Succeed With An Influencer Marketing Campaign
Many brands that succeed with influencer marketing include it as an essential part of their digital marketing strategy.
As a highlight of social media marketing, influencer marketing opens chances for companies to raise brand awareness, establish valuable partnerships, boost sales and support other marketing campaigns such as SEO and SEM.
Influencer marketing is such a powerful tool. Thus, many companies are interested in promoting their brands with popular social media influencers.
As you start your influencer marketing campaign, you must be wondering “among millions of famous people, who should I choose?” and “how can I proceed with the campaign properly?”.
To help you answer the questions, we compiled a list of the eight types of influencer marketing campaigns. Through this, we hope you will get a solid foundation before launching your very first influencer marketing campaign.
Host Giveaways, Contests, Sweepstakes, and Event Activations
Giveaway campaigns are one of the most common influencer marketing campaigns due to the simplicity and the mutual benefit it brings. It works by supplying influencers with a product or service that they can give away to their followers.
Giveaways give a high degree of guaranteed growth as a follow-up, shares, retweets, and comments. If the influencer’s audience is similar to and larger than yours, they will potentially generate higher ROI.
Potential customers will see this as a chance to win your products for free, and you might get additional sales from people who didn’t win in the contest.
In this example, wedding photographer Mallory Sparkles gave away a mini beach photo shoots to people who followed his Instagram, tagged a friend in his post’s comment, and share his post to their stories.
Nevertheless, along with great benefits, there always remain potential risks.
Among people who newly follow you as the sweepstakes begin, there will be a large number of followers that are only there for the prize, not your brand and products. It might lead to a decline of followers after the contest has ended.
Fake accounts and bots are also a threat. If the quality of the contests is low, for example, like to win one product, the risk of you getting a bunch of fake followers will be relatively high. You can detect this through the sharp and rapid decline in the number of followers.
The procedure for the selection of winners should be mentioned clearly in the giveaway posts to avoid the frustration and anger of customers. Even though you may presume the contest would not be taken too seriously by the players, you should better prepare for critical responses from those who have not won the contest.
Lastly, the legality of the sweepstake must be guaranteed to avoid any form of profiteering and allegations that may affect your brand.
Social Media Takeover
When an influencer takes over your social media channels and shares content during a set period, the agreement is called a social media takeover.
The period usually lasts about a day. However, for some special events or occasions, some take around a week.
This type of influencer marketing campaign requires a high level of trust since you have to give the influencer your security information, such as a password.
As digital technology is growing every day, there is a platform named Snapchat, which allows you to have influencers take over your account stories without giving them your login info.
In this example, fashion model Irene Kim takes over Vogue’s stories to tell her fans the story in her way about behind the scenes at Seoul Fashion Week.
Affiliate Marketing
If you don’t have a big budget, an affiliate marketing campaign might help you out. It is a great way to work with multiple influencers at once at a low cost.
No matter how much money you have, you can do it with as many influencers as possible. The influencer earns a commission on all sales generated from their sources.
An Affiliate marketer will promote a product onsite or redirect a customer to your website.
For example, suppose you had an e-commerce brand selling clothes and fashion accessories. By giving 12 influencers a unique promotion code for them to share with their fans, and with each promotion code used in your online store, the influencer will get a commission, and you get a sale.
Sponsored Social Media Content and Blog Posts
Sponsored posts are classic and straightforward. It is the most popular influencer marketing campaign type. Even if your content is excellent, there is a significant risk that your content will never attract enough traction without influencers posting them.
Sponsored posts work as brands sponsor the influencer to create promotional content for them. A brand should provide the guidelines, expectations, or themes from your brand, so the influencers will know what you want them to do.
As influencers are active on many social media channels, and some of them even own private blogs or websites, you can push your brand image everywhere continuously by collaborating with well-known and reliable people.
The compensation for influencers, except for payment, can be either a free or discounted product in exchange for promotion.
In this example, Lisa Ziegii (@lisa_ziegii) – a fashion blogger shared with her fans the discount code from Ideal of Sweden in a sponsored posts on her Instagram.
Gifts, Unboxing, and Reviews
This type of influencer marketing campaign involves a brand giving influencers their products or services as a gift. In return, the influencer will, perhaps, voluntarily record an unboxing video or simply review their experiences on their social media channels, and it’s also called product seeding.
A customer journey starts from the moment your customers receive the product, and in this case, they are the influencers. As they show their followers their unboxing experience, they also take their audience on the virtual journey with them.
After listening to influencers’ opinions and reviews, the audience can determine whether it is something they want to buy and try.
Offering gifts is also an excellent start for a long-term relationship between your brand and influencers.
If influencers are new customers, you will have the opportunity to get first-hand experience of your products. If they are already your customers and now would receive your product for free, they might love your products or services more, which can increase your chance of having a positive product review on social media.
This kind of influencer marketing mainly works with micro-influencers who find it exciting to receive gifts from brands.
Beside free products or services, a product link or a coupon code is a plus, which will help increase your sales when they are used by influencers to promote your product.
The typical example is a review post from Ankita Mitra’s Instagram (@foodology_ankita) – a Food and Lifestyle blogger.
She shares with her fans her opinions, likes, and unlikes about the Natural Vibe Botanicals Organic Dehydrated Tomato Powder of the brand Naturevibe Botanicals (@naturevibeindia). The product is a gift from the company to Ankita.
Guest Blogging
Through collaborating with influencers who also write blogs and accept blogs, guest blogging campaign might help you promote your brand uniquely and effectively.
There are two ways to blog hosts. One is to accept the blog entries. The other is to post your content to websites and blogs that relate to your industry.
Guest blogging is an authentic and simple way to improve your brand awareness. You might gain more traffic via blog posts on both influencers and your sites. The authority and reputation of your company will also increase, which attracts more potential new fans and consumers.
For example, a guest post on Problogger covering Ramit Sethi’s process for developing and selling million-dollar products online, written by a blogger named Michael Alexis, receives many complimentary comments for the author.
Guest blogs bring a large number of followers to the website and reaffirm the site’s value through quality articles created by highly qualified people.
Brand Ambassador Programs
A brand ambassador is an influencer who shares content for a brand daily or regularly.
Brand ambassadors usually have long-term partnerships with the brand. The period could be several months to a year or longer.
A directly paid partnership is not the only way to access brand ambassadors. You can also try product rewards or other benefits that could lead to money, like affiliate marketing.
Brand ambassadors are like the “face” of a brand. They work like how celebrity spokespeople work in traditional advertising campaigns.
They actively share and promote brands’ photos, tweets, videos, and articles through their social media channels.
Through partnering with brand ambassadors, content about your products repeatedly appears on their channels. The content then imprints your brand image into the ambassadors’ audience, which helps raise brand awareness consistently.
More frequent promotion means your products cover more angles of the ambassadors’ life, and it shows your potential customers your products’ versatility.
Good things take time. The audience will believe in a long-term, reliable, and authentic relationship that you are trying to build with brand ambassadors. They will evaluate that through the trust between both sides in each experience and promotional content, the influencers’ posts.
Brand ambassadors are influencers. Like any other influencers, they have been building a strong and loyal relationship with their viewers. Therefore, when they see their favorite influencers’ sticking to a brand for a while, they will potentially stay with it, which helps decrease the churn rate in your marketing strategy.
To take an example, Emma Stone – an extremely famous and talented actress, a celebrity influencer who has just officially signed the brand ambassador contract with Louis Vuitton – a French fashion house and luxury retail company. She, as a House Ambassador, will be the face of Les Parfums Louis Vuitton – a new perfume product from the brand.
Pre-Release and Discount Codes
The pre-release campaigns are not strange to brands nowadays. As there are millions of new products coming out every year, brands need to create excitement for the customers while they wait for the release. Pre-release campaigns are perfect for an influencer marketing campaign.
Companies can maximize their benefits from this campaign by cooperating with influencers. The sense of exclusivity that this campaign brings back to influencers makes them feel incredibly proud to be the first to try the product.
Some other promotion methods, such as discount codes, can also be given to influencers to share with their fans. The more related to sales the influencers’ posts are, the better it is for your brand’s bottom line.
By offering premium codes for shopping, you are having influencers widen your overall reach for you. It is a kind of Call-To-Action feature that encourages customers to take action and make a purchase. As they see their favorite influencer sharing a discount code, they might jump straight to the final steps if they are still hesitating.
The pre-release method as an influencer marketing campaign type is a standard in the movie industry. Whenever a new movie is coming, all the stars who are actors and actresses in the film become influential marketers. They will attend pre-releasing events and post promotion content on every social platform that they use.
The result of this campaign will be a spectacular success if the movie satisfies the expectation of audiences. Otherwise, filmmakers and producers will barely earn an acceptable return.
Here some of the marketing activities carried out to promote the movie “Avengers: End Games” produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
Influencer Marketing Value
Firstly, is it true that social media influencers genuinely have a significant impact on people?
According to a study, 86% of women surveyed consult social media communities’ recommendations, while 72% make purchasing decisions frequently based on advice from those online social connections.
Influencer Orchestration Network points out that about 40% of survey respondents made a purchase based on seeing a social media influencer using it on Twitter, Youtube, or Instagram.
Therein, approximately 50% of that number have shared influencer content, which enhances awareness and engagement.
As you can see, people are influenced by industry leaders and popular content creators more than ever. And amazingly, they adapt to it so well.
The evolution in the way how consumers make purchasing decisions has opened up countless opportunities for businesses and content creators all around the world.
So, does it work? How valuable is influencer marketing to the marketing industry and businesses?
According to the 2019 Influencer Marketing Survey from Mediakix:
- 80% of marketers confirm the effectiveness of influencer marketing and 35% find it extremely effective.
- 89% of all say influencer marketing’s ROI is equal or higher (about 11 times) than other marketing platforms’
- 71% of surveyed people assert that the quality of customers and traffic from influencer marketing is better than other sources.
- 65% of participants plan to increase their influencer marketing budget for 2019.
- The most common budget is $1,000 – 10,000 per year per company, followed by $100,000 – 500,000 per year per company.
- 85% of marketers set the most crucial influencer goal is increasing brand awareness, while 71% aim to reach new audiences and 64% lean to generating sales/conversions.
Business Insider’s Intelligence estimates that brands will spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing campaigns by 2022.
About 71% of marketers believe that influencer partnerships are good for business, said the Digital Marketing Institute.
These stats have shown the immense values of influencer marketing, proving it is a solid return on investment in the long run.
To gain huge profits that come at a reasonable price. It requires your brand to implement influencer marketing in a truly focused, strategic, and effective manner.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing’s possibilities are virtually endless. As the consumers’ buying decisions are now more dependent on influencers’ advice, brands have a great chance to navigate the customer journey and tell the story in their way.
Influencer marketing has become an opportunity for brands to exploit. It has never been easier for brands to connect with customers, raise brand awareness, and boost conversions rapidly and cost-effectively.
Along with the constant development of social media, which requires quick adaptation from businesses, consumers today expect brands to communicate with them more organically. Influencers who are experts in this field can help you do this properly.
By identifying the right influencer who suits your business the most and combining appropriate influencer marketing campaigns into your strategy, you will increase your reach among potential customers, and achieve significant partnerships and connections with both influencers and audiences.