The Blockchain Influencer Marketing Manual

Influencer marketing is one of the greatest ways to attract new audience to your crypto project. NinjaPromo shares its approach to that type of advertisement to shed some light upon it and help you get a foothold on it.

Influencer marketing is promotion of services and goods on different online platforms through popular bloggers. Its concept emerged when it was noticed that consumers tend to trust public people — HubSpot research shows that 71% of users make buying decisions based on recommendations in the social media.

Influencer Marketing is for you if:

1. You want to expand your reach by promoting your product or service in the language your desired audience would respond to. Influencers can create content themselves, adjusting the information to their followers, so you don’t have to prepare marketing materials yourself.

2. You notice the drop in your organic traffic and you want to improve your reach. Influencer marketing prevents KPI fraud and ensures only real people click your link.

3. You’ve exhausted other, more traditional sources of traffic. Involving influencers provides you with a completely new traffic source with active audience — most social media platforms provide analytics that helps pick the right influencer for your purposes.

According to CNBC, influencer advertising market is going to grow to around $10 billion by 2019, and many marketers agree that it surpassed their expectations after sudden boost in 2017. Today, 74% users search for recommendations about services and products in social networks and 70% of “millennials”, who now are able to pay, trust bloggers with average popularity.

How Influencer Marketing helps your cause

Adepts of traditional marketing still consider influencers as purely image-building instruments, but that gets further and further from the truth each day. According to TopRank Marketing data, 67% of marketers are going to turn to influencer marketing for lead generation. Influencer marketing is vital for dealing with primary goals of marketing — reach and engagement. It should be an essential part of omnichannel strategies through using the sources with better ROI.

Influencer campaign step by step

The first thing to do is to pick the influencer best suitable for your project. Keeping your customer persona in mind, you don’t have to throw your money in top names before studying the specifics of local markets.

The second step is to brief the chosen influencer. All the constraints should be specified in great detail while being very careful about their creative freedom. However, one of the main rules of modern marketing — the shorter, the better (for example, 30–60 seconds of video integration) should be definitely applied here. You also require direct and clear message for the audience and certain benefits for new users.

Then comes the content release. It’s vital to check all the tracking links to make sure they work properly. You’re also should expect technical issues on influencers end and be prepared for swift responses to changes. If you target multiple regions, you also have to keep the time zones in mind.

The final stage is analyzing the results and predicting the future. It’s important not to give into delicious fairy-tales of incredible results — you should think over both best- and worst-case scenarios. The average results are 0.3–5 % CTR and 20–50 % CR. The margin of turning tracked actions into organic traffic is from 20 % to 70 %.

Who you’re dealing with

All the influencers can be put into several groups, depending on a variety of things they bring to the table.

Celebrities are the ones who come to mind first. They are the most expensive influencers, since they get a huge number of requests. They are stars and trendsetters, their audiences are the biggest and reach the furthest. It’s very difficult to get in touch with them directly. You want them if you want reach and awareness of your project.

Entertainers are another group that can provide wider reach and increased awareness of your project among the general public. Entertainers produce specific, yet viral content, usually of humorous nature. Their audience is predominantly young and prefers such content for leisure and fun. However, such audience is great for exposure of your project.

Lifestyle vloggers are great for expanding your reach and engaging the audience. Everyday life, fashion or travelling is normally the center of their attention and their format usually resembles that of reality shows, so, even though people watch it for pure entertainment, there’s still a level of engagement that provides your promoted project with increased interest from that audience.

Sharers are the other group of influencers that may engage their audience in your crypto project. They are close to their audience, posing as close siblings or best friends because they tend to share their opinion on everything their audience wants to discuss. Their content usually centers around several, mostly trending topics, discussed without showing off or posing as an authority figure. They are far more trusted by their followers when it comes to the promoted products and services, since the audience has a definitive personal example because it feels that sharers use what they promote themselves and and has a definitive personal example.

Experts provide more topic-specific content that normally revolves in only one or just a couple of fields, whether it’s cryptocurrency, business, certain region, etc. They tend to provide their audience with clear analysis and proper recommendations — both in their content and their promotions. Their audience is quite narrow, more adult in comparison to mentioned above and tends to trust and share (or at least consider) their opinions, making experts a great asset for reaching and motivating quality audience that may become your loyal customers as well.

Authorities tend to lean towards hype topics and controversial events, and they’re not afraid of participating in a scandal. Yet they provide idea-driven content to active and easily-engaged audience that trusts their opinion — and the quality of the products and services they promote, providing you with passionate potential customers as well.

Results and predictions

Number one recommendation for you is to run a test campaign before getting into the main one. The test will provide you with predictions for costs and final metrics (CR, ROI, etc.)

It would also give you and understanding which metric is key for measuring your results. It’s useful to have such data before you start the main campaign. Usually for making predictions it’s best to focus on either average number of views or minimum/maximum values.

The frequency of content releases is also to be taken into account. The fewer releases there are per month, the larger period of time should be analyzed. If there are 1–3 releases a month, you should look into at least 3 months’ history. And if there are 10 releases a month, there is no need diving deeper.

Let’s wrap it up

When it comes to audience, here’s what you should do:

· define targeting (interests, gender, age, financial capacity, etc.);

· prepare definitive offer and clear marketing message;

· pinpoint the tone of brand’s communication.

And from the side of influencers:

· determine the region;

· define proper topics;

· pick the most suitable influencers with matching format and content;

· debrief the influencers.

At the stage of Preparation, you should do: 1) the Briefing (influencer’s profile, targeting, terms of reference (TOR)); 2) Media planning; 3) Media plan approval; 4) Final TOR approval.

At the stage of Production, you should look into: 1) Script editing; 2) Tracking links preparation; 3) Content release.

At the stage of Analysis, you get: 1) Primary results analysis (suggested period depends on the platform: 1 day for Telegram, 3 days for Twitter or Instagram, 14 days for YouTube); 2) Reports with campaign results.

Influencers are a tricky source that can be mastered only by experimenting and testing — just like any other new tool. For many this is reason enough to turn to the professionals for help. Their experience, good and bad, helps to pick the right strategy to each blockchain project specifically

Hopefully, this manual helped you better understand the seas of influencer marketing and motivated you to take your project on this road yourself or with professional assistance.

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