Facebook Influencer Marketing: The Essential Guide for Marketers

Step One should really occur before you consider which social network(s) you use for influencer marketing. Your entire campaign should be underpinned by your goals. However, you may already know your target market well, and understand that they are the type of people who enjoy spending time reading, watching, and listening to their favorite Facebook influencers.

In many ways, influencer marketing is an extension of content marketing – it is a way to expand your distribution of content far wider than you could achieve yourself. You either create content for influencers to share with their audiences or preferably, you set content parameters and let influencers create relevant content in their typical styles, so the content comes across as authentic to their audiences.

Your goals are what you expect from your campaign. There is little point undertaking a campaign if you haven’t determined a clear purpose for it. You need to shape your entire campaign strategy around the goals you set. You also need to establish key performance indicators (KPIs), so you have some way of measuring your campaign goals as you proceed and can determine your campaign’s success or failure.

Some possible campaign goals you could consider:

1. Brand awareness
2. Increased sales
3. Attracting a new market
4. Growing your own social media followers (i.e., influencers refer their followers to your social pages)
5. Customer retention

This is also where you think carefully about who the target market for your campaign is. For example, if you are wanting to build brand awareness, who are you hoping will take an interest in your campaign? Where do they hang out, socially? If you are aiming to increase sales, you presumably already know the types of people who buy your products, so again you should have a reasonable idea as to their preferred social platforms.

If you’re trying to attract a new market, you really need to think carefully about who that new market will be. You could even draw up a customer persona representing your potential new clients. A vital part of this will again be the social networks they enjoy.

Should the answers to your question suggest that the target market for your new influencer marketing campaign spends time on Facebook, then it makes sense to target Facebook influencers for your campaign.

At this point, you need to make some crucial decisions. Your answers will be affected by your budget, along with your influencer marketing experience, and how much you want you and your team to be involved in the process.

Some businesses prefer to merely pay a company to organize their influencer marketing for them, much as they may pay an advertising agency for their traditional advertising. At the other extreme, some firms prefer to do every step of the process in-house, often with an extremely minimal budget.

You have three main choices, although you don’t need to stick exclusively to one option.

1. Use an agency – there are many specialist influencer marketing agencies now to help businesses carry out their campaigns. We have profiled many of them here, and if you click on the dark blue icon, you can limit your search to those agencies that work with Facebook influencers. Each agency has its own specialty, so it is worth checking which one appears to fit your work model best.
2. Operate your Facebook influencer marketing campaign internally but use a platform as a tool to help simplify parts of the process, e.g., influencer discovery. We have extensively reviewed many influencer marketing platforms here. Check which ones provide the tools you want and list Facebook as one of their channels. Although the influencer marketing channels initially just provided an influencer discovery service, they now offer many more useful tools, such as relationship management, campaign management, an influencer marketplace, third-party analytics, and internet content amplification.
3. Run your campaign the traditional way, building up a series of Facebook influencers organically. While this is cheaper, it can be much more frustrating and time-consuming.

The way you do this will very much be affected by your earlier decision on how to organize your campaign. Effectively you have three options:

1. Leave it to your agency to recommend suitable Facebook influencers (they may have an internal team of influencers, their own influencer discovery tool, or they may use one of the influencer platforms to help them find suitable influencers for your campaign).
2. Use an influencer discovery platform to decide on the most suitable Facebook influencers to help you meet your influencer marketing goals
3. Go onto Facebook yourself, and find the suitable influencers in your niche. Look at relevant pages. Join Facebook Groups in your field. Gradually build relationships with them, and in time sound them out about collaborating in some form of relationship. You can search pages using keywords to help you find relevant influencers. You will need to think carefully about how you filter your results to receive the best results.

You will want to scrutinize potential influencers, even if you pay an agency to come up with suggestions. The main things that you will want to know about each potential Facebook influencer are:

1. Do they produce content that is relevant to your niche?
2. Is their audience like the types of people you are hoping to attract? If you have created a customer persona, you need to analyze whether the influencers’ followers are like your customer persona.
3. Does the influencer have a good engagement rate with their followers? RivalIQ’s 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report indicates that the typical engagement rate on Facebook varies by industry, but average engagement rates in 2018 were:
   • Food and Beverage – 0.24%
   • Hotels & Resorts – 0.21%
   • Higher Ed – 0.19%
   • Sports Teams – 0.19%
   • Non-Profits – 0.17%
   • Home Décor 0.11%
   • Fashion – 0.10%
   • Health & Beauty – 0.10%
   • Media – 0.08%
4. Is there evidence that the influencer will create and/or deliver the types of content you want to use in your campaign?

Again, this will depend on how you have chosen to organize your campaign. If you are working with an agency, it is possible that they may undertake the first contact between you and suitable influencers. At the very least, they will set up an easy way for you to contact influencers.

Some of the platforms also have systems to ease outreach to influencers. This is particularly so for those platforms that work with pre-vetted and signed-up influencers.

Other platforms may not include a system for reaching out to influencers. However, they will most likely provide you with suitable contact addresses so you can sound them out yourself.

If you have taken the organic route, you will have to take time first to build up a relationship with the Facebooker before you make any formal contact with them.

Once you have decided the influencers with whom you most want to work and had an indication that they are happy to work with you, then you can sign them up to your campaign. Again, this process will be dependent on your method of campaign organization. You will have little to do if you are working through an agency. Those platforms offering relationship management and campaign management tools will have systems in place to simplify this process for you.

Make sure that your influencers know your campaign goals, and how you intend to measure their success. More experienced influencers will be used to this and will probably be able to easily provide you with the necessary data as the campaign unfolds.

Never forget your campaign goals and keep a close eye on your recognized KPIs as the campaign progresses. Agencies and many platforms will provide you with the necessary data as your campaign progresses. Indeed, some of the platforms offer a plethora of data about virtually every aspect of the campaign.

If you haven’t paid for influencer tools, then you may have to rely on influencer-supplied data. If your goals and related KPIs relate to your own Facebook page, then you will have access to detailed Facebook Analytics vis your page’s Facebook Insights section. This should show you the impact of your campaign on your reach and engagement rates. Similarly, if your goal relates to your company website, then you will be able to extract data from Google Analytics, to show whether the campaign is operating as intended.