Five Tips to Maximize Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

The popularity of influencer marketing has skyrocketed: check out how the search volume for “influencer marketing” has increased over the past five years!

More and more brands are recognizing that it’s one of the most important pieces of the overall marketing/PR pie. So, how can you ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment?

Read on for tips on how you can maximize your influencer marketing campaign.

Tip 1: Keep Them Coming Back with Evergreen Content

The internet never forgets, and that can be a great thing for brands, assuming it’s content they want to be seen over and over again. By encouraging influencers to publish evergreen content — that is, content that is not tied to one particular promotion or timeframe — brands reap the benefits of a one-time influencer marketing campaign indefinitely. That’s because the influencers’ content continues to gain visibility over time, improving the brand’s search rankings and providing potential customers with resources and information about the brand from a credible source, the influencer, when they’re on the path to purchase.

Tip 2: Foster Relationships with Brand Aficionados and Star Performers

Once you’ve identified and worked with influencers who have a passion for your brand, fostering those relationships can yield long-term benefits. Launching a new product? Tap influencers who know your brand well to serve as a mini focus group to offer valuable insights. Diving in to your next influencer campaign? Make sure you include a few influencers who have historically performed well for you.

Not only do influencers become a part of the brand’s evolution this way, but also, it boosts an influencer’s authenticity when it’s evident that she uses the product or service in her daily life. Cultivating relationships in this way can result in content that demonstrates a deep understanding of a brand’s objectives and can garner brand trust and loyalty in the long run.

Tip 3: Use an Agency That Specializes in Finding Targeted Influencers

The most successful influencer campaigns are those that involve hyper-targeted, carefully vetted influencers that align with the brand’s values and campaign goals.

Whether it’s finding five moms with highly engaged communities to attend an event in Austin, or seeking out 50 millennial moms with kids under age five to try out a new product, it can be extremely time-consuming to identify and manage these target-right influencers on your own. Working with an agency like The Motherhood creates both budget and time efficiencies because we’ve gathered data and insights from thousands of trusted influencers over several years, and our senior-level staff takes a hands-on approach to managing each and every program.

This goes hand-in-hand with the tip above, too: an influencer marketing agency can help nurture long-term relationships on behalf of your brand.

Tip 4: Your Content Has Legs – Exercise Them!

An undeniable benefit to an influencer campaign is that once it has ended, the content lives on and continues to deliver value over time. Brands have the opportunity to get additional eyeballs on the content generated during the campaign by cross-promoting it on their website, blog and/or social media channels (using proper attribution and crediting the influencer, of course).

Another great and cost-efficient option for boosting the visibility of influencer content comes from promoting it with paid Facebook posts. Boosted posts appear higher and more frequently in the News Feed, increasing the reach and engagement levels beyond those of a standard Facebook post.

Tip 5: Trust Your Influencers to Do It Right

70 percent of bloggers feel that there is a gap between what type of content works with their audience and what brands think works.*

Giving influencers an understanding of your campaign’s objectives and an idea of your intended messaging is crucial to shaping any influencer campaign. However, overly prescriptive messaging and strict brand guidelines can detract from the human aspect of an influencer marketing campaign, and it simply won’t perform well.

There’s a reason influencers have clout: their opinions, lifestyles and values resonate with their communities, which keeps them coming back for more. To have that influence carry over to your brand, it’s important that influencers have creative liberties when working on your campaign.

Contact us for additional ways to get the most out of your influencer campaign: contact@themotherhood.com.

*As revealed by an online survey conducted by Smith Brothers Agency and The Motherhood of 600 women within The Motherhood blogger network and approximately 50 brands that use influencer programs as part of their marketing mix.