Influencer marketing has taken the world by storm. The rising popularity of social media across all industries and niches from business and real estate to gaming and fashion has fired a shockwave of interest into the marketing ecosystem. The massive wave of interest in influencer marketing has globally resulted in more people running amazing influencer campaigns. In addition, a whole lot of people are running badly executed, inside the box, boring influencer marketing campaigns.
For example, we have recently been asked the question:
“Are there any influencer marketing tools that can run pre-roll ads on instagram photos?”
We hope we don’t need to dive too deep into why hearing this from an internationally acclaimed advertising network hurts our ear drums. Regardless, we wanted to write an article that might inspire a person or two to jump with both feet out of the influencer marketing box, and into the reality of what influence is. Not just a single platform on which to apply a cookie cutter branded ad for everyone to ignore. Rather, something familiar.
Not a new thing, just an actionable version of everyone’s favorite marketing tool: Trust.
Influence is NOT exclusive to any single medium of advertising.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson made 125,000,000 dollars last year. Not because he’s a better actor than Tom Hanks, not because he’s a physical juggernaut. Instead, it’s because if you put that man in a movie, you will sell tickets. If you put him in a TV advertisement for the most famous brand of computers on the planet, you will sell laptops.
Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?
The ability to drive eyeballs. The Rock has built a huge audience and establishes trust in seconds. On Instagram, The Rock’s top posts are branded content for his upcoming films. In movie posters, his giant nostrils and chiseled jaw overwhelm fans with joy.
The reason we briefly introduce Dwayne’s influence is to demonstrate how it doesn’t live exclusively social. It lives everywhere. Social is just the easiest execute to find it, and where we as marketers have applied it.
Influence on billboards:
Influence in original content:
Weird mashups in your superbowl ads:
“ Live in the leading – the spaces between the rules” – Stefan Mumaw
The truth is, we cannot specifically tell you what original idea you should use to make your brand stand out. However, we can try and inspire with a loose translation of my own thoughts around the mentality to have when approaching ideation.
Planning Ahead
Plan something you will be proud to talk about afterwards. We have seen that, when you start with content that is appealing to you, your audience and the influencers themselves; results will follow.
Consider one of the most successful campaigns Modash has been involved in to-date for YCombinator alumni, Veriff. The entire creative concept behind Veriff’s influencer campaign was celebration. The celebration of their 100th employee. As we mentioned in the case study on the campaign they essentially started with this premise:
You’re 22, considering a job alongside school. A young, quickly growing startup that even Ashton Kutcher invested into is buying 100 cannons of confetti to try and convince you to apply for a job. They’re also asking the coolest people in town to support the mission of hiring their next 160 people.
Do you apply?
– #Veriff100 Influencer Marketing Campaign
Something Veriff’s work culture cared about was their milestones of rapid growth. Something the influencer could care about was the opportunity to blast confetti with a young, local startup that mega-famous Ashton Kutcher had supported.
Getting the Creative Right
When you’re planning the proper story to tell or content to create with influencers, it’s important to make it interesting. People connect to great stories because it gives us an emotional response and allows us to relate.
Highlighting the particular problem you solve, the special reality of your solution, or expressing a milestone are three great ideas to start with.
Imagine you are a flight claim service. You allow people to earn hundreds of dollars back if they have had a flight delay or cancellation in the last 12 months. You’re expanding to new markets.
The announcement of your product launching in the local country can be presented by travel influencers with audiences in that country. They discuss how they earned hundreds or thousands of dollars back just by using your service and showing their followers how it works.
It’s exciting, valuable, and new. Content gold. Something this simple can be a huge boost for a brand like this.
Getting the Influencers Right
The influence dream has not always been easy. It has been plagued with fraudulent and difficult to find target audiences. Not to mention how incredibly time consuming the execution process can be.
Now, it’s completely possible to run audience targeted influencer campaigns with verifiably credible influencers globally. Using Modash at Vitals, we’ve tried to create the best tools to run an influencer marketing campaign from start to finish. Including campaign management, communication, and finding influencers on Instagram, Twitch, and other social media channels.
When deciding on influencers to work with, there are a few criteria to initially consider. Budget is a good place to start. While long term relationships with mid level influencers are very effective and easier to manage, they can be more expensive. Meanwhile, working with small creators can be vastly inexpensive, but more communication effort will be required. With tools like Modash, you can successfully complete those tasks much more time efficiently.
Once you have determined your budget, you need to figure out who your target market is following. Who does your target customer care about? Do they have anything to do with the problem you solve?
Let’s say you’re a Cat Cafe restaurant chain with a young adult audience in Texas. Influencers with audiences in Texas, who are interested in pets, between the ages of 18-24, and are posting content that suits your brand would be the ideal creators in which to conduct business together. The question is: how do you find them?
Without a tool, you will need to manually scroll through instagram and search for hashtags related to your topic. Then, you can start making some assumptions based on the content they post and who they might be trying to reach. Why go through all that extra work when you can simply use Modash!
Where Can You Leverage Trust Today?
At Vitals, we are pushing to get consumers to trust us enough to buy the value we provide. Being trustworthy is one thing, but proving you’re trustworthiness is something entirely different. Influencer marketing is the process of borrowing existing trust from creators.
So we gift you this question; where could you be using influencers today to up your existing marketing efforts for super-powered trust building?