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. 

With brands of all sizes exploring influencer marketing as a way to seed authentic, searchable content that drives purchase over time, one of the first decisions is whether to manage it in-house or through a network or agency. We’ve discussed the benefits of using an influencer marketing agency, but the decision doesn’t end there.

When it comes to selecting a partner for influencer marketing efforts, brands are faced with the prospect of evaluating dozens of organizations: large influencer marketplaces, boutique networks, blogger-run collectives and numerous other operations. As a social media marketing agency that has pioneered and executed hundreds of award-winning influencer marketing campaigns, The Motherhood understands the unique benefits of engaging a boutique agency.

High-Tech vs. High-Touch

Many large influencer networks tout their marketplace of tens of thousands of influencers who are available to brands at the click of a mouse. Campaigns are run through slick-looking automated dashboards.

While on the surface a high degree of hands-off automation may seem like a benefit, the reality is that a high-tech approach will fall flat without a high-touch element, for a number of reasons.

Blogger Vetting Requires a Human Touch

We know that 75 percent of professionals consider identifying the right influencers to be the biggest challenge of a sponsored content campaign. Reviewing thousands of prospective influencers within a database — even after extensive filtering, sorting and filing — doesn’t take into account the very necessary human element to the selection process.

The Motherhood takes a personal, detailed approach to blogger vetting, considering things like:

• past, present or future relationships with competitors
• responsiveness of an individual influencer (critical for quick-turnaround campaigns)
• strengths or talents on certain platforms (performance goes beyond numbers)
• existing affinity for the brand
• other special circumstances that aren’t able to be captured in a database (For example, if a blogger’s child was just diagnosed with lactose intolerance, that may exclude her from a dairy campaign; or if a blogger just announced a pregnancy, that could impact a recommendation for an OTC product campaign)

Additionally, we often recommend an up-and-coming blogger who loves the brand we’re vetting for and who has proven to deliver gorgeous content. While those types of influencers are often overlooked or overshadowed in a large database, the boutique agency approach allows us to present some true rising stars in the blogosphere who will generate significant conversion for the brand.

With The Motherhood campaigns, brands always have the opportunity to review a large selection of influencers and select their top choices for their campaign. The difference is that a boutique agency offers tremendous efficiency by delivering a carefully curated list of influencers who are excellent fits for the individual campaign and brand, taking into account many intangibles that a dashboard can’t. Working with a boutique agency to identify bloggers is like receiving a beautifully packaged gift selected just for you.

With Automation Comes Risk

Large networks often promote automation as a way to achieve scale. While that can sound attractive to busy marketers, we’ve observed within the industry at large more than a few scenarios in which automation caused (or could have caused) detriment to the brand. Consider the following:

• An influencer marketplace employed an automated system in which it would identify high-performing blogger content and launch an amplification campaign. However, the content the system identified as a top post included the wrong campaign hashtag and inaccurate campaign messaging, which was not caught until days later. The result? Many, many hours of re-work from the account team, leading to lost momentum and an over-budget campaign.
• On the flip side, a large team of influencers was working to publish content according to a very specific, immoveable deadline. However, just before the content was to go live, the brand’s landing page was inexplicably removed, resulting in a broken link. The Motherhood’s dedicated account team identified this in a way that an automated dashboard could not. By flagging the issue to the client and obtaining a tracking link to a new landing page within the hour, all coverage was still published on deadline without any of the re-work that would have been required if the dead link had made it into 75 blog posts and several hundred social media posts.

Better Engagement — But Not in the Way You Think

The debate on why engagement matters is alive and well, but we’re talking about a different kind of engagement. In this instance, the engagement we’re referring to relates to how invested an influencer is in a brand’s campaign, which we know to be much more easily and genuinely achieved with a boutique agency.

In any given influencer marketing campaign, there are dozens of touch points with prospective and confirmed bloggers. The journey could include any or all of the following:

• The initial program ask
• One or more rounds of negotiation
• Contract signature or request for tax-related documents
• Briefing the participants on the messaging, theme and approach
• Copy review and approval
• Coverage monitoring and reminders
• Follow-up to request corrections
• Results collection and reporting
• Post-program wrap-up

With a boutique agency, influencers also receive on-call access to senior account directors who can answer their questions and provide quick-turnaround insights that help them deliver accurate, timely and creative content.

At The Motherhood, we view influencer marketing as a very human, very personal discipline. Each communications touch point is an opportunity — person to person, not person to dashboard — to endear an influencer to your brand and generate long-term affinity. By creating a human connection and putting a face behind the network and the brand, the influencer knows they are heard, valued and appreciated. We know this to be a powerful incentivize to bring their best selves and to produce high-quality content that moves the needle.

The Motherhood: A Boutique Agency Achieving Big Things

The Motherhood is the gold standard in influencer marketing, founded and run by seasoned PR professionals who, for more than a decade, have consistently produced exceptional, award-winning online content. We’ve been named the PR News Social Media Team of the Year, AMA Marketer of the Year, PRSA Agency of the Year and Best in Show and one of Pittsburgh’s fastest-growing marketing agencies. We’re also one of Pittsburgh’s coolest offices to boot!

To discuss ways our boutique agency can deliver value and impact for your influencer marketing campaigns, please email contact@themotherhood.com.