How to Optimize Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Influencer marketing can be a powerful tool for brands and when it’s done right, you can quickly reach your target market for far less than what would need to be spent on search and paid social.

However if you don’t get the right mix of talent, creative and message, you can quickly find yourself in an expensive and poor performing campaign. Here’s how to optimize influencer campaigns from start to finish.

Develop Your Offer

This is the most important thing. Are you trying to raise brand awareness, are you looking for direct purchases? Is there an incentive, limited time offer or other hook to get someone in?

This might seem simple but ultimately who you choose to engage with and how your creative serves as a conduit for that engagement is all based on your initial offer.

Vet Your Influencer

The easiest way to find influencers that will work well with your brand is to leverage audience discovery tools like Sparktoro to find who your current followers engage with most frequently. These kinds of tools can help you find both macro influencers (1 million+ followers) or micro influencer with 5,000 followers that get insane engagement rates.

These tools can also vet things like fake subscriber rates and give you a sense of whether their followers are in or out of your target market.

Creative

This is where almost every well conceived campaign goes wrong. Every platform offers static posts, videos, stories, bio links etc … and often brands don’t ask enough relative to their investment.

Immediate ad stories that someone can tap through in a tenth of a second or poorly scripted videos where it’s clear from the first sentence it’s an ad will never perform well no matter how many followers someone has.

Study your influencer, specifically their highest engaging content and look for clues on how to model and script compelling content. Someone who is really artistic will look out of place holding a cardboard box with your product name and someone who travel blogs won’t get much engagement for a paid post of your product on their kitchen table.

Message

Even campaigns where influencer, offer and creative align can see failure when they don’t have a well written message. At the end of the day, your post is asking someone to take action and that action needs to be clearly described, clearly feasible and easy to access.

Is there a link in the bio to purchase? Can they swipe up to visit the product page? Simple things like this are often missing from the messaging so even when you get a report back showing high engagement, you won’t see the resulting sales because of a muddled message.

These are just a few helpful tips. If you need a custom influencer marketing strategy, contact AVX and we’ll source influencers, develop creative and run campaigns that convert.