5 Lesser-Heard Strategies to Get Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns Rolling
As digital media becomes increasingly pervasive, more customers are consuming advertising on various digital platforms. For business leaders, it has become important to understand the peculiarities of these advertisements and the way they are being viewed by the customers.
As the lines between content and advertisements continue to become blurry, customers must be able to distinguish when something is being promoted with an intention to influence their opinion or behavior for an immediate or eventual commercial gain. This in business terminologies is referred to as influencer marketing.
The real win for brands is to exercise influencer marketing in such a way that customers view the promotional messages, realize the commercial intent of these, and yet get influenced by these messages to eventually take a buying step.
Influencer marketing leverages the power of influencers to expand the outreach of particular campaigns and to accelerate the conversion goals for the brands. An influencer is someone who has access to an audience and the power to impact their purchasing decisions or opinions about a product, service, brand, or experience.
An influencer is usually an authoritative person in terms of knowledge, position, or relationship with their target audience groups. He/she may intervene in an editorial context or in collaboration with a brand to publish content.
The following tips may help the digital marketers maximize their influencer marketing endeavors on several digital media channels:
1. Add a Disclosure Label
The average customer should be able to distinguish between advertisements and user-generated content. To prevent this confusion from cropping up, a disclosure must be added from a list of approved labels. Only permitted disclosure labels from the list of approved labels must be added.
This will allow the brands to leverage their creative ways of advertising; however, will also keep the customers informed that the communication is an advertisement.
Examples of such advertisements include promoting a store or a brand through influencers’ social media handle or promoting paid music in a video.
2. The Disclosure Label Should be Upfront and Suitable for all Potential Devices
The disclosure label used to highlight advertising content must be upfront and customers must be able to see it without clicking on see more. The label must be prominent and must be suitable for all device platforms. The language displayed must be English or should be translated to suit the preferences of the target audience groups.
3. Avoid Exaggerations
Be real – don't over-claim what you can deliver as it can harm your brand equity. For example – avoid the use of filters on commodities such as hair shiners, teeth whiteners, etc.
4. Provide Testimonials or Data in Support of your Claims
The influencer must do their due diligence about any technical or performance claims made by them such as 2X better ROI, or long-lasting results or faster pipeline building, etc. Evidence of due diligence involves correspondence with the advertiser or brand owner confirming that a specific claim made in the advertisement is backed up by scientific substantiation.
5. Get it Documented
For the brands, it is recommended that the contractual agreement between advertiser and influencer carries clauses pertaining to disclosure, use of filters, as well as, due diligence.
Wrap Up
According to research by HubSpot, 80% of marketers state that influencer marketing is effective, and 89% say it works just as well (if not better) than other marketing channels. The top three goals of brands using influencer marketing to promote their business include brand awareness (85%), reaching new audiences (71%), and generating sales and conversions (64%).
Influencer marketing, when properly strategized, helps brands to build trust among the target audience groups, improve brand awareness, enrich their content strategy, and architect winning partnerships with their target audience groups by providing them with amazing value.
The most tangible benefit of influencer marketing, when strategically employed is a higher volume of sales leads, as people trust the influencers for their positive word-of-mouth and pay. Employing the above specific strategies will help you boost your influencer marketing campaigns.
Tell us, what do you think about the tips above, or if you have some new ones in your mind in the comments section.