Boost your communication strategies with Influencer Marketing

For a PR and communications agency one of the most challenging task is to boost a brand’s presence and reputation before public opinion. And, for this, we are always looking for new and better strategies.

That is why, in recent years, influencer marketing has gained popularity as a more than effective resource for a brand to gain a place among different audiences. And although you have probably already heard about it, we are pleased to share with you everything that we know about influencer marketing, that led us to be experts in the matter. 

What is influencer marketing?

It is a strategy promoted by specialized agencies in order to optimize your clients’ PR and communication strategies, based on building partnerships or collaboration relations with highly popular and influential people on the Internet and social media.

Known as influencers, these people are icons who gather thousands or even millions of followers and are becoming more and more significant in communications and marketing. Having a robust community that pays special attention to what they do and say, they have become essential to position a brand and increase its revenue potential… all it takes is for them to publish a favorable opinion or a direct recommendation about the brand.

The Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2022 survey, developed by Influencer MarketingHub and Refersion, with the participation of 2,000 specialized agencies worldwide, revealed that:

  • By 2022, the influencer marketing industry is expected to grow by approximately $16.4 billion. 
  • The total number of global influencer marketing-related service offerings grew by 26% in 2021 so that 18,900 companies now offer or specialize in influencer marketing services. 
  • More than 75% of brand marketers intend to spend a budget on influencer marketing by 2022.

Who is your ideal influencer?

With the huge variety of influencer profiles available today, the great challenge for brands is to know how to choose the right influencers to collab with: opinion makers, bloggers, journalists, experts, and even celebrities, depending on whether the goal of their strategy is to create awareness, generate leads, position a product, or else. Therefore, the first step is always to do an exhaustive and detailed mapping.

This, of course, is a major issue. Influencers, with their great talent for making themselves heard and positioning their personal brand, have an invaluable potential in their own profiles to increase a brand’s audience, change users’ perceptions of it and even create trust and loyalty. This is why it is essential to know how to choose and define the conditions of the partnership, always with an eye on the objectives.

To establish the kind of collaboration you hope to set with an influencer, here’s what you need to do:

  • Decide which channels to use.
  • Define the messages to be transmitted.
  • Outline what is expected in terms of brand communication.
  • Create compensation agreements for services.
  • Set the term of the collaboration.
  • Establish the goals to be achieved with this collaboration.

The issue of knowing how to choose will be addressed later in this article. However, it is worth a disclaimer: the real challenge of a communications strategy is to build memorable stories; hence the selection of the influencers with whom you will collaborate is quite complex.

For us, it is not a matter of metrics, follower numbers, or posting dynamics, but of their affinity with the brand and their ability to generate conversation. Therefore, we aim to create a community of influencers who are true brand lovers and are eager to work with it over time; this has brought us better results than the simple purchase of services per campaign.

Best practices in influencer marketing

Time to get to work: if your brand needs to benefit from a successful influencer marketing strategy, here are some recommendations for you:

Define your target audience

How do we implement an influencer marketing strategy? As always, the first step is to accurately specify the audiences you want your campaign to reach. Yes, we’re talking about creating buyer personas, but we’re also talking about niches, about categories of people according to their interests, habits, and identities. To be clear about this is necessary to choose the right influencers to collaborate with us, lending their own channels to amplify our messages.

Choose by affinity, not by metrics

We believe that to find out what type of creators best match the goals of our strategy, we must consider not only their followers and their posting patterns, but also a series of other aspects that require a skillful and qualitative evaluation: charm, types of messages, empathy with their followers, engagement, and ability to generate conversation, but, above all, how much affinity they have with the brand’s personality and narratives.

Our approach to choosing communication partners has proven to be highly successful. So successful that at MileniumGroup we developed the 5 Star Influencer Program, a unique method that adapts to the needs of each client and enables us to precisely find the right influencers for each strategy.

After an initial mapping, we assess each profile according to a series of criteria set in three different categories. The scores will be computed, resulting in a rating from 1 to 5 stars, which will be the basis for any decision. Here is a quick outline of the process: 

Be creative

Thinking outside the box is one of the great duties of PR and communications agencies, and standing out among all the information that floods the digital landscape is one of the top priorities for brands. Therefore, a specialized team like MileniumGroup’s is key to making the most of the available tools in the industry.

Creativity is one of our strengths and becomes a fundamental asset for our clients when it comes to implementing actions, activations, contests, and digital content aligned with your brand. This is all to achieve brand awareness, attract users to their web page, add more views, get leads, or increase followers.

Build community, it is not all about he money

Our influencer marketing strategies rely on loyalty and mutual growth, which guarantee that your brand will be a part of the conversation between an influencer or content creator and the audiences you want to reach; but we believe that the best way to achieve this is to collab with influencers that truly believe in your brand. 

This has allowed us to develop bold methods to identify and score influencers, in order to succesgfully personalize each of our clients’ strategies. 

Make agreements and contracts

At  MileniumGroup we have agreements with a variety of influencer marketing agencies all along Latin America. This allows us to make compliance contracts to asure that everything we agreed is fulfilled in a timely manner. 

How to create an effective Influencer Marketing strategy

We at MileniumGroup have vast experience working with influencers throughout Latin America. And the region’s cultural diversity is a challenge for us, as each country is unique in its ways of communicating, in its media, and in its consumption habits. Their audiences are unique, too.

However, we have developed different influencer marketing campaigns for clients such as Logitech or Electronic Arts with excellent results. These companies have known how to leverage their reputation as leaders in the technology and video games industries, making themselves heard and gaining visibility in their communities through actions such as giveaways, stories publications, or brand mentions.

For Logitech, we have built an army of over 60 influencers from all over Latin America, who are proud permanent partners of the brand and engage in different campaigns over time. Thus, by having a complete understanding of the company’s communication needs, we find the right influencers to fit them each and every time, capable of creating successful publications to give the brand visibility and credibility in front of the key communities.

Through this, we have been able to build up the brand’s relevance in the gaming community, through closer communication via influencers that are themselves real fans. Affinity with the brand remains the key to success in influencer marketing. 

If you want to know what makes us at MileniumGroup experts in influencer marketing or if you need a successful influencer marketing strategy for your brand in Latin America, a market we know very well, contact us.

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