels Influencer Content Types

• Facebook • Blog posts

• Instagram • Instagram posts/stories

• LinkedIn • Facebook posts

• Snapchat • Sponsored Facebook Live

• Twitter • Twitter posts/videos

• Blogs • Snapchat videos/photos

• YouTube • Emails

• Email • LinkedIn posts/videos

• Newsletter • YouTube videos

• Digital/print ads • Magazine/newspaper articles

• Television • Television appearances/videos

02 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Finding Value for Your Company
Using Influencers
Influencers come in all levels of “celebrity,” often synonymous with audience
size. Macro, micro, and nano influencers provide varying levels of investment
and offer options for all marketing budgets. When considering what type of
campaign you’d like to run for a given project, consider the following factors.

Influencer Marketing Campaign Variables

• Expertise: Does the content you are promoting or product you sell match with the
influencer’s audience?

• Reach: Is this influencer present on the same channels and platforms as your
audience? For example, if your target audience is in their teens, it may not be
useful to reach out to an influencer whose main following is on LinkedIn.

• Demographic/Audience: Does your buyer persona match this influencer’s

following? What does a typical follower of their audience look like?

• “Celebrity”/Notoriety: Is this influencer generally well-liked?

03 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Chapter 2
Why is Influencer Marketing Important?
Influencer marketing is growing at an incredible pace, and for a good reason.
Searches for influencer marketing have grown by 1500% in the past four years.

Image via Google Trends

With Instagram’s user-base and engagement growing exponentially and the

influencer market predicted to more than double its 2017 profit numbers in
2019, the currently $4.6+ billion dollar industry is a lucrative marketing strategy
for businesses of all sizes. 80% of marketers have found that influencer
marketing has been helpful in growing their business.

Influencer Marketing Statistics

• 71% of marketers find that influencer marketing leads are better quality than other
lead generation sources.

• LinkedIn is the most effective social media site for sharing content and garnering
audience engagement

• Over half of the online population follows a celebrity or influencer on social.

• 49% of buyers rely on influencers for purchase decisions

• Marketers spent $570 million on Instagram influencer marketing in 2017

• $5,000-10,000 is the average price per macro influencer (500,000 to 1 million

followers) post.

04 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Chapter 3
What is an affiliate program?
As we discussed earlier, affiliate marketing is a branch of influencer marketing
that is more transactional and allows affiliates to send referrals to a company
over time, making money by sending customers to a company’s website
usually using an affiliate tracking link.

Image via HubSpot

Affiliates can promote a given company or publisher’s product on their own social
media networks, blogs, videos, or in any other content format. Most companies
pay affiliates on a monthly basis and have a dashboard where they can track their
progress, best content sources, and successful clicks, leads, or sales.

Key Affiliate Marketing Terms

• Affiliates: Those who promote a product, service, or brand.

• Product/Company/Brand: The organization that wants to promote their website,

product, or service via an affiliate.

• Network/Affiliate Network: The network or tracking system to manage affiliates,

referrals, and sales.

• Consumers/Buyers: Those purchasing or following the product or brand. The end

goal audience of an affiliate marketing campaign.

• Pay-Per-Click Campaign: Affiliates get paid for every click they generate, whether
or not that click leads to a sale.

05 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 • Pay-Per-Lead Campaign: For these campaigns, affiliates will get paid based on
the number of leads, as defined by the company, they generate. This could mean
people who give their email, fill out the form, or request a demo.

• Pay-Per-Sale Campaign: This is the most common structure, as affiliates are the
most incentivized to deliver interested leads to the company.

What is an Affiliate Marketing Campaign?

An affiliate marketing campaign is a relationship between a company and an affiliate or
brand advocate who makes money by promoting the company or product to their
audience. For example, let’s say you’re a successful beauty blogger who often posts
recommendations for your favorite tools, products, and brands. A company who
creates makeup brushes now wants to get their brushes in front of your audience.
Now, you can try the product and if you like it, you can become an affiliate for the
company. Every time someone buys the brushes using your link, you’ll get paid.

Key things to remember in affiliate marketing:

• Don’t spam your audience with promotional posts for a product, you’ll quickly lose
followers and break your audience’s trust.

• Don’t directly ask your audience to buy the product.

• Only serve as an affiliate for products and companies you respect.

Recommended Affiliate Marketing Tools

• ClickBank

• ShareASale

• Everflow

• LinkTrust

06 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Chapter 4 Who are Influencers and How Do You
Find them?
Influencers are pretty much as their name suggests, influential people.
Specifically, influencers have a highly engaged audience on social media, so
access to them serves as a powerful marketing tool to boost qualified traffic to
your website. Influencers can help guide your audience to making a buying
decision—their advice means a lot to their followers.

Like we outlined in the first chapter, influencers can range from macro
influencers and celebrities to niche, nano influencers with smaller social media
followings. So, when you’re scrolling through Twitter and see someone with
over 1,000 followers, how can you tell who is an “influencer”?

How to Find Influencers in a Specific Field

• Listen: Set up a Twitter feed for a certain hashtag, celebrity, or related topic. You’ll
start to notice the same users’ posts rising to the top tweets repeatedly, and their
engagement is consistent and organic with their followers. Using Sprout’s
Advanced Listening, brands can also surface influencers, their followers and
engagements when seeking influencers within a certain industry.

• Find them in their space: Lots of photography and lifestyle influencers use The
Hub, a platform that connects content creators with companies. You can also use
LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram to directly reach out to influencers who
inspire you and align with your brand. Often a personal first touch from a social
media manager will have more impact than outreach from your brand account.

• See who follows and interacts with macro and celebrity influencers: Smaller
influencers often have much better engagement rates at better prices. This
works particularly well in the retail, foodie, and fitness spaces. Odds are, the
smaller influencer was inspired by a larger one, and may have a slightly different,
untapped audience.

• Use your resources: Tools like Buzzstream and Buzzsumo offer products to find
influencers in fields like tech, communications, retail, and more, as well as
manage influencer campaigns.

• Analyze past performance: Take a look at an individual’s post performance

across social media platforms. Does a certain influencer get 1 million likes on
Facebook posts but is lacking on Instagram? Consider how and where you’d like
to partner with them.

07 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Examples of Successful Influencer
Marketing Campaigns at the Macro, Micro,
and Nano Influencer Levels

Macro Influencer: Ingrid Nilsen, 1.4M Instagram Followers

Image via Ingrid Nilsen on Instagram

Ingrid has partnered with Sephora, CVS Beauty, and other beauty brands like
Simple Skin and maintains a lifestyle Instagram, YouTube channel, Twitter
account, and Facebook page.

Her Instagram posts have garnered over 25K likes each and sponsored
content blends seamlessly in with her non-sponsored posts. Working with
influencers to create content that is authentic to their audience will create a
better follower experience and more successful campaign.

08 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Macro Influencer: Gary Vaynerchuk, 3M LinkedIn Followers

Image via Gary Vaynerchuk on LinkedIn

First known as a wine critic who expanded his family's wine business,
Vaynerchuk is best known for his work in digital marketing and social media,
through New York–based VaynerMedia.

Today, Gary has more than 12M combined followers across social media,
producing content daily on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
Snapchat, Spotify and more. Gary also hosts a global top 100 business podcast,
The GaryVee Audio Experience, which features new episodes every day.

09 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Micro Influencer: Nurse Clara, 57.4K Instagram Followers

Image via Nurse Clara on Instagram

Clara Jones is a Registered Nurse who has a lifestyle blog and Instagram
account. She partners with brands like TX Compression Socks, Figs scrubs,
and other nursing and lifestyle brands to incorporate relevant products for her
followers. Many niche professionals like those in healthcare often share
recommendations and favorite products.

10 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Micro Influencer: Mari Smith, 230K Facebook Followers

Image via Mari Smith on Facebook

Mari Smith started out as a business consultant and her honest posts on
Facebook helped to grow her online presence and make her the “Queen of
Facebook.” Mari maintains a YouTube channel and partners with brands
and fellow marketers across many social media platforms.

11 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Nano Influencer: Boston Fitness Fanatic, 889 Instagram Followers

Image via Boston Fitness Fanatic on Instagram

Jackie Zaccardo is a local Boston fitness influencer and hula hooper with a
growing, engaged audience. She works with brands and products that she
personally uses to offer promotions to her followers, generating business for
companies like I Dream of Hoops, mentioned in her post.

12 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Chapter 5 Chapter Five: What is an Influencer
Marketing Campaign?
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty details of organizing an influencer marketing
campaign. If you’re interested in an affiliate campaign, skip ahead to the next
section. Influencer campaigns include research and strategy, outreach and
influencer relations, goals, contracts, payment, and analysis. Read on to go
through each part of the influencer campaign, step-by-step.

Influencer Marketing Campaign Process

Step One: Research

Determine where your audience lives. Start by analyzing the demographics of

your social audiences as well as those of your competitors. Research common
hashtags and explore the top influencers in your industry. Sprout has a great
social media demographic resource, which is a helpful place to start. You can
also use tools like Sprout’s Advanced Listening to identify key social
conversations and influencers discussing your brand, product or industry.
Search through their followers and find an influencer whose size and rough
budget aligns with your brand and goals.

Step Two: Outreach

Once you’ve identified some candidates, start your outreach. Follow or

connect with people you respect and be honest about what you’re looking for.
If you have influencer contacts, ask for an introduction or a warm handoff.
LinkedIn can be a great resource to find mutual connections to influencers in
your field.

13 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Email Template for Influencer Outreach

Subject line: Sponsored content opp - time to connect?

Body: Hi [Influencer],

I’ve been following your content and love your messaging surrounding
[topic/product.] We recently shared your post and it performed great with our
audience. I’d like to talk to you about a sponsored content campaign for us,
[insert company here.] Do you have a few minutes to chat sometime soon? I’m
available at [email/contact info.]

Direct Message (DM) Template for Influencer Outreach

Message: Hi! I’ve been following your content and love your messaging
surrounding [topic/product.] I’d like to talk to you about a sponsored content
campaign for us, [insert company here.] Time to chat soon? I’m available at
[email/contact info.]

Step Three: Campaign Specifics, Budget, Goals, and Contract

Create a detailed campaign plan. If you’ll be using multiple influencers, use a

common hashtag, like Trello’s recent #ReadySetGoal campaign. By using
influencer support and targeting with Sprout Social, they increased their
following by 71% and generated 33% more mentions.

When considering budget, consider the quality of the leads you’ll generate.
Compare the cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, or cost-per-sale you spend on
comparable, automated channels like social media advertising or sponsored
newsletters. Expect to pay more than a nonspecific audience, as influencers’
followers are curated and less frequently targeted with ads than brand
accounts, therefore more engaged and higher quality.

Work with the influencer or affiliate to identify a timeline, goal or KPI list for the
campaign (or each individual post), and any requirements, legal restraints, or
guidelines. Make sure your goals are SMART—specific, measurable, attainable,
realistic, and time-bound. Here’s a free template for creating SMART goals.

14 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Who is your target audience or buyer persona? Key demographic? Create a
contract detailing both the influencer’s deliverables and the agreed upon fee
and payment timeline/method. This is a good opportunity to provide brand
style guides, font files, brand colors, or any other resources they may need.
Make sure you agree on messaging and give good examples of similar posts
that inspire you and align with your brand.

Image via Ira Wolf Music on Instagram

In this post, Ira Wolf, a musician whose posts have a desert, wanderer,
outdoorsy aesthetic, partnered with an outdoor equipment company, Kelty
Built, to create a natural sponsored post that aligns with both audiences.

Tip: Assign value to various metrics. For example, how much are followers
worth when you invested in an expensive series of blogs? Check out this
handy table of returns and investments which can help you document which
campaigns are worth the budget.

15 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Image via HubSpot

Step Four: Tracking

A major component of any influencer or affiliate marketing campaign is

tracking. Any company can provide a tracking URL to influencers (template
below), or you can choose to use either an influencer/affiliate software or a
CRM (like HubSpot’s free CRM) to track and manage influencers.

UTM Template

Here is a tracking URL with urchin tracking modules (UTMs), which help to
identify the source of traffic for a given piece of content.

http://www.hubspot.com/?utm_source=Influencer&utm_medium=In-
stagram&utm_campaign=HubSpotLife&utm_content=Affiliate%20Aaron

For this example, the following UTM parameters (tags) are used:

• Utm_source: campaign source, ex. “Influencer”

• Utm_medium: the platform like social media, blog, email, ex. “Instagram”

• Utm_campaign: the campaign name, ex. “HubSpotLife”

• Utm_content: an individual piece of content or influencer, ex. “Affiliate Aaron”

To customize this URL for your content, just substitute your URL for
“hubspot.com,” then enter your own parameters after = in the URL. You can use
as many UTM tags as you would like and leave out the ones you don’t need. If
you’re a HubSpot user, use the HubSpot Tracking URL Builder to save time.

16 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 You can also use tools like the Sprout Smart Inbox to monitor certain hashtags
and key terms to track your campaign.

Step Five: Payment

When considering how much you’ll be paying influencers, most will have a
certain price they charge per post or campaign. Affiliate marketing campaigns
are different, those are paid based on tracked clicks, leads, or sales generated
by the affiliate. Influencers typically charge a fee for posting and the results are
proposed and projected, but not guaranteed.

To get a gauge on how much you should be paying influencers at each level,
first determine what type of influencer they are. Micro influencers typically
charge $80-500 per post and macro or celebrity influencers charge between
$3,000-500,000+ per post. Nano influencers are often looking for
partnerships to help grow their brand and name. Many are happy to receive
free products in exchange for a sponsored post.

Step Six: Analytics

One of the most important parts of an influencer marketing campaign is

analyzing the results. As we discussed before, influencer marketing is not an
exact science when it comes to predicting outcomes. After a campaign or a post
has been completed (or along the way), you’ll need to look out for these metrics.

• Engagement: this includes likes, shares, comments, reposts, and any other
interaction with the post

• Impressions: numbers of times a piece of content has been viewed. Can be

considered as the “actual views” metric.

• Reach: number of followers an influencer has on either on or all social media

platforms combined. It is an indicator of audience size, which is helpful for
marketers to forecast potential impressions.

• Results/Resonance: how many people took action based on the post

When tracking campaign or post performance, you can utilize Sprout's

Analytics Suite to easily gather key data insights in presentation-ready reports.
Along with reliable data, analysis is key to choosing which influencers have

17 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 good ROI for your company, which ones need more coaching on future
content, and which may not be a good fit for your audience.

Influencer Marketing Campaign Checklist & Staying Organized

with Influencer Marketing

When working with influencers, make sure to keep detailed records on your
end of campaigns, influencers, goals, and progress. By quickly identifying your
most successful influencers, topics, posts, and pairings, you’ll be able to
optimize and streamline your influencer marketing efforts. Work with influencers
and treat each relationship like a partnership, creating goals and content that
work for both of your audiences. Be honest and create an open discussion if
you’ll be continuing to work with influencers or affiliates in the future.

Influencer Marketing Campaign Checklist

• Campaign brief

• Terms & conditions of contract

• Creative Release Agreement

• Non Disclosure Agreement

• Brand/content guidelines

• UTM templates and tracking

Influencer Marketing Organization/Continued Relationship

Management Checklist

• CRM for tracking influencers/campaigns, HubSpot offers a free CRM option

• Social media management tool, Sprout Social allows you to monitor hashtags or
keywords and measure the impact of influencer campaigns

• Payments/Budget

• Post performance and data

• ROI

• Demographics and audience

• Engagement

18 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Recommended Influencer Marketing Tools

• Sprout Social

• HubSpot CRM

• BuzzStream

• Buzzsumo

19 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Chapter 6 Dos and Don’ts of Working
with Influencers
Dos

• Do pay influencers on time and within the agreed upon payment period terms.
Creating and maintaining a good relationship with any brand advocate, micro,
macro, or nano, is crucial for the success of the campaign.

• Do give helpful feedback and provide as much data as possible to the influencer.

• Do use mutually beneficial goals that are agreed upon before the campaign
starts.

• Do use software to your advantage. Tools like Sprout Social’s Audience

Targeting can publish influencer posts to specific portions of your audience if you
want to target a certain product audience or demographic.

• Do send thoughtful gifts and thank you notes following successful campaigns or
as an intro.

• Do interact with them frequently and organically on social media.

Don’ts

• Don’t try to force your product or brand on an influencer whose audience doesn’t
align with yours. This will only hurt both parties and be a waste of money.

• Don’t go rogue and run a campaign without a proper tracking setup. It’ll be a
challenge to try to associate sales with the influencer’s work after the fact.

20 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Chapter 7 Influencer Marketing Challenges
(+ How to Solve Them)
Influencer and affiliate marketing can be extremely valuable and cost-effective
ways to grow your audience and find new brand loyalists. Unfortunately, as
influencer marketing is slated to become a 6.5 billion dollar industry by the
end of this year, it also attracts fraudulent individuals trying to get a piece of
the pie. 78% of marketers also report their biggest challenge with influencer
marketing is tracking return on investment (ROI). Here are some common
influencer marketing challenges and what to do if you run into them, with
advice from the Influencer Marketing Council, a group that aims to promote
influencer marketing best practices and combat unethical behaviors.

Challenge
Suspected fake/purchased followers

Solution
Track an influencer’s follower patterns and keep an eye out for sudden spikes and
dips, which are indicative of purchased followers. Watch for a mismatch in ratio
between followers and likes. If someone has tens of thousands of followers but only
receives a handful of likes, that’s a red flag for purchased followers.

Tip: Look where an influencer’s followers engage from or geotag the most. Does it
match the influencer’s most common locations? If not, that can be a flag for purchased
followers.

Challenge
Engagement rates

Solution
Look out for a benchmark of 20% of impressions when comparing to an
influencer’s followers.

Challenge
Catfishing/stolen images or identities

Solution
Verify images by Google searching an individual, scrolling back and finding older
images to compare, or reverse image searching a handful of photos. You should be
able to quickly find if someone used another person’s image from the internet.

21 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

 Challenge
Bot followers and comments

Solution
Look out for unnatural or suspiciously robotic comments or usernames. If they don’t
make sense or include strange characters, spacing, or language, they could be
purchased to help with comment ratios.

Challenge
Tracking ROI

Solution
Use specific usernames or tracking URLs for sponsored posts and content. Then,
divide the campaign spend by the number of likes, comments, shares, total reach,
visitors to your websites, leads, or sales that can be directly attributed to the influencer
campaign. Determine which metric is the most valuable to you and use that to
determine price per action.

22 The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Conclusion
Influencer and affiliate marketing are a great channel to grow the top of your
funnel and get an audience of engaged followers to learn about your company
from a source they trust. Influencer marketing can help you grow any part of
your funnel all the way to driving sales or help to increase brand awareness.
With influencers and affiliates existing at every size and budget, any company
can take advantage of this fairly new strategy and see incredible results.

Resources

• The Ultimate Guide To Affiliate Marketing

• Does Influencer Marketing Actually Work

• Six Step Process To Maximize Your Influencer Outreach

• 13 Influencer Marketing Campaigns to Inspire and Get You Started With Your Own

• 5 Great Examples of Instagram Influencer Marketing

• How To Work With Influencers—The Ultimate Guide

• An Expert’s Guide To Influencer Marketing

• Using Sprout Social For Influencer Marketing Campaigns

• How To Find Social Media Influencers

Learn more about HubSpot’s free marketing tools to help

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