Chances are, your team or organization is facing a similar struggle to many other brands right now: remote work environments and reduced access to content production studios have created a challenge in producing new content for upcoming product launches or evergreen campaigns.
Additionally, your team may be downsizing resulting in limited content creation resources, or heck, maybe your content is just not getting you anywhere.
If the above is familiar to you, now is the right time to tap into social media influencers and their content to keep your audience growing and build brand affinity.
Why Partnering with Influencers is a Game-Change
A Voice that Aligns with your Brand
Influencers’ voices are powerful and authentic. 89% of brands say ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels.
Collaborating with influencers gives your team a huge opportunity to work with storytellers that align with your brand’s values, voice, and goals. By identifying your influencers’ interests, hobbies, and passions and ensuring they align with your brand, the content they produce will resonate on a deeper level with their audience.
Think about it: influencers take pride in sharing their personal life and experiences with their audience. They share their highs and lows with their followers.
So when they share content on why they love your brand or how your product makes their life better, their audience (ahem, potential buyers) see their story as an authentic testimonial.
Micro-influencers can be great for organic engagement, while content creators with larger followings can be great to reach larger audiences. But remember, it’s important to not just look at follower count or likes. Dig deeper and really educate yourself on what the influencer is passionate about.
Finding the right influencer voice that represents your brand well and who has a trusted voice to their audience is beneficial for both your brand and the authenticity of an influencer to their followers.
Saving Time = Saving Money
It is inevitable; creating content-in house takes time and resources, and outsourcing content can be costly; influencer partnerships combat that.
Instead of:
- Your team compiling ideas on creative
- Hiring or selecting individuals as product models
- Capturing video or photo content in a studio
- Importing content into a photo or video editing program
- Editing content
- Resizing and exporting
Tapping into influencers allows them to step in and replace all of the above by delivering content shot on iPhones at a faster and cheaper rate. Embrace the influencers’ creativity by providing loose campaign briefs and sharing brand guidelines that allow them to truly shoot unique content for your brand.
In today’s world consumers are 2.4 times more likely to view user-generated content (like an influencer’s Instagram post) as authentic compared to content created by brands.
If consumers are more likely to pick up on its authenticity and it takes your team less time to create, what’s holding you back?
Getting the most out of your Influencer Partnerships
Reach new Audiences and Track Sales with Influencer Ads
Performance metrics have long been associated with digital marketing efforts but in today’s influencer marketing world should evolve past vanity engagement rate metrics such as likes and comments.
We know that influencers have been shown to have tremendous sway with consumers, but traditional influencer marketing across social media platforms is limited by scale, targeting, and measurability.
So, how can you ensure that you are getting the most out of your influencer partnerships? By whitelisting your influencer content.
If you're not familiar with whitelisting influencer content, in short, it means that your team can create influencer ads to amplify content to audiences that are farther reaching and more targeted than those in an organic campaign.
Implementing whitelisting into influencer contracts as a part of your influencer marketing strategy allows you to combat the low reach and lack of measurability of organic content.
Because influencer ads allow you to actually track the sales data associated with each piece of content, you can easily assess the return on investment and find content winners for your influencer efforts.
Extend the Shelf-Life of Influencer Content and Grow your own Content Library
Gaining whitelisting permission for your influencers is the first step to getting the most out of influencer content, but growing and expanding your asset library is next in line.
81% of consumers are known to frequently buy the items they’ve seen shared on social media, meaning that the more frequently a user sees something, the greater of a chance there is they will purchase.
Repurposing influencer content for use in influencer ads, brand ads, website collateral, or email marketing is a great way to extend the shelf life of influencer content far past the organic posting period. Of course, make sure your influencer partners have agreed to the proper usage terms.
With Lumanu’s Content Manager tool, you can store, view, and download an influencer's original assets to use across a variety of marketing materials. Not only does Lumanu’s Content Manager store all in-feed Facebook and Instagram posts, but it also stores Instagram stories. About a third of influencer content on Instagram appears on stories, so to capture and have access to these stories after their 24-hour expiration time is a great way to continue access to those assets all in one place.
When in-house content creation is slow, frame your team’s mindset to think of influencer marketing an opportunity to try something new or mix things up. Partnering with content creators to meet your team’s marketing objective, whether it’s to increase brand awareness, reach new audiences, or drive sales is an extremely effective use of budget.
Is your team ready to save time and ramp up your influencer marketing strategy? Check out a recent post on our blog to learn how to turn your influencers into a performance channel.
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