How to Increase the ROI of Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
Return on investment (ROI) is one of the key indicators for evaluating the performance of your advertising campaigns. The higher it is, the more successful you are and the more efficiently your money works. When investing in influencer marketing and setting a budget for a campaign, brands are used to relying only on the results that influencers give them directly.
This means that no other advertising formats are used here and no other marketing activities are considered. Such an approach can be viable, the experience of thousands of marketers and brands shows that it works and influencers show reasonable results, basically that’s why influencer marketing is one of the major areas digital marketing in general and grows up further away.
But there is a way to earn more profit, the maximum possible. A marketing campaign as a whole consists of various activities, messages (digital, in this case) and media formats – let’s say, they’re all patches. They may work well separately, but the real strength is in unity. To unlock the full potential of influencer marketing and reinforce other advertisements, patches must be sewn together to create a complete image.
To do it right, there are a few key points to keep in mind:
- Give an influencer specs to make content you could use more.
- Negotiate the deal and purchase the right to use the influencer’s content.
- Adaptation of content for other advertising formats.
- Use of Content on Other Platforms.
Let’s see what all of this means.
Adapting a technical task to an influencer
So you decided to increase your ROI with the help of influencers. Alright, now you need to think about what content you want to work with more. What really makes sense is your goal. Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Or attract new customers? Or is the campaign aimed at retaining users? Depending on your answer, the objective may vary, as may the specifications you must give to the influencers engaged in your advertising campaign.
You have a product or service with its benefits for customers; you know your target audience’s concerns and desires, and you have an influencer with their own unique way of reaching the audience. The sum of all this knowledge and instruments gives you a clear picture of exactly what you want the influencer to convey. This is where your spec list begins.
- Tell the influencer more about your brand and product so they can dig deeper into the essential features and better understand the product and your values. Ideally, the influencer should become a sincere enthusiast who promotes the product with joy.
- Highlight the most important parts and set the accents. Usually, it is not necessary to tell the audience everything at once, just stick to the most valuable features that can pique the interest of precisely the target audience. This is what the influencer should talk about more and be passionate about – just like yourself.
- In addition to specifying what the influencer should do and say, also specify what they should not do. For example, no mention of competing brands, no swear words and insults in advertisements, and no live crocodiles should be in the frame… Anything you can find that may have some significance.
All of these points relate to the content itself. Don’t forget to define more technical requirements. For instance:
- Ads must be at least two minutes long and no longer than three minutes.
- The video must be of high quality, the image must be clear.
- The sound of the videos must also be clear, so it is better to use a suitable microphone.
- The call to action should be well articulated.
- The influencer should be right in the center of the frame.
All of this will help you adapt the content for later use.
Buy the right to use influencer content
No, you don’t automatically get full rights to ads if an influencer created them for your brand. Yes, the influencer is still the copyright holder even if you pay them for the promotion. Yes, you can become the right holder.
To use the content made for you by the influencer, you must add a clause on the purchase of the rights to do so to your contract. This is a legal standard, after all, you will be using the influencer’s face and/or the result of their creative work.
First of all, you need to consult with a lawyer or an experienced specialist of the agency to properly formulate the conditions. Second, negotiate the terms with the influencer. Many of them immediately agree to your terms when they see their fee amount go up a bit, so that’s okay. But some of them may be strictly against such deals, so you have to be patient to convince them or step back and find someone else for such a deal. Make sure you always act legally.
Adapt content and use it on other platforms
You now have a video, photo and/or audio file from the influencer promoting the product to you. Great! It’s time to adapt the content for the platforms the influencer was not using initially.
Audiences on different platforms can overlap, but they are not quite the same and are accustomed to consuming a specific type of content on each platform. According to BuzzGuru Analytics Platform88.5% of influencers who have over 10,000 followers on at least one platform have more than one social media account, so their audiences on different platforms also intersect.
For example, you can’t just run YouTube ads on Instagram, it just takes another form. This is one of the reasons why you need to specify certain technical moments when instructing the influencer. The more quality content you get, the easier it is to adapt it: cut, add frames, edit, etc.
Learn the specifics of the platforms you’ll be conquering or give your specialist team a chance to show off. If we are talking about video, for example, you can extract static images from it to edit and the sound to mix. The video itself can be creatively reworked to meet the needs and expectations of the audience on the selected platform, as well as their technical requirements.
Why is using influencer content across multiple platforms becoming a marketing standard?
Ads work best when you trust the person promoting the product. It even becomes more personal advice than promotion. Content creators are called influencers for a reason: they influence the public and their opinion, and they do it on a more personal level.
Influencers are valued in marketing because they have people’s attention and, more importantly, trust. Seeing and hearing an influencer you trust talking about a product through multiple media channels makes you more loyal to the product and the brand.
In this way, a brand gains credibility in addition to increasing its return on investment. You only pay an additional fee to the influencer once, and it saves you from having to create content from scratch entirely on your own – you don’t spend a lot of money on production. It also gives you a promoter that your target audience trusts.
