Everyone is doing influencer marketing nowadays, but it´s still not mapped out completely. Even though every campaign and every approach is different, there are certainly some factors, that impact the success of every influencer campaign. Check out these 5 tips, that will help you succeed in the influencer marketing game:
1. Lead the influencers – But give them their freedom as well
Influencers generally know, what kind of content works for their channel and their followers. But they are no marketing experts and they will not have a deeper insight into the game you want to promote. Therefore, you have to work closely together with every influencer, to find the perfect strategy that implements your game the best possible way.
2. You will get content – Not commercials
That being said, you, as the marketing manager, need to understand the kind of content you are getting. Pushing influencers too hard to do “infomercials”, will result in a failing campaign. The heart of influencer marketing is the user liking and appreciating the content they are consuming. That opens up endless creative ways to work with influencers, but if you overdo the commercial aspect, you will get a hard backlash from the community, so be careful.
3. Follower counts are overrated – Recent engagement and performance are way more important
While follower counts can be a decent indicator of the size of an influencer, they should not be an important metric when composing an influencer marketing campaign. The most important data comes from user engagement, that is the number of likes, comments, upvotes, etc. an influencer gets on his content. In YouTube you can also look at the average views of recent videos, to get an impression of the potential of an influencer. Obviously, the more additional data on the influencer, like past campaign success or Instagram view counts, the better.
4. Prices change depending on the game as well as outer factors
Prices for influencer marketing vary a lot right now. The field is still relatively new and prices are not fully mapped out yet. What makes things worse, is that prices of the same influencer will differ a lot for different campaigns, depending mostly on the quality of the game. The more a game fits the influencers channel and the better the quality of the game is, the less you have to pay them for doing a video.
5. Work with the perfect influencers
Finding the “right” influencers for your game is a tough task, it depends on many factors, like their channels, style, the target audience, past performance metrics, etc. But the most important metric is still the influencers attitude towards your product. In any case, the influencer, you are working with has to be passionate about the product himself, otherwise, the collaboration is just set up to fail. Look closely at the way the influencer reacts to the product and if he is a true fan of it, it´s very likely, that he will be able to spar this passion in his followers as well.