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Influencer marketing continues to grow in popularity, surpassing many marketing strategies, with 75% of marketers having already implemented an influencer marketing solution, according to Forrester. However, too many brand collaborations with influencers today simply involve the creation of pretty photos on Instagram, and it’s easy to see why. It’s quick, affordable (if you’re working with the right influencers) and can be effective.
But if you’re looking to rise above the noise as a marketer, there are sophisticated ways to collaborate with social influencers that can better integrate into your overall marketing ecosystem and objectives.
1. Collect ratings and reviews of your product or service.
When an influencer creates that perfect photo highlighting your product or service, you also have the opportunity to ask them to submit a rating and review. Studies show that having only five reviews causes purchase likelihood to increase by a factor of nearly 4x. The review could be submitted on your company website, but if you’re using an influencer marketing platform, to really scale the impact of your reviews, choose a platform that helps collect reviews from influencers across all of your product SKUs and syndicate those reviews to your website and other third-party retailers that sell your product.
2. Execute a digital focus group or research panel.
When talking with marketers, I’m always surprised to hear how few are using influencers as a digital focus group or research panel. Unlike traditional consumer panels that are full of self-proclaimed “experts,” influencers have been publicly validated as an authority in the field where they create content.
The most effective influencers are also marketing gurus in their own right, so they should be able to communicate their perspective on new cultural trends, social platforms or content formats in a way that has higher utility for your brand than an average consumer panel. Influencers are often willing to answer survey questions or participate in an exclusive focus group as a means for creating a relationship with a new brand for future collaborations, especially if the insights from the research lead to a new product concept that the influencer can later help promote.
3. A/B test creative and campaign concepts.
Before you spend too much time or money with your creative team or agency, try using a handful of influencers to test consumers’ reactions to different campaign briefs and creative. Too often, influencers are brought in at the tail end of the campaign ideation process and used purely as media distribution vehicles, which doesn’t maximize the value they can bring to the table.
Instead, they can be your “canary in the coal mine,” helping unearth creative concepts that resonate with consumers quickly and affordably. Once you see a concept resonating with an influencer, you can double down with the full force of your marketing resources. If the concept falls flat, then you’ve only activated a handful of influencers (ideally micro-influencers to constrain both budget and exposure) and can avoid a potential PR mishap.
4. Repurpose influencer-generated content on your website.
Many marketers repurpose user-generated content (UGC) in their paid media campaigns, but what about for all those products they’re trying to drive sales to? Studies have found that adding UGC to product detail pages on your e-commerce site can increase conversion rates by 3.6x. Even if the influencer did post the image on a social network, you should still repurpose the content to drive even more ROI.
5. Ask customers to apply to your influencer program at checkout.
In my experience, the majority of influencer collaborations still start within a marketplace, where influencers are rented to the highest bidder regardless of how they actually feel about the brand. I always encourage marketers to collaborate with their existing customers who also have influence. There’s no better place to identify these people than after they buy your product. Adding a simple “Apply to our influencer program” call-to-action can get existing customers to raise their hands and opt into your influencer community.
Since it’s full of influencers who love your brand already, you may be able to use branded incentives (product, experiences, promo codes, etc.) instead of cash, which will ensure that those who activate have authentic passion for your brand.
6. Add a ‘filter by influencer’ feature to your e-commerce site.
Once you’re activating a sizeable number of influencers regularly, you should have enough content to make it a key part of your consumer’s purchasing journey. I’m starting to see digitally native brands add filters and searches to their e-commerce experience that allows the consumer to shop for products by influencers. By creating collections of influencer-curated products, your brand can borrow from the equity of that influencer, while also highlighting the product “in the wild” with a real person. This can be incredibly powerful for an up-and-coming brand or a brand that’s trying to shift to a new target audience.
7. Test your brand on emerging channels.
It’s no secret that many emerging social networks come and go, so most marketers will wait to see how mainstream a social network becomes before making an investment. One way to test a network with minimal effort, and before robust paid media capabilities are available, is to leverage influencers on that network to test how users respond to your brand’s presence. TikTok and Twitch are great examples. However, the rules of engagement and content formats are a little different than Instagram or YouTube. Influencers on those platforms are already well-versed in the nuanced dynamics of the platform and community, so pulling a few into a digital focus group on how they would prefer to feature your brand within their next live stream or short video is a great place to start.
As the adoption of influencer marketing continues to grow, finding strategic ways to collaborate with influencers beyond pretty photos on Instagram will enable marketers to maximize the ROI of influencer investments and differentiate in an increasingly noisy ecosystem.
