Whether your goal is to attract new leads or increase your conversion rate, every brand needs a well-planned marketing strategy. While there are different marketing strategies you can apply to attain your goals, influencer marketing is one such marketing tactic that is quickly becoming mainstream.
However, for the success of an influencer marketing campaign, you need to search for the correct influencers for your brand on whom you can depend upon. And for this, you need the help of influencer mapping.
What Is Influencer Mapping?
Great, you want to choose influencers for your next influencer marketing campaign, but wait – do you have a rough idea of whether they align with your brand voice? Before you go ahead with an influencer, influencer mapping is necessary and an unskippable process.
Influencer mapping is the process of understanding the influencer’s voice and how much influence their content and opinion have on the digital world. Through this process, you can find the correct influencer whose content aligns with your brand voice, what platforms they use, and measure their impact on their audience.
However, you need to understand that an influencer’s influence is not the same as their popularity. Popularity is equivalent to how many people recognize the influencer, while influence means how many people make their purchase decisions based on their opinions.
The Importance of Influencer Marketing
With the help of influencer mapping, you get a detailed idea of an influencer’s audience size and give you an in-depth comparison between different influencers. Other benefits include:
Determine Key Influencers
For the success of your influencer marketing campaigns, you need to target the right set of audiences. Influencer mapping will help you identify the correct influencer for your brand by analyzing their audience. It enables you to decide which influencer to reach out to in order to hit your target audience.
Find Right Audiences
Through the help of influencer mapping, you will know exactly what kind of audience an influencer influences. You will have access to hidden audiences that you might not have targeted before. This expands your reach, increases your sales, generates more leads, and drives more revenue.
Puts an Influencer’s Influence to the Test
Influencer mapping helps you compare different influencers to measure the amount of influence they have on their audience. You can conduct the A/B testing method by creating different influencer marketing campaigns and comparing them with A/B testing.
You can do this with different campaigns and the same influencers and gain an insight into which influencers are best for your campaigns and brands. This way, you can optimize your influencer marketing campaigns through influencer mapping.
Affinities and Content
Influencer mapping gives an idea of the shared affinities an influencer has. This set of affinities can include brands, software, news outlets, and other influencers. Moreover, influencer mapping shows how an influencer talks about specific topics.
Engagement Data
Another advantage of influencer mapping is that you get accurate engagement data. Are their audiences engaging with their content? If yes, then the percentage is given through influencer mapping.
How Can You Do Influencer Mapping?
From identifying your goals to measuring the results, here are the five steps you need to take care of while doing influencer mapping:
1. Focus on the Key Goal
To begin with influencer mapping, you first need to identify your primary goals for your marketing campaign. Without a specified purpose, your campaign is headed directionless. Goals help you segregate your resources into the correct slots.
Your key goals can be increasing engagement, getting greater reach, and everything in between.
2. Identify and Shortlist
Once you identify the goals you want to achieve with your influencer marketing campaign, the next crucial step is identifying relevant influencers in your targeted industries. Make a key list of influencers that align with your goals and shortlist them that fall closer to your objectives.
3. Analyze
After shortlisting influencers that align with your brand image and fall closer to your marketing goals, analyze the kind of content they make and their areas of interest. Study their social media networking sites, the common characteristics of their followers, and dissect their audience to understand which influencer can be an excellent fit for your campaign.
4. Plan a Mapping Strategy
Another crucial step in influencer mapping is ranking the shortlisted influencers on various factors like how easy they are to reach out to and how important their influence is on your strategy. With the help of these key points, you can generate various ways to reach out to them and take their help in attaining your goals.
5. Measure the Results
After deciding the influencers you are going to work with for your influencer campaign, you should hop on measuring the campaign results. You can do this by measuring the engagement level and the effectiveness of the participation of your audience. Through these metrics, you can determine the impact of these influencers on your business and your campaign.
Through influencer mapping, you can visualize the influencing power that the influencers you want to associate with have. It also opens you to new audiences that you might have missed out on!
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