How many influencers should you engage when starting an Influencer Marketing Program?

Please welcome Tim’s Top Tips on influencer marketing from Tim Williams CEO of Onalytica. Here he is with his first piece ‘How many influencers should you engage when starting an Influencer Marketing Program?’

Transcript:
Hello there and welcome to Tim’s top tips on influencer marketing.

I’m going to answer one question per week and this week our customers have been asking us, “How many influencers should you engage and partner with to drive a successful program?”.

Now, that’s a really hard question to answer because it just depends upon what your objectives are. I think you would expect me to probably answer like that initially but we understand the question we understand that you want some frameworks to work within so here’s a framework that works really well for us and our clients and whether it be Fintech, EdTech, Healthcare, Climate Change any of the particulars of topical communities that you might want to influence.

First of all, you’ve got to ask strategically how many influencers are going to be influencing your industry? How many influencers are going to be driving the innovation, creating content you’re pushing around content virally to be able to influence your target audience.

So typically we find that there’s 500 influencers that are the critical mass to achieve that. Then you’ve got to look at practically, you know, how many influencers are you going to be able to engage with in the first couple of months? So, especially if you haven’t reached out to any influencers yet, we believe that you should look at 30 key targets to be able to outreach to. These are targets that should match the values of your brand, they should have the personas that you feel comfortable with partnering with and also they should be realistic engagement targets – they shouldn’t be people like Leonardo DiCaprio on Climate Change for example. There should be people who are bought into the same ethos may be increasing content to better the industry or people that want to raise their profile that are already engaging their target audience in a particular way. So, 30 key targets would be great and then you can arrive at 10 influencers that will probably say yes to the initial engagement if you’ve got the right value proposition, because guess what, not every single influencer is going to say yes to the initial outreach.

So just in summary: Track and listen to 500 influencers in the industry, target 30 influencers for initial outreach and you should be able to engage 10 influencers in the first three months.

I hope that’s helpful and look forward to seeing you next week.

Arrange a Conversation