If you have ever used social media, there is a 99% chance that you have witnessed influencer marketing in action at some point because it has become trendy these days and has helped so many businesses build an online presence and increase sales tremendously.
Influencer marketing is such a powerful and effective tool for brand promotion. That is why many companies have now adopted it to promote their businesses by building relationships with various successful social media influencers.
If you have decided to start your influencer marketing campaigns, you must be wondering how to go about it properly to ensure good results and who to choose among the millions of influencers worldwide. To help you settle these worries and questions, we have compiled the nine best Influencer marketing campaigns that can yield your desired results quickly.
Social Media Takeover
When an influencer is in charge of your social media channels and can share content at a set time, this type of agreement is known as social media takeover. You can agree with an influencer to let them control your social media accounts for a given time; this period can be a day or more or during special events.
The most important thing about this type of influencer marketing campaign is the need for trust. Yes, it requires some high-level trust to be able to give an influencer free access to your social media channels. Due to the high risk involved in this method, it is best to make shorter agreements, at most one week, unless you are very confident that the influencer is trustworthy.
With social media takeover, your channel’s engaging and fun-filled content will appear naturally as though you created them yourself. This content can give your brand the attention and engagement it needs to drive sales, generate leads and keep your audience interested during special occasions.
Some social media platforms like Snapchat have developed a new way to create takeover posts without sharing your passwords with influencers. Since this is the only downside to this influencer marketing campaign method, let’s hope that, with time, other platforms will also adopt better ways to create takeover posts.
Gifts
This is a simple method of initiating a relationship with an influencer of choice. Naturally, when someone gives you a gift, you will feel the need to return the favor; it is the same with social media influencers.
This type of influencer marketing campaign is one of the most cost-effective methods because it involves a brand gifting influencers their products or services. Then the influencers will, in turn, give good reviews, record unboxing videos or recommend the product/services to their followers.
This return of favor is mostly done voluntarily, as the company do not necessarily need to request these actions from the influencers. A common name for this strategy is product seeding, and it is very popular these days, just as it is also effective.
After listening to the influencer’s experience with your products or services, the audience can determine whether they would like to give your brand a try. But, more importantly, so many people who have never heard anything about your brand will get to see and hear about it from a famous online personality.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a unique and incredible influencer marketing strategy; it is very effective and requires you to collaborate with influencers. All you have to do is to find an influencer who is willing to accept blog posts, but the influencer must be in your niche.
There are two ways to carry out guest blogging; either you accept guest posts to your blog or submit your posts to other websites or blogs in the same industry or niche. When you accept the guest post to your blog, the guest blogger will be prone to share the post in his network, which will automatically drive traffic to your blog and increase awareness for your brand.
However, when using the second method, you have to find influencers or publishers who are willing to accept and post articles about your business or industry. Then, you reach out to them and submit your guest post. This will generate valuable leads for your brand and attract new followers and customers, thereby increasing sales and awareness.
Host Giveaways
Giveaway is very common among influencers as it offers many mutual benefits and is simple to implement. It is done by supplying an influencer with your products so they can give them away to lucky followers after following specific procedures.
Giveaways can generate a higher ROI for your brand if the influencers’ audience is larger than yours. In addition, it can help your brand grow its online presence and engagements with the request for comments, follow-ups, retweets, likes and shares from the influencer to the audience.
Many potential customers will be excited to win your products for free and may be driven to purchase them once they like the experience of using them. Also, those that couldn’t win any products will like to buy them to see for themselves what the products are like. But overall, giveaways will increase sales and brand awareness and give the influencer more followers.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a different online marketing system, but it can be implemented into influencer marketing, and it is very effective when done properly. Affiliate marketing relies on partners to market and sell products for brands, and the partners will receive a commission from every sale they can initiate.
While there are affiliate marketers that specialize in this system of brand promotion, you can also make collaboration with influencers to market your product with the promise of a reward or commission.
When the influencer promotes your products, the sales will be made on-site, or the customers can be redirected to your site, but whichever way this sale happens, you will be required to pay the influencer as agreed. The best part of this influencer marketing campaign is that you can partner with as influencers as possible, and it doesn’t have many risks like some other campaigns.
Sponsored Blog Posts
When done correctly, blogs written by influencers always feel like a sales pitch; as such, they are very engaging and captivating. In addition, blogs are fast becoming the most reliable and trusted source of information, so these days you can see people consulting blogs daily before they do certain things, especially purchases.
So many people do not doubt anything written in a blog because they trust that it was created based on detailed research and sometimes from personal experiences. So if you can get an influencer to write about you or your business on their blog, you will automatically earn the trust of readers worldwide.
A sponsored blog post can be done in two ways, you can ask a blogger to write about your products and services in detail and may even offer a discount promo code. Or a blogger can mention your brand or company in a related blog post.
Reviews
Reviews are very common in influencer marketing because every other campaign you choose will mostly end up with good reviews from the influencer. This marketing campaign involves gifting products or services to influencers and celebrities and encouraging them to give feedback on their experience with your products/services.
This method is widely used in different ways, as you can also get reviews from regular customers and giveaway events. In addition, some influencers specialize in giving reviews on products. They do this in an exciting way making the audience believe they have never seen or used the product before, and they share their unboxing and first-time use experience with the audience.
The premise of this influencer marketing campaign is that the brand gifts the influencer some of your products, and in turn, the influencer reviews the product on camera.
Long-term Brand Ambassador
If your brand sells quality and effective products or offers exceptional services, there will naturally be people who enjoy using your products and services and adores them enough to want to promote them. This is how many businesses have built long-term relationships with brand ambassadors to implement influencer marketing in their business.
In this influencer marketing campaign, a brand agrees with an influencer who has enough experience using their products, and this person is usually a famous influencer or a celebrity. The brand ambassador will share articles, posts, images, and videos about your products and services on social media to promote and endorse them. Depending on your agreement, you can also use their faces as the face of your brand.
Many companies have brand ambassadors that have never bought their products before the contract but instead, they gift them these products to gain their favor.
Sponsored Social Media Content
This is very similar to social media takeover, except that the content will be posted on the influencer’s channel instead of giving them access to your brand’s social media accounts. When you have taken time to create excellent content, watching it drown in the noise of social media can be frustrating. This is why partnering with an influencer can help you share excellent and captivating content with as many people as possible and get your desired result.
All you have to do is to create a set of guidelines for the influencer on how you want the content to be and how often you want new content to be produced; then, you sit back and let the expert do the job.
Read also: The key Benefits of Influencer Marketing for your Business
The numerous possibilities that influencer marketing brings are endless; since consumers now rely on opinions and recommendations to make the most of their purchasing decisions, brands now have greater chances to influence and reach out to the targeted audiences.
It is now easier than ever for brands to connect with customers and promote brand awareness because influencer marketing has provided an opportunity for businesses to utilize social networks in many cost-effective and efficient ways.
As social media keeps advancing rapidly, consumers expect brands to communicate with them naturally and in an organic way. Influencers are experts that can help you do this effectively. One thing is sure from all we have discussed so far the usefulness and vastness of influencer marketing cannot be overemphasized.
