What is influence marketing?
Influence marketing was born with the advent of influencers, opinion leaders who use their social media networks to create content in a specific sector. Fashion, sports, cooking, lifestyle, humour: their mastery of these subjects allows them to acquire a certain awareness and to create an engaged community.
One thing for sure: collaborating with these content creators allows you to increase the reach of your brand on social media. But to succeed, we must choose seasoned influencers who share our brand’s values.
Critical steps that cannot be skipped make all the difference.
After having made a judgment about associating your brand with public personalities, and having defined what the match is between your objectives and the target audience, many steps can be taken to try and generate an effective influence marketing campaign.
And don’t forget about what platforms you choose to disseminate your message. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch: they all have their quirks and influencers all have different ways of using them to reach their community. Think about what format is best suited to your objectives. How do you want to disseminate your message? A succession of frames in story, static images in a carousel, a short video…There are a host of choices and a host of tactics.
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Choosing the right influencers and the social media to prioritize
When you choose an influencer, this person becomes the face of your brand on social networks. Before approaching such a person, think about the image they project. Have they ever been involved in controversial subjects? Have they ever made their opinions known about thorny subjects that run counter to your brand’s values? A discreet inquiry is wise to ensure harmony with an enterprise’s values.
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Define permanence measurements according to content
Don’t forget to define performance measurements (KPIs) that you want to adopt to ensure the success of your campaign. For a video that disseminates a key message, viewing the entire video (or most of it) is more than adequate. However, if you’re trying to sell a product, you would want users to click on a link that sends them to a transactional site.
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The importance of a good brief to creating appropriate content
The medium and the form must align with your brand’s image and the voice (in its widest sense) of the influencer. Use the creativity of your collaborators to disseminate your message. To avoid useless spillage, it’s important to frame the creative by developing a clear brief with campaign objectives, key messages, desired formats, access to post-campaign data, the timetable, the budget, etc. Don’t be afraid to be precise about your expectations, in order to avoid needless to-and-fros.
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Supervise content creation
It’s not a myth. Working with influencers can be an arduous task: each collaborator has their own way of dealing with content. It can become difficult to disseminate a message imposed by a campaign, even if the fee is generous. Make sure the influencer you have chosen has all the information in hand that is necessary for the creation of content.
Then, make sure you do a strict follow-up on content. Do be afraid to ask influencers to make corrections before content is disseminated, all the while allowing a certain amount of latitude so that influencers can let their creative juices flow and put their personal stamp on it.
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Measuring the impact of publications
Now that content has been created and online, it’s time to measure campaign results. Impressions, reach, engagement, clicks: it’s critical to analyze data linked to defined objectives to better understand the impact of creative, and being able to adjust its aim (if necessary) for the next campaign.
There is no single, universal approach to developing a good influencing strategy. Each influencer is unique, and the opportunities for creating content, almost limitless. Influence marketing is a new way of communicating that requires time and openness to the idea of venturing away from traditional codes of advertising. Still, if the influencer respects the brief, this tactic can really pay off and induce users to become intimately involved with the brand and even become brand ambassadors themselves. All you have to do is jump in with informed decisions at the ready.
