By: Brianna Davis
ApexDrop Influence Marketing
Best practices for new marketing strategies—such as micro-influencer marketing—can take years to develop while your results suffer. Even the most experienced digital marketers are still learning how to optimize results for micro-influencer marketing. We’re here to accelerate your learning curve and your results.
What if you could ask some of the most experienced campaign developers in the industry to help you stop making rookie mistakes? We just did. With nearly 400 campaigns under our belts, our campaign team offers 11 tips to improve your influencer marketing campaigns.
1. Engage and Interact with Your Influencers
Many companies activate influencer campaigns but never interact with the influencers. That’s a big mistake.
Why? Influencers put a lot of work into their posts and they appreciate knowing their work is noticed and valued. Engaging with their content helps strengthen the partnership with you and will make them more likely to continue to recommend your brand, tag your brand in future posts (at no additional cost), and want to work on your future campaigns. What should you do? Like, follow, and comment on the content they produce for you. Regram their stories and leave genuine comments on the pictures. Even follow your faves. Spread the love and you’ll see returns!
2. Be Accessible
Once you grab their attention with great content on social media, make sure you’re driving traffic to your site. Do this by making sure your website is easy to find from your social media platform. We’re surprised at how many companies don’t include a link to their site in the bio. Don’t make this simple mistake!
3. Broaden Your Horizons
Be open to new segments. Have a hunch about a new segment? Influencer marketing is an easy way to test. With a campaign size of 100 micro-influencers, for instance, you can easily test a segment you haven’t used in the past. Don’t ‘pigeon hole’ your brand by targeting the same segment. Pick a handful of influencers in different segments and test your idea.
For example, if you sell laundry detergent and you normally target moms, try testing ten pet owners, ten college students or ten outdoorsy bloggers. Pet influencers create amazing content with stopping power and they are often very generous with their content.
As another example, beauty brands don’t need to target only beauty influencers. Try testing moms or fashionable women.
4. Create Relevant Content
You literally have seconds to grab someone's attention. Align your content with the time of year to be relevant. Focus on the season, or the holidays, and the emotions. This requires a plan.
Strategize to have content at the right time. Define the dates when you need to switch up your content for the next season. Don’t forget to brief your influencer agency on the feelings you want to invoke with your content -- or ask for input from your agency. You’ve hired us to be your experts and we’re happy to help. Planning ahead will ensure you’re prepared with the right sentiment to inspire and capture attention throughout the year.
Some brands are able to repurpose content from the prior year to boost their seasonal content. Get started with monthly or quarterly campaigns now and you will build your content library for the future.
5. Build Lasting Relationships
Using many influencers helps get your product in front of consumers quickly. Consider identifying the handful of influencers who best portray your brand, develop a longer-term partnership and use them as brand ambassadors to drive sales.
6. Extend the Life of Your Story
Create a "We Love Our Fans!" highlight on Instagram. That way you can extend the life of those Instagram story shoutouts. How do you do this? Create a new highlight. Repost stories that tag your brand, and then add them to this highlight.
7. Simplify Your Customer's Journey
Make your buyer’s experience pleasant from start to finish. Accessibility, browsing, purchasing, and shipping -- make all of these steps easy and convenient. Messy websites, confusing prices, and long shipping times ruin the experience and will limit your sales.
8. Consider Working with Nano-Influencers
If you're looking for niche, trustworthy and engaging influencers, give nano-influencers a try. More than half of all influencers are nano-influencers.
While your competition struggles with macro and larger influencers (with their general audiences) you can reach a highly targeted, fresh audience with little to no competition at all! With nano-influencers being newer to the market, they are often easier to work with and their promotions tend to be more authentic. Also, because they’re so new, their fans trust them more. They haven’t “sold out” -- meaning they don’t accept payments to promote brands they don’t truly love, a practice that leads to loss of audience trust.
9. Aim for Constant Exposure
According to the Rule of Sevens, it can take seven exposures to your brand before a person ultimately makes a purchase. Thus, it’s important to produce exposure through influencer campaigns in two ways: by reaching more people but also by reaching out throughout the year with seasonal and fresh content. Our fastest-growing brands are running campaigns on a monthly or quarterly basis, regramming the most popular posts to reach an ever-broader audience with the top-performing content, and staying in front of their target audience with a variety of content.
10. Don't Forget to Vet
Influencers with fake followers or fake engagement don’t have the influence their number of followers would suggest. Brands must ensure influencers are vetted for fakes either by doing the checking themselves or by hiring an agency that does.
11. Reuse Content
Reuse the content...everywhere and anywhere. You’d be surprised by how many brands don’t reuse the content from their influencer campaigns. Often times, they think the images need to be perfectly polished, but we’ve found that candid UGC (user-generated content) is the real breadwinner, and you should be using it everywhere. Plaster it on your social channels, your emails, ads, and most importantly your product detail pages on your site. These raw, relatable images are building social proof, customer trust, increasing conversion rates, and average order values.
About the Author
Brianna Davis was recently promoted to Brand Success Manager at ApexDrop after three years as a top-performing Campaign Developer. In her free time, Bri enjoys traveling, trying new foods, and adding to her plant babies collection. If Bri is assigned as your Brand Success Manager, you will be in good hands. Nothing gets between Bri and her brands' success. Questions about influencer marketing best practices? Feel free to reach out to Brianna directly at Brianna@apexdrop.com.
About ApexDrop
ApexDrop is the oldest, fully dedicated micro-influencer marketing agency in the United States. We help consumer products brands produce Instagram micro-influencer content at scale. We’re different in that our influencers are compensated with your product gift (not cash) resulting in more authentic content creation. When you work with ApexDrop, leave the heavy lifting to us. We vet, select, negotiate, and communicate with content creators delivering you a guaranteed number of social posts and license-free content for you to reuse for all of your marketing needs.
