January 25, 2024
Last week, we attended the Brandwatch: London Masterclass, where we listened to panels and talks from leading brands, social media platforms (TikTok & Meta), and Brandwatch themselves, about what the future holds in digital marketing.
One of the panels was Leveraging Influencers for a Bigger Impact with Karen Chisholm from NHS Blood & Transplant, and Georgia Goodwin from Digital Voices.
The duo discussed their own direction with influencer strategies, and best practise for getting the most of influencer campaigns.
Here are some of our key take aways
- Always On Strategy
- Ensuring your influencer activity is steady and consistent is crucial for success. This is called an ‘Always On’ approach which is exactly what it says on the tin.
- By following an always on strategy, your audience and their audiences will constantly be exposed to your brand, products and/or service, which helps for authenticity, brand memorability and credibility.
- Building Relationships with Influencers & Creators
- In addition to running steady influencer activity with your brand, the panel emphasised the point about how important it is to try to use the same pool of influencers in your campaigns.
- Audiences can then associate your brand positively with the influencers you work with.
- By continuing to use the same influencers and creators each time you activate; your brand is able to develop a relationship with them, which means they will get to know your brand well, and continually improve the level of creation for you, and may also be more enjoyable to work with!
- Creative Freedom
- When working with influencers and creators, creative freedom is super important to allow them to create something meaningful and authentic for their audience.
- As brands typically work with influencers for specific campaigns, they have key campaign messages that they want the talent to incorporate into their submissions. However, this can often mean that the brand gives the influencer a script to ensure that the message is delivered exactly how they want.
- Unfortunately, by using scripts, the ‘paid ad’ aspect of the influencer work can end up being extremely obvious, and often comes off as disingenuous and inauthentic. This is a bad result for both the brand, and for the influencer’s audience perceptions.
- This is why creative freedom is generally a much better approach when it comes to working with talent.
When working with smaller influencer budgets as a brand, it can be difficult to use the same influencers each time you activate an amplification strategy, as you may be extremely selective dependent on your campaign, or it might be unfeasible to run back to back influencer campaigns throughout the year.
Our recommendation here would be:
- Try using an influencer platform without an admin fee, this will help you to source a pool of creators and influencers within your budget.
- Work with nano to micro influencers who are looking to build their followings and work with brands like yours.
- If your needs are mostly for UGC style content, but you don’t receive tags from your audience, try to work with smaller creators (rather than influencers) who produce aligned imagery already for other brands like yours, or produce lifestyle content that would work with your feed.
