How to avoid influencer marketing growing pains (part 1)
As a marketer you have a clear understanding of what influencer marketing strategies work for your business and you’ve run a number of successful campaigns, but you’re now looking to pay larger budgets for the right influencers, to produce some ‘hero content’ for your brand — supported by promotions across all their social channels.
This could be a video for YouTube or Facebook supported by posts on Instagram or twitter — or writing a new article to be featured on their blog. You understand that original content, if done right, has the ability to resonate with the influencer’s audience and produce better results.
Avoiding influencer marketing growing pains
You are increasingly seeing value and increased audience engagement from your influencer marketing activities and your strategy is moving to deeper collaborations with influencers, to produce original content that feels and looks right for both parties. You are also getting comfortable managing bigger budget campaigns and using more influencers, across multiple social channels.
But as your confidence and range of activities grows, there are new challenges and considerations that come into play. Bigger budgets and a multi-channel approach equals increased complexities and a growing need to understand your return on investment. A risk may be that spending big doesn’t result in big returns, or that you are not able to measure if your campaign was truly a success. You need to ensure your creative approach resonates with both your audience and more importantly, the influencers — and you need to start looking for a higher level of sophistication when it comes to campaign management and reporting on these campaigns (e.g. looking beyond views and likes).
Have the courage to let influencers create and be creative.
With a more sophisticated and creatively controlled campaign, the influencer can really integrate your product or service into their own style and content and whilst this is clearly a paid arrangement, it should aim to appear in no way advertorial in approach or message. Producing authentic content with an influencer must feel natural for both parties, otherwise your message will feel forced or false and the results will be mixed, at best. This process is critical to the success of your campaign.
It may sound obvious to call out, but your target audience should have a strong match with the influencer’s audience you are collaborating with. Make sure you do your research here. Ask to see a break-down of each influencer’s audience profile — including age, sex and location (e.g. what country are they based in). You don’t want to pay $10,000 for a YouTube video when 50% of the influencer’s audience are based in the wrong country, or skew too young vs your target demographic. Some influencers have media cards or you can ask to see a screen shot of their audience profile, taken from their main social network channel data.
Next, sharing a well-defined creative brief with an influencer is key. Of course, aspects may alter and creative elements change, but having an agreed brief will help the process and its success no end. In this brief you should define the campaign objectives, target demographics, the key messages that need to appear in the creative, do’s and don’ts from a brand perspective and the KPIs that you are looking to drive (e.g. views, engagement, sales etc.). Click here to download our free creative brief template to get you started.
From this point on the best advice here is to let Influencers create and be creative.
Influencers understand their audience intimately and understand the type of content they will or won’t like (they literally have the data to prove this!). Forcing your own content ideas or product placements into an influencer’s creative idea will lead to content that does not feel authentic to their audience — and most importantly won’t get good results (e.g. views / engagement will be much lower than their normal posts). Beyond poor results there’s also a real danger that this approach could lead to a negative sentiment towards your own product and brand.
So let them come up with a creative idea that yes, answers your brief, but will also appeal naturally to their audience.
It takes a leap of faith to let the influencer to lead this process, so write a great creative brief to inspire them, be clear about key messages you need to appear in the content (either visually or verbally) — and agree a number of approval points through the process — be it approving the creative idea, scripts or storyboards, through to the first edits of the content they produce.
Here are a few examples where the creative is led by the influencer — where they highlight the brand and key messages in a way that sits comfortably with the usual style of their content.
Do you have any great examples of influencer led creative, I’d love to see them?
