There is no denying the power and effectiveness that paid social advertising plays in your marketing mix. By having a presence across multiple platforms, you can build a solid brand reputation and a relationship with your desired audience. Over recent years, using a paid social strategy to leverage results has faced inevitable challenges with ad blockers, targeting restrictions and cookie limitations.
In 2023 there was an 11% decrease in average daily screen time, which highlights how users are now searching with intention rather than doom scrolling. It’s critical for success in today’s environment for brands to be active on social media platforms, and influencers can help boost awareness in an overly competitive landscape. Influencer content can bridge the gap between your brand and audience, in an authentic manner.
So, what actually is influencer marketing?
In a nutshell, it’s when a brand collaborates with a social media user to create content that promotes their brand or products. There are different types of influencers such as nano (under 10k followers), micro (under 100k), macro (under 1m), and celebrity status. A brand will want to utilise a mix of these to use their budget efficiently while tapping into lot of different audiences.
Depending on what’s been agreed between the brand and influencer, the creator would normally create content either a post, story, or video and post this to their own account tagging the brand. In some cases, brands can boost their content through paid channels to increase awareness, engagement and ROI.
How is it used?
Companies leverage the trust and credibility that influencers have already built with their audiences instead of directly advertising to consumers, which can become repetitive and predictable. Influencers can leverage different styles of content to keep their account fresh such as:
- Sponsored posts
- Collaborations
- Giveaways
- Gifting
- PR Events
Whatever the objective, the influencer will create content based on the brief from the brand. Depending on the nature of the post you can track their activity through third-party tools and identifiers to help you understand which creators are having the most impact.
Why is it useful?
As with anything, a blended approach works best. Influencer marketing is a complimentary strategy to enhance the already established plan. The paid ads will do the leg work in terms of reaching your audience, whilst the influencer activity builds trust. Think of influencer marketing as a helping hand and a ‘way in’ to your relevant audience in a way that paid advertising just can’t achieve.
So how can this approach strengthen Paid Social?
When considering the addition of a new approach, it can be assumed it may replace or ‘over-take’ the pre-existing activity. However, this is not the case as when used in harmony, the outcome can be better than ever. Here are just a few examples of how the addition of influencer marketing can in fact strengthen paid distribution.
- Build Trust & Credibility – People trust authentic and user generated content (UGC) over the polished, purpose form creative often seen in paid ads. This reliance on the influencer to provide honesty is why it is so important to find the perfect fit for your brand. The wrong match will seem disjointed and implausible while the most successful influencer campaigns are those seen to seamlessly transition from their organic content to paid adverts without the user even realising!
- Higher Engagement Rates – Expect to see engagement soar when incorporating an influencer into your activity.
- Content Creation at Scale – A benefit of using an influencer is the possibility of using their content for further paid campaigns (based on agreed content rights of course), providing an evergreen approach to the campaign and building a dependable hub of creative to be used time and time again.
- Better Audience Targeting – By choosing the correct influencer, you’re immediately tapping into a vast audience of ready to act users, rather than landing on a potentially ‘cold’ audience and expecting them to convert straight away.
- Improved ROI – With ‘98% of industry leaders believing that creator content drives more ROI than traditional digital advertising and 93% of industry leaders expecting to invest more in creator marketing over the next two years’there is no denying the growth of influencer marketing as a strategy. You can likely expect lower cost-per-click (CPC) and higher conversion rate when influencer content is used in paid ads.
Sounds great – how can this work for me?!
First be clear on an objective and so you can optimise effectively. It is important the influencer’s activity compliments your pre-existing strategy rather than working against it. Research into ‘best fit’ rather than follower count is essential. This can be a job done manually, or there are a range of third-party platforms available who will not only discover influencers but will also manage the relationship with the influencer and the campaign effectively.
Before you start you will need an idea on:
- The brief (what will the posts be focused on, product or brands led)
- Budget
- Type of influencers
- Target audiences you want to tap into
- What platforms it’s best to reach those with
- Type of content (will depend on the influencers pricing matrix)
- Duration of the campaign
- Reporting (if purely organic the creator will need to supply screenshots of their performance and audience demographics)
The reasoning behind this is because you might want to reach an older demographic, therefore some platforms like Snapchat will be ineffective so you need to identify where your target audience is active and find influencers on there. Remember that like any other campaign within the paid social strategy, the best results will come from testing and learning. Having an honest communication with the influencer to establish exactly what is and isn’t working along the way will be invaluable to achieving your desired outcome.
Ready to start leveraging influencers in your marketing mix?
By now you can see the importance and benefits of using influencer marketing as a complimentary strategy to enhance an already established paid social media approach. The two are stronger together as they can fill in each other’s gaps; the native feel of an influencer campaign appeals to the desire of authenticity, whilst the control of a paid social campaign allows multiple variables to be tested at once, resulting in a harmonious path to the same end goal.
If you’re reading this and thinking YES! I would love to expand my strategy and believe influencer marketing is a great approach for my brand – then get in touch with our paid social team to discuss how we can help you achieve the best results possible.
