A marketing funnel is a tool for positioning consumers’ stage on your brand.

Marketing strategy is the same as identifying each step that is right for achieving a goal. Influencer marketing is also known to have an optimal effect if it is aligned with the funnel.

In other words, your influencer campaign will vary by purpose.

Through this article, LEMON wants to explain how to maximize influencers usage in each of your marketing funnels.

Influencer Marketing for the Overall Marketing Mix

Maintaining a healthy marketing funnel is not just the task of one approach. It requires collaboration between your entire brand and your marketing in marketing mix. Which ultimately becomes the best unit to reach your customers.

In developing the marketing mix, the marketing funnel becomes a tool to align your efforts.

The best way to detect consumer movements based on the marketing funnel is to determine KPIs or key performance indicators.

LEMON has repeatedly said that influencer marketing is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. You must determine the KPI according to the purpose of running the program. Because it will be more helpful in knowing your marketing performance.

Influencer Marketing Is Not Just for Brand Awareness or Conversions

Indeed, the first step in doing business is launch. Launch Products require brand awareness. However, your expectations in setting up a business must be long-term thinking.

After consumers are aware of your existence, then? What are they doing?

Your expectation is to direct them to a purchase. Even though the marketing funnel still has a long way to go.

Imagine that brand awareness is your starting point. Influencer marketing is the vehicle to get there. There are paths that you can’t cut via shortcuts.

So how can you get to your destination if you don’t want to take the main route without a shortcut, but hope to get to your destination safely and on time?

It’s the same with conversions.

In today’s omnichannel environment, social media can generate brand awareness and follow up on that awareness with meaningful engagement until consumers are ready to buy.

Influencer marketing can be effective at every level of your marketing funnel.

Maintaining Relationships with Influencers

Influencers are those who have the power to lead their followers online. These followers pay attention to the posts, experiences, and recommendations provided.

If you maintain a good relationship with influencers, you get something that is worth more than your budget.

By having a good relationship, you can analyze where the strengths or strengths of the influencer are. And you can easily determine what stage the celebrity is in your marketing funnel .

Engagement as the Most Important Metrics

Besides reach, impressions, and conventions, what other metrics are reliable?

The answer is engagement.

Any form of engagement that occurs with an influencer‘s post shows that the audience is paying attention to you.

If you run influencer marketing with LEMON, engagements such as likes, comments, and shares will be tracked in our platform report dashboard. The engagement rate at each stage of your funnel indicates the success of your campaign.

Using engagement metrics on impressions and conversions will give you a better view of how to use influencers effectively at every stage of your marketing funnel.

Define Influencer Marketing Strategy Goals

There are some factors that impact customer buying behavior. The better you understand your target audience, the more effective your influencer marketing campaign will be.

The best influencers will reach an audience alignment with you. In addition, they can reach a deeper connection with your audience than your business. Hiring the right influencer for you depends on how well the influencer‘s posts resonate with your target audience.

Achieving this level of authenticity gives you great insight into how you want your audience to respond to your marketing efforts. This ideal audience response becomes the goal of influencer marketing. Among the most common campaign objectives are:

• Conversion
• Brand awareness
• Traffic
• Download
• UGC

Let’s go over each of your marketing objectives by funnel.

Influencers For TOFU ( Top of the Funnel)

The top of your funnel represents the first introduction between you and the consumer.

It’s unrealistic to demand an audience that’s even still in the “introduction” but you treat it like a buyer.

In any advertising or marketing campaign, you will usually find a small percentage of consumers who are ready to buy. This happens because some consumers make an impulsive buying decision, or because these consumers know what they want and can relate to your message enough to make a purchase.

However, most other consumers need a lot of time and information to dig deeper about you. Some consumers carefully research their problems/wants and available solutions.

Instead of forcing a sale at every turn, you can log every kind of positive response and cultivate your audience to buy when they are ready to do so.

The benefit of treating your audience according to the stage they are on, namely TOFU, is that you don’t look aggressive and will scare your customers.

The right goal for your top of the funnel is brand awareness.

Goals: Brand Awareness

In TOFU, brand awareness is your main goal. In terms of acquired media value, you can measure brand awareness by the number of impressions.

Influencers know how to help you target new audiences with effective messages.

At this stage, the KPI you should accurately pay attention to is how many consumers are paying attention to your message and have a positive response. To achieve awareness, your audience doesn’t need to be committed. All you want is to make them curious about you.

The Right Influencer Marketing Strategy for Brand Awareness

Achieving brand awareness is easier than any other goal. List in your campaign brief specifically what your awareness goals are. Provide hashtags, relevant links, and specify how and when you want influencers to mention your brand.

In an influencer marketing campaign for TOFU, you want your audience to pay attention and get to know the media you have (i.e., visit your website, social media company pages, etc.). By respecting the novelty of the relationship between the brand and the new audience, you won’t frighten consumers by suddenly using a “buy now” message.

Remember, the new audience is in the introduction stage.

Lastly, your TOFU strategy will be more effective if you provide something of value. That “something of value” could be a contest, information, or product sample. Giving something away will also build trust with this new audience.

The Right Influencer for TOFU

Technically, any type of influencer – nano, micro, macro, or mega will help you achieve awareness. However, the influencers with the largest audiences generally do a better job of helping you reach your awareness goals.

Macro-mega influencers maintain online communities with 100,000 to 1 million (or more) followers. These influencers are best qualified to help you reach new target audiences.

However, macro-mega influencers tend to be more expensive. If your budget is small, you can target a new audience by collaborating with niche-specific nano-micro influencers. Collaborating with these influencers in large numbers can reach impressions as high as micro-mega influencers.

Influencers For MOFU (Middle of the Funnel)

Once consumers know who you are, they will be in the middle stage (MOFU). Maintaining audience interest in MOFU means nurturing ongoing engagement.

However, not all engagement can be interpreted as valuable at this stage. Certain consumer responses are more valuable than others. For example, asking influencers specific questions about the products they promote on behalf of your brand.

To measure the success of MOFU, you need to identify the most important ways that consumers can engage with influencer posts. Engagement type

it helps you create MOFU goals.

Goals: Engagement

Engagement ensures that your audience won’t immediately forget you and what you did.

Engagement with your audience should make them smarter about your industry and get them to like you. You’re not just trying to build trust with consumers so you don’t scare them; You are trying to provide more specific information to help them decide to buy your product.

Influencer Marketing Strategy for MOFU

Some of the best MOFU strategies are product reviews and video tutorials.

Include in your campaign brief, and inform influencers, what kind of engagement you are expecting. So that influencers can create content that can attract audiences to take these actions.

Remember, your MOFU goal should be to inform your audience. In addition to gaining authority by providing quality information, you want a deeper connection with your audience. Influencers know exactly what to do to facilitate that industry knowledge and emotional connection.

The Right Influencer for MOFU

Any influencer with strong engagement metrics can help you achieve your MOFU goals. Therefore, you should choose influencers carefully to ensure audience alignment. Recruit influencers whose online community lifestyle is perfect for your product/service.

As you slide further down your influencer marketing funnel , those with smaller audiences generally perform better. The smaller the online community, the better your chances of achieving meaningful engagement.

Some macro influencers maintain very strong engagement metrics.

However, micro influencers remain (arguably) the strongest type of influencer for MOFU campaign purposes. Since every brand is different, you should experiment with different types of influencers to find the best match for your brand and marketing goals.

Influencers For BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel)

Most campaigns for the bottom of the funnel focus on driving sales. At this stage, most of your audience knows who you are, how valuable your product is, and just needs to make a decision.

Now it’s time to create a call to action and watch your sales increase. Since prospects at the BOFU level know you quite well, you are less worried about scaring them off.

Goals: Conversion

Depending on your product or service, conversions may include direct purchases, trial registrations, and/or subscriptions. In fact, you can use multiple conversion techniques, so your audience has more than one way to commit to you.

Influencer Marketing Strategy for BOFU

When planning your BOFU campaign, you should consider the user experience and make it as easy as possible for consumers to convert. Fortunately, social media like Instagram offer “swipe-ups” that entice consumers to take action.

To measure accurate conversion metrics, you should also create trackable affiliate links, tags, and landing pages.

Additional BOFU tactics include promo codes or limited-time offers. These discounts encourage consumers “on the fence” to act now rather than later.

The Right Influencer For Bofu

Nano-micro influencers are very talented at driving sales. Their audience is small, highly engaged, and provides a lot of input into influencer product recommendations.

Again, any type of influencer can drive sales. By nurturing long-term relationships with influencers, you will gain a better understanding of which influencers are performing better at your BOFU stage, regardless of the number of followers they have.

Conclusion: Use Influencer Marketing Across Funnels

One thing to keep in mind as you develop your influencer marketing campaign is that influencers are also trusted, consumers. Your influencer relationship management skills will improve as you learn how to explicitly state your marketing goals.

That’s why it’s important for you to pay attention to the marketing funnel, and how each influencer fits into your strategy. Accurately identifying the right influencers will help you meet each of your marketing goals more efficiently, thereby increasing influencer marketing ROI.

Consult your business with the LEMON Influencer platform for the right strategy according to your marketing funnel.

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