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Influencer marketing isn’t easy.
While influencer marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for connecting with customers in an authentic way, it can prove challenging on many levels. Few are the marketers who can marry a clever strategy with a deft influencer selection, and coordinate engaging creative that reaches a spot-on targeted audience. These influencer marketers deserve praise and recognition.
Our goal at NeoReach is to help you succeed in your influencer marketing. To that end, we will be taking some time each month to highlight the crème de la crème influencer marketing case studies. Each case study will be closely inspected to distill down what made it successful. We hope that this effort will help bolster your own campaigns and strategies.
In this article, we will outline the guiding values and the different elements that we think constitute a great influencer campaign. This model can be used as a lens for analyzing influencer marketing campaigns as well as a guide for designing them.
The Guiding Values the Best of Influencer Marketing
It is our core belief that any great execution starts with great values. Values form the underlying foundation that guides your thoughts, your words, and your actions. From our experience, successful influencer marketing campaigns tend to follow these three guiding values.
Authenticity
We hear about the importance of authenticity in marketing all the time. Nowhere is it more important that in influencer marketing. Authenticity is about being real. It’s about being true to what you believe and who you are. It is a core human quality that is at the root of human connection.
An influencer is nothing without their own unique voice and takes on things. This is how they amassed their fans, who expect specific points of view expressed in a particular tone. When collaborating with an influencer, you want to be acutely aware not to break, but to amplify the influencer’s tone and perspective. In order to do so effectively, you must master the art of setting directions while leaving room for the influencer to express themselves on their own terms.
Relevance
Relevance is about showing the right message to the right person. This is crucial to succeeding in the current media landscape, where a user can tune out your post with one click. In influencer marketing, relevance entails selecting influencers who’s persona and audience match the message you are aiming to get across. For example, you would not hire a sports vlogger reaching college-age males to promote a new women’s luxury brand. Also, brands and influencers should avoid any sort of ‘surprise’ integration of the brand to the content, but rather weave brand mentions or highlights into the content’s narrative throughout.
Value
People will only consume your content if they find value in doing so. This is doubly true for sponsored influencer marketing content. If an influencer is going to post about a brand, the content that features that brand should be even better than their normal content in order to justify the brand feature. That content should provide value to the end user who is watching the content. Value can be provided in a number of ways. For instance, it can be that the brand sponsored a very special experience for the influencer, or that the brand is offering a very favorable discount to an influencer’s followers.
The Elements of a Successful Influencer Marketing Post
With those guiding values established, we will now explore the different elements that make up a successful influencer marketing campaign.
Match of Influencer and Brand
Taking time when playing matchmaker is important as forming the right relationship will be critical to success. In a successful post, this relationship will be completely harmonious – meaning, the brand or product is something one could almost assume the influencer would champion. Brands can achieve this success by seeking out influencers with similar personalities to their own digital voice, and those with followings and communities that overlap with their own.
Creative and Distribution Strategy
While these could technically be considered separate components, they need to be in such close syncopation that they should be looked at as one marker of success.
The creative strategy should ensure any content is appropriate for the platform and appeal to the influencers fans on that platform. Additionally, the content should incorporate creative elements that make sense for both the influencer and brand. Care should be taken with regards to the story being told, plus the tone and length of the content.
A successful distribution strategy is demonstrated by where the content has been published and how, if at all, the content has been modified to be platform-appropriate. Though as outside observers we may not have full visibility into it, the paid media support for an influencer marketing post also plays a successful post.
Audience Targeting
The final marker of success for a successful post is the audience engaged around it, and the type of reaction they have. If we can see a number of individuals that fit what’s likely the brand’s core target, applauding the content (and perhaps even the brand), we can chalk that up as a success.
Stay Tuned For The Best Of Influencer Marketing Series
Now that you have a better idea of what criteria we’ll be analyzing posts with, be sure to check back to see the best of influencer marketing each month!
