In the year 2019, every brand is rushing to learn and implement influencer marketing, for a very good reason. With its very attractive ROI and immediate results, brands want to join the bandwagon to achieve their goals.
Consumer surveys show how much they are influenced into buying a product after seeing an influencer’s post about it. Not just organic posts, but even sponsored posts have had an effect on consumers to follow social media accounts of other brands. According to a study by Google, 70% of the teenage YouTube population is influenced extensively by YouTubers and vloggers than the bigger, more traditional celebrities.
Let’s face it, traditional ads are almost obsolete these days. They cost a lot and tend to fall on deaf ears.
Clearly, influencer marketing is the way to go, but if everyone is participating, how do you beat the competition? How do you make sure that your influencer strategy will truly get the best engagement and reach? And how can you be certain that your campaign will ultimately get you more sales?
Here are a few of the best tips to absolutely smashing the competition and out-influence everyone else.
1. Turn your influencers into ambassadors.
Working with influencers to promote your brand will only get you so far. In order to maximize your influencer campaigns, you need to build long-term relationships with each of your influencers. One way to do so is to turn them into true ambassadors for your brand.
Influencers are perfect because they have an established audience that is interested in specific subjects. This audience is also engaged enough to interact with the type of content and the specific style that the influencer uses.
The more your message is promoted to and consumed by that audience, the higher the likelihood of sales for your product or service. So you want to find an influencer with a large enough or an engaged enough audience and work with them on a long-term basis.
What you need to do is find an influencer whose message and style are authentic and consistent in addition to matching your brand. But how exactly do you find these influencers?
That brings us to the next point.
2. Use an influencer tool or marketplace.
If you want to be better at influencer marketing than everyone else, you need some additional help. There are a variety of tools that automate several vital pieces of the influencer campaign for you.
Greenroom also provides a customized service for finding influencers with an in-built platform. These tools each come with a search feature that allows you to narrow down your influencer search effectively to find the ideal people to work with.
3. Track your campaign.
What many marketers struggle with when it comes to influencer marketing are campaign execution and tracking. They have a hard time figuring out exactly how their campaigns are driving results and get overwhelmed by the amount of work it takes to run these types of campaigns. For most marketers, the struggle is in understanding how each of the influencers is performing. This can make it difficult to calculate your campaign ROI.
4. Use multiple mediums.
If you want to absolutely crush the competition, you need to utilize every single medium that your influencers use. For example, if your influencer uses Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, ask them to post unique native content on each platform about your brand.
Gillette did this in a brilliant way. The company wanted to promote its new product line — the Gillette Venus, for which they hired several female beauty influencers. The influencers then created Instagram posts, which they used for directing visitors to their vlogs. These vlogs, too, contained mentions of the brand. By using multiple mediums and a catchy hashtag, #ChooseToSmooth, the brand was able to garner an engagement rate of 2.2%. The campaign also reached 476,000.
5. Leverage user-generated content.
User-generated content is the holy grail of influencer marketing.
This is where users or followers get so inspired by a campaign that they go out and create their own content in which they tag the brand using the campaign’s hashtag. This creates a viral effect on the campaign that quickly multiplies the engagement and reach.
One incredible example of this is the campaign that the Australian skincare company Frank Body did. They sell natural skin products and wanted to promote their coffee scrub collection. So they chose several relevant influencers who helped create content in which the brand’s product is featured. Each piece of content was tagged with the catchy #letsbefrank hashtag.
Before you knew it, thousands of users on Instagram began posting photos of themselves, covered in coffee scrub, with the #letsbefrank hashtag. The campaign was one of the most successful campaigns and gained the brand 350,000 followers in a very short time.
Look at the example of Licious. Greenroom recently collaborated with Licious, an online meat and seafood marketplace for an influencer campaign #MadeWithLicious with food influencers. Licious nailed the essentials of a successful marketing campaign with the #MadeWithLicious hashtag which has amassed 1035 posts and the campaign receiving a 100K engagement rate. What did Licious do right? According to Mention.com, 52% of consumers say that participating in a contest helps them feel more connected to a brand. The brand
– chose the right platform
– got the right consumer audience
– the chosen influencers had a consistently good engagement rate
Instagram rewards pages and posts, which has organic follower engagement, with higher exposure and reach. However, the most fundamental quality of a brand contest is to keep it simple. Social media audience will not respond to anything that requires any sort of additional effort. Licious manages to keep the rules uncluttered and the activity was relevant to the brand’s essence. The more appealing the reward is, the more are the chances that the follower will share that experience on social media and link back to you. Licious ensured that the contest prize paved the way to expand its social visibility even further.
Conclusion
Take the time to automate key processes, and gain a clear advantage over your competitors. Make sure to create long-term relationships with every influencer you work with.
Find the best influencers for your brand using an influencer tool or marketplace. Automate your payments to free up some time for other aspects of the campaign. Use every platform that the influencer is on to your advantage. And lastly, leverage user-generated content to make your influencer campaigns go viral.
Have you implemented an influencer marketing campaign before? At Greenroom, we help brands connect with the perfect influencers for their campaign. To reach out to us, leave a comment below, or visit our Facebook, Twitter or Instagram pages to reach out to us.
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