The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing for Alcohol Brands

Influencer marketing has not only growing in popularity but is growing in spend. An industry that was estimated to be worth $2B in 2017 is now expected to reach $10B by the year 2020. As this growth continues, it’s more important than ever for marketers to keep up to date with the latest tactics and trends within their respective industry.

However, when it comes to implementing influencer campaigns for brands in highly regulated industries, such as the alcohol industry, there are many specific precautions that need to be taken to ensure you’re compliant with digital marketing guidelines.

Below we’ve outlined key phases for implementing successful influencer marketing for alcohol brands, but you can also download the full white paper for additional information.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO INFLUENCER MARKETING FOR ALCOHOL BRANDS

PHASE 1: DEVELOPING YOUR STRATEGY

Every good influencer marketing campaign begins with a solid strategy – a strategy that contains your campaign objectives, approach, target audience, and more. Below are three major areas of your influencer marketing strategy that, as an alcohol brand, require your attention if you’re going to set yourself up for success.

AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

Once you’ve determined your target audience, it’s essential to understand where they are on social media, what common interests they possess, and what type of content they’re most likely to engage with. From there, you’ll begin to understand which types of influencer’s you’ll want to partner with to most effectively reach your target demographic.

SETTING METRICS

As budgets towards influencer marketing grow, so does scrutiny from senior management. If you want to keep getting funding for your programs, you’ll need to prove how influencer marketing is contributing to ROI, and that starts with the beginning of your campaigns.

We’ve developed a separated White Paper that dives into 25 different ways you can measure influencer marketing in 2018. Everything from vanity metrics like impressions and engagements, to purchase indicators like conversion tracking and sales lift is broken down to help you develop campaigns that not only create real, meaningful relationships with your target audience but prove sales attribution.

DIGITAL MARKETING GUIDELINES FOR ALCOHOL BRANDS

We recommend brands apply the applicable self-imposed alcohol marketing guidelines to their influencer campaigns. Below we’ve included the full version of each current guideline available for you to download below.

• Beer Guidelines
• Spirits Guidelines
• Wine Guidelines

PHASE 2: IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS

When it comes to identifying the best influencer to represent your brand, there are many things to keep in mind, especially as an alcohol brand. First, we recommend that you never implement opt-in programs because you’ll lose control of who’s representing your brand. Instead, as we do at Carusele, you should take the time to vet and hand-select creators for your campaigns.

THE ABS’S OF INFLUENCER SELECTION

At Carusele, we go to great lengths to ensure that we partner with the best influencers to represent our clients. The key is that we never use opt-in programs, but instead carefully vet and hand-select our creators through a process we call the ABC’s of Influencer Selection.

Audience Fit: Is this influencer right for this audience? By using third-party insight data, we’re able to see who an influencer’s audience is, including demographics, location, and interests.

Brand Fit: Is this influencer the right fit for this brand? Leveraging the power of IBM Watson, we identify ideal candidates based on demographics, content themes, performance history and more.

Content Fit: Will the content be a fit for this campaign? Our influencer specialists personally review all of an influencers channels to determine fit, including voice, tone, look and feel, history with competitors, and authenticity.

If you’re also concerned about influencers with fake followers, take a moment to check out our blog post about how to identify fake followers.

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR ALCOHOL BRANDS

Use audience data to properly estimate the demographic makeup of the influencers’ followers. We only select influencers who appear to have at least 71.6% of their follower base made up of users 25 and older.

Be sure to review each influencers channel content to ensure they do not promote over-consumption (drinking games, binge drinking, getting “drunk”, etc.) or showcase illegal actions (drinking and driving, providing alcohol to minors, etc.).

COACHING INFLUENCERS

While you may be an expert on alcohol marketing regulations, many influencers are not. To ensure that creators produce and publish content that’s compliant, you may need to train them prior to campaign launch. At Carusele, we provide all our influencers with a Welcome Packet that includes everything they need to know about a campaign, including a special appendix designed to address alcohol marketing guidelines. Additionally, it’s also important to reinforce standard FTC social media guidelines.

…to continue reading this ultimate guide to influencer marketing for alcohol brands, download the full white paper here.