Does your influencer marketing campaign have a clear content strategy? Image source: Dollarphotoclub.com
An influencer marketing campaign begins with defining your goals and identifying individuals with followings that match your target audience. When your research reveals a range of different individuals who you could approach to connect with your brand during a specific campaign, how do you choose the right ones? One way is to evaluate their content style, systematically assessing factors such as production value, tone, format, and platform. Here’s a closer look at a strategy that can help marketers ensure they’re choosing influencers whose content matches their marketing campaign goals and best reflects their brand objectives.
Platform
When developing an influencer marketing campaign, platform decisions matter. An influencer’s ‘platform’ usually refers to the social networks where they are most active. Choosing a platform that’s a natural fit for your campaign – like selecting YouTube for more in-depth and exploratory videos or Instagram for an image-based product campaign – makes sense. Influencers usually have a primary channel that they use to connect with followers, such as an Instagram account or a YouTube channel.
Another element to consider is an influencer’s secondary channel activity on complementary networks. Keeping secondary channel activity in mind could aid in cross-promotion. If your influencer is active on multiple networks, it’s easier to get more eyes on the content that they create, which in turn increases the chances of engagement and results. It’s also important to think about your company’s long-term social media goals. Which networks are critical to your long-term marketing objectives? Investing in influencer campaigns that support such networks is a smart strategy for building followers and brands awareness over time.
Tone
How does an influencer speak with her audience, and how does that fit with the tone of your brand and messaging? The most successful influencer campaigns have natural synergies between the influencer tone and the overall tone of the brand.
For example, if you’re looking for influencers for a hot new line of designer sneakers, a highly visual and informal, conversational style with an emphasis on fun is probably a natural fit. A campaign that’s talking to Baby Boomers about serious issues like retirement has a whole different feel. Ask yourself what tone you want reflected for your brand image and what tone is necessary to underscore the specific goals and messaging of your campaign.
Format
Another important factor to think about when you’re selecting an influencer for a campaign is the format that their content takes. For example, an influencer’s videos on YouTube might be primarily humor-focused, “linkbait” content, in-depth how-to’s, product reviews or interviews. What type of content is their audience used to seeing?
The type of content that a producer publishes gives you a good idea of what her audience is seeking; is the focus on entertainment, education or developing a deeper insight into a specific subject? How does that focus fit with what your company is trying to accomplish? Finding natural linkages increases the chances that an influencer’s audience will be receptive to your message.
Production Value
A final note when looking at an influencer’s content style: what is their approach to content creation and their ultimate production value? Some producers will have extremely polished, professional-grade images and videos shot on high-end equipment with staging. Others may be edgy or artistic or corporate or totally off-hand in their approach. Production value represents an influencer’s natural voice and brand promise in a subtle way. But if you miss this cue, you’ll also miss an opportunity to find a really great brand-influencer fit.
If your brand is cutting-edge, then a high-polish format may be exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re aiming for something that’s more natural, something less staged may be a good choice. Take the time to dwell on what the production value of an influencer’s content signals and how that aligns with your plans.
3 Strategies Brands Employ for Successful Influencer Campaign Content
Once you’ve evaluated the content of specific influencers, it’s time to provide them with guidelines for creating their connected campaign content. Choosing influencers that maintain natural content synergies goes a long way toward making your campaign a success. But there are three additional strategies that can help brands feel confident that their content matches their needs:
Clearly articulated goals and metrics: The more you communicate to your influencers, the better chance they have of meeting your needs. Provide background on your brand, product, and the goals of the campaign. Explain what you’re hoping to achieve and what makes you believe their brand is a good fit. Develop clear guidelines – including your success metrics – to help guide content creation. Context and clarity lead to great content creation.
Have a plan for amplification: Often, the goal of an influencer marketing campaign is amplification. Perhaps you’re trying to expand the reach of a specific piece of content, or raise awareness of your brand image with a target audience. Either way, those goals will be more successful if there’s a plan in place to help further amplify the content created. There will be natural lift from the influencer’s own audience. But strategic investment in advertising, sponsored posts, outreach to PR, and simply sharing the content on your own social channels ensures that everything is being optimally promoted.
Hire the right partner for strategy and execution: Managing the content streams associated with influencer marketing is a tremendous amount of work. Specific steps include identifying influencers, articulating campaign goals, setting success metrics in place, refining messaging, translating that into content guidelines, reviewing content for compliance, overseeing implementation, and keeping lines of communication open so that influencers have a great experience with your brand.
An experienced agency like FullBottle can guide a brand through these steps. Our team uses our considerable experience, well-defined processes, and proprietary technology to ensure that your influencer campaign is a success and that the content produced achieves the campaign’s goals.
Are you ready to explore whether influencer marketing campaigns are the right fit for your brand? Contact FullBottle today to learn more about our services.
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