5 Simple Steps You Need To Establish A Successful Influencer Campaign

Today, serial entrepreneur Brett Knutson is the founder of multiple multi-million dollar companies. But his early venture into the business world opened his eyes to certain problems in need of solutions, leading him to start his marketing agency Monopolize.

One of Knutson’s earliest companies was Hive, a social networking app last valued at $22 million. “When I first started I spent a tremendous amount of time and money working through agencies only to find out that they were white labeling,” he says. White labeling is when a company rebrands a product or outsources a service to make it seem as if they had done it themselves. “It’s basically taking a ton of my money for doing no work,” says Knutson.

“It set me on this search to find these underground marketers that are doing all the white label work for these big agencies,” he said. Knutson ended up finding several of them and starting his own marketing agency with them, which today is called Monopolize. All the services they provide are in-house or outsourced to companies in which they own equity.

Monopolize is a full-service marketing agency that helps brands find their voice and share it with the world. “We pride ourselves on being the best out there for influencer marketing campaigns for big brands, and for working with big personalities,” says Knutson. With access to the world’s largest influencer network, Monopolize helps put brands in front of the right audience.

But what exactly does that mean? “Basically, we make people famous,” explains Knutson. “We’ll have, for example, a plastic surgeon come to us who wants to become an industry celebrity. We will grow their presence online to where they have millions of followers. We’ll get them international PR, put them on top-ranking podcasts, or get them verified on social media.”

Among their list of high profile clients are fortune 500 companies and A list celebrities. Despite being a new company, Monopolize has already proven itself to be one of the industry leaders and is only continuing to grow.

Today, influencer marketing is the most successful and lucrative of all marketing strategies. Last year, nearly 90% of brands reported that their ROI from influencer marketing beat all other marketing channels, and nearly two-thirds of companies pledge to increase their influencer marketing budgets this year. But despite the uncontested success of influencer marketing, many companies are making simple errors that diminish their effectiveness. “Most brands will approach an influencer with a high following, have them post, and hope they’ll gain sales. But there’s a right and wrong way to do it,” says Brett Knutson, founder of multi-million dollar marketing company Monopolize. As an expert in the field with access to one of the most powerful influencer networks, he offers five simple steps to establish a successful influencer marketing campaign.

Step 1: Ensure the Influencer’s Followers Are Your Targeted Demographic

A mistake that brands often make is choosing influencers who fall into their targeted demographic but failing to examine whether the influencer’s followers also fall into that same demographic. “You might be trying to sell to young women, so you find a female model, but her following is primarily old men. So just be aware of the fact that the person promoting the product and the person seeing the product being promoted can oftentimes be different people,” explains Knutson.

Step 2: Investigate Whether the Influencer’s Engagement Is High and Real

Today, followers don’t matter as much as engagement does. “Go through their comments, make sure that it’s not just the same comments over and over again,” he says. “Look for diversity and consistency in their engagement.”

Step 3: Make Sure Your Legal Agreement Gives You Control and Ownership Over the Content You Create Together

You need to ensure that you own the rights to the content that influencers create for you. “If a manager wants you to sign a deal that says the influencer owns the rights to their likeness, it means you can’t repurpose that content ever again,” says Knutson. “That will ruin the effectiveness of the campaign because less than 10% of any influencer’s audience is going to see that content organically.”

Step 4: Create a Targeted Advertising Campaign

Once you’re able to collect data from who has seen the post organically, you can utilize that to create an advertising campaign that targets the rest of the influencer’s audience who hasn’t seen the content organically.

Step 5: Create a Lookalike Audience and an Evergreen Campaign

Creating a lookalike audience allows you to reach potential new customers because they’re similar to your existing customers. “It’s a great way to find a bunch of new people that you can advertise to. Then you can build an evergreen campaign that way,” he says, referring to search-optimized content that will stay relevant over a long period of time.

If you’re interested in learning more about Brett and his company, be sure to follow him @knutson