campaigns Archives - Kingfluencers

How to Find the Right Influencers for Your Campaign in 2024

Posted on January 4, 2024January 31, 2024 by Yoeri Callebaut

We can only estimate how many influencers there are today – it’s probably somewhere between 3.2 and 37.8 MILLION.

And it’s safe to say that only a tiny fraction of them will be exactly right for your brand and your campaign.

Then how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? How do you find those influencers who can help propel your business forward?

It’s important to answer this question. While we firmly believe in the power of this booming branch of marketing – and the data proves it – we do acknowledge that a lot can go wrong in influencer marketing as well.

So, we created this guide to help you avoid common pitfalls and hire exactly the right influencers for the job. We want you to create awareness for your brand, grow your business, and create great experiences for your fans with influencer marketing – reliably and safely.

You do this by choosing the best influencers to represent you.

Here’s how to do it, step-by-step.

To Find the Right Influencers, Do These 3 Important Steps First

If you want to find the best influencer for your campaign, you have to build your foundation properly first. This will help you clarify what kind of influencer (or influencers) you are actually looking for.

The three steps below will help you lay a great foundation for your influencer marketing campaign:

1. Set exact goals for your campaign

Not all campaigns must have the same goal. Each campaign can aim to achieve different metrics, and each can feed into different parts of your brand’s funnel.

The main goals that businesses usually have for their influencer marketing efforts are:

Improve the general visibility of your brand and create awareness
Gain social media followers and boost engagement
Generate leads for your business
Increase traffic to your company website or/and build backlinks
Conversions, such as email sign-ups
Improve your brand’s reputation
Generate revenue and social selling

Determining your main goals is an important prerequisite to developing a strategy for your campaign. It will then be much easier for you to pick the influencers who best fit into that strategy.

2. Determine your target platforms & campaign formats

Establishing goals in step one will help you determine which platforms make the most sense for you to have influencers make content for. This step will help you find those influencers who are most aligned with your planned campaign – because they’re naturals at the platform you’ll be using.

Here’s a quick breakdown of which type of audience you will find on each of the social media platforms:

TikTok: Particularly popular with Gen Z (other age groups are definitely on the rise though)

Instagram: A high percentage of Millenials are on IG

Facebook: Great if you want to target the older, wealthier Gen X population

The right influencer for your campaign will already be successful on the platform you’re targeting. If your brand appeals to a wider, more diverse audience, it might make sense to seek influencers who are active on multiple platforms – or hire one for each.

Also consider how you’d like to collaborate with and incentivize your chosen influencers. There are many ways of working with an influencer. Let’s look at a few different ones:

The influencer becomes an affiliate marketer for your brand, often combined with giving out discount codes to their followers
They host giveaways of your products for their audience
They present products that you’ve given them for free
They make their usual posts advertised as “sponsored by” your brand
They take over your company’s account for a day
They enter into a long-term contract with you and become ambassadors for your brand

The right kind of influencer will be able to accommodate you in the exact formats you choose.

3. Establish your messages & themes

Next, get clear on what kinds of messages you want to send in your influencer campaign and what themes they will fall under.

We divide these into four different content pillars which will make your messaging diverse and impactful.

The Brand Pillar

Your brand is the focus. This pillar has content that revolves around your brand, whether the posts are high level, informative, funny, or inspirational.

The Product Pillar

This type of content features a specific product – or line of products – such as a fashion brand’s new spring line. This could be done in an interactive Q&A or tutorial, for example.

The Experience Pillar

This is where you highlight people experiencing your brand, such as influencers shopping in the store or cooking with your cookware.

The Moment Pillar

Celebrating special dates, from birthdays to holidays and anniversaries. You could feature a virtual and/or physical Easter egg hunt, or show influencers receiving customized birthday packages.

You need someone who can make these messages and themes come to life in the way that you want – and once you’re crystal clear on them, you’re much more likely to pick the right influencer for the job!

Now that you know your strategy for your campaign that the influencer must be able to carry out…

Let’s dive into relevancy: How much does the influencer align with the niche and the topics surrounding your brand?

How to Pick the Most Relevant Influencers for Your Campaign

To do this, it’s helpful if you’ve already created your ideal influencer persona: The perfect person who would be the best fit for your audience and your campaign.

They:

Are of the right age to fit your target audience
Possess the correct kind and amount of knowledge around your brand’s niche
Are the right size for your budget and for maximum impact
Have the right personality and level of charisma for what you want to communicate
Dress and behave in ways that fit your brand
Make content that’s already in line with your brand values

In short, they should represent your brand identity very well – as if they were a natural part of it!

How to Guarantee That You’ll Find the Best Influencers

As vital as the issue of how relevant the influencer is to your brand, is the question: Do they have authority? Both online and in your company’s niche.

Pick an authority in their field and your campaign will have a great impact. But if you fail to vet their authority first, you can run into all sorts of potential problems.

How do you pick the most authoritative influencers?

By taking the following steps, you can rest assured you’ve made a good choice working with this person and your campaign will be successful.

They have a quality audience

A quality audience is committed to the creator – they engage readily with each of their posts, and their content is a part of their life that they take quite seriously! Also, a quality audience is not composed of people who are just there for entertainment and would never support the influencer financially … but they’re actually in a position to buy the products that he or she might recommend, and would do so happily.

Social media manager Jason Francis, of Social Media Samurai, says that “Quality trumps all. I know people with 30,000 followers struggling to raise $500 in a GoFundMe campaign, while people with 2,000 to 3,000 followers can move and influence them to the tune of $25,000.”

They make quality content

In today’s day and age on social media, it’s not enough to only post selfies with some meaningless text. A “sponsored post” shouldn’t consist of just a random shout-out to your brand or the mindless placement of your product.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite – the best influencers are consistently creating content that’s captivating, creative, and authentic.

What does this mean?

It means they care enough about their audience to craft pieces of media and messages that really resonate. The content hits on their followers’ dreams and desires, addresses things they’ve recently had on their minds often, it can even shock, fascinate, and pull them out of boredom or sadness.

Making creative content means finding new connections, inventing new ways to get a message across, combining different forms of media, and injecting novelty by collaborating with different people in their niche.

Above all, they have to stay authentic while doing it. Their loyal followers want to feel like they’re “one of them” – that they’re a close, trusted friend. A good influencer will achieve this by speaking in a common tone of voice, keeping their content relatable, caring about and engaging with the audience, and generally staying humble in spite of their success, fame, and status.

How do you vet these things?

First of all, you can obviously check out their social media profiles and study the posts they’ve been publishing so far.

Secondly, see if they have a media kit available that shows off their best work and gives a good impression of both the “vibe” and the quality of their content.

Their influence is real

Fake followers are a real problem on social media. What good is it if the influencer you’re working with has 100k followers, but most of them have been bought from some shady service? Not much good at all, apart from having a nice big number in their profile.

Yes, social media outlets have been cracking down on these things, but fake followers are still common on all platforms.

How do you spot fake followers?

1. Manually go through their list of followers

Potential red flags you should look for are profiles with weird or unrealistic-sounding names, many profiles that are not followed by anyone, and profiles with no user image or something that looks like a stock photo.

Additionally, if the majority of their followers appear to be from non-English-speaking countries, although their content is English, that might be a sign that the followers are not real.

2. Check the engagement on their posts

A real engagement rate for social media is between 2-3.5%. So if you see a profile with an audience of 100k, but their engagement is consistently low, their followers may have been bought. They should realistically be getting thousands of likes per post and hundreds of comments.

3. Use a tool to check for fake followers

In addition to doing the “common sense check” we outlined above, you can use one of many influencer credibility tools such as grin.co, inbeat.co, and modash.io to let a fraud-finding algorithm confirm what you’ve observed by looking through their profiles yourself.

Their reputation and background are flawless

You want to carefully vet the influencer’s background. Make sure they’ve had no reputation-destroying scandals, shady business connections, or even a criminal history.

A simple way to do this is to search for “influencer name + scandal,” “name + controversy,” or “name + convicted” on Google.

Could they be damaging to your brand?

Do they have business dealings that might interfere with your campaign or potentially damage your brand’s reputation?

It’s important to check for this because the costs of falling for a fraudulent influencer could be very high.

Obviously, these things are unacceptable and any sign of these issues will quickly make you rule out ever working with that particular influencer.

Ideally you’ll want to find someone whose ethics and values are impeccable – in line with your brand.

Where to Find the Right Influencers – Platforms & Tools

Look for influencers in-house and among your fans

Most likely, many of your employees are already publicly advocating for your brand. You should look to channel and grow that enthusiasm! After all, who better to showcase what your brand stands for and be the credible faces of it than the people who built it?

Also, your leadership team is part of the face of your brand. Their role as social influencers is becoming increasingly important. One way to help senior executives successfully pick up this role is through personal branding.

Finally, your consumers can become a form of influencers as well. User-generated content (UGC) from brand fans and advocates can be very valuable and boost community engagement.

Each of these groups can be powerful brand advocates, but when combined effectively, the result is synergistic, delivering a massive impact.

Manually search on web platforms

Who’s already interacting with your brand?

Some of your top followers might have sizable, related audiences themselves. If they’re already liking, commenting on, and sharing your brand’s posts, they might be a perfect fit for a collaboration. If you see your brand mentioned without it being sponsored content, that’s a great initial sign!

Think about your industry’s icons

It could be a good idea to check out the most well-known influential people in your niche – yes, they’re more expensive to work with than others, but they also have the biggest reach and authority.

Set up a Google Alert

It’s possible to create an alert in Google so that anytime your brand, a topic related to your niche, or the industry in general is mentioned, you get notified. This is a valuable option for finding those people who are immersed in your field, are always talking about it, and are ‘hip’ to the latest trends. These might be influencers you’d want to work with.

Hashtags

By searching hashtags on different social media platforms, especially Instagram, you can find people in your niche and those who are already working as influencers.

Do this by searching trending hashtags, hashtags about aspects of your field, and hashtags like #sponsored or #ad that tell you someone is working with brands.

Speakers at events

Usually, the most influential and authoritative people in your industry are paid to speak at industry events. Become familiar with the speakers on the list at conventions and other events and see who you could imagine working with for an influencer marketing campaign.

Look for blogs and niche authority sites

Search for websites and blogs that are written by influencers in your niche. Do this by typing in keywords related to your brand into Google and adding the word “blog.” There are also tools that automate this task, as we’ll address later.

Followers of other brands in your space

By doing a bit of competitive analysis, you can also find good influencers for your brand. Check out who is most engaged on other brand’s profiles and who has a good audience themselves. These influencers show they are invested in and proactive about marketing – which will be great if they’re working with you!

Find influencers with a similar audience as you

If you know your target audience, you know what other topics they’re interested in and which influencers in those niches they follow. For example, if your company sells popcorn, your audience might be interested in other related things, like watching movies. It might make sense to partner up with influencers in the movie space, so you can reach your audience in another sphere.

Set up a contact page for prospective influencers on your company’s website

If any influencers are browsing your website, they will see that you’re open to working with them and contact you. You just need to create the page on your site and provide a contact form – and they’ll do the outreach themselves!

Browse LinkedIn

Some influencers also have active LinkedIn profiles. To find them, look for the job description of “content creator.”

Search forums in your niche

In some niches, there are good online forums where the latest in your industry is being discussed. Look for those people who are constantly discussing and providing value, and who seem to have authority and influence within the community. Reach out to those people to become part of your influencer marketing campaign.

If you’ve gone the manual route and are not yet satisfied with your results – or if you’d rather not do all that work yourself – there are two other ways to find the right influencers for your campaign:

You can use influencer-finding tools or hire an influencer marketing agency.

Use influencer-finding tools

Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool

This is a tool to find competitor sites that your audience also likes to visit. These could be run by influencers you could potentially hire.

Influencity

Influencity is an “Influencer Relationship Management” tool. It allows you to find, analyze, and organize influencers, as well as manage campaigns and forecast and measure the results of those campaigns.

Upfluence

Another full-scale influencer marketing platform, Upfluence offers campaign management, product placement outreach, influencer event management, and payment and transaction services.

Post For Rent

Post For Rent call themselves the “one-stop-shop for influencer marketing.” Their services include influencer search, an influencer marketplace, the NEXT business manager, and managed service.

Hype Auditor

With Hype Auditor, you get influencer analytics, influencer discovery, campaign management, media plans, trends and rankings, and analysis of competitors and the market landscape on social media.

Followerwonk

Created for finding influencers specifically on Twitter, Followerwonk lets you connect with those authoritative power users on the platform. It can not only search Twitter bios globally, but also analyze and compare accounts to find the right influencers.

Respona

Respona lets you find bloggers who are active in your niche. They will monitor for brand and competitor mentions and automate your influencer outreach.

Hire an influencer marketing agency

If this whole process of finding influencers, vetting them, and reaching out is something you’d rather not do yourself right now – influencer marketing agencies do all of it for you.

A good influencer marketing agency will have:

A built-up network and database of relevant and trustworthy influencers
A streamlined process for collaborating with brands and influencers
A creative eye for which campaigns will have the most impact
Proven experience with effective storytelling
Seamless campaign management
The expertise and tools to properly analyze campaign metrics
An impressive portfolio and positive testimonials from past clients
An influencer marketing strategy tailored to your demands and your budget

Obviously, working with an agency will cost more than doing the work yourself. On the other hand, you are free to focus on other tasks in your business and can trust that their proven process will give you a good return on your investment in your influencer marketing campaign.

Conclusion

There you have it: Your guide to finding the right influencers for your campaign this year. If you follow the steps outlined above, we are confident that you will be able to use the proven power of influencer marketing to bring measurable growth to your business.

Only being on social media is definitely not enough to be seen – Kingfluencer’s Top 7

Posted on April 1, 2021January 10, 2024 by Yoeri Callebaut

Zurich, 01.04.2021: Brands usually make the mistake on social media of not telling their products an authentic story with a face that the audience can identify with. The result: a lot of effort in the battle for attention that cannot be won. Not so with our 7 tips that show what it takes to not only use social media as a brand but to properly harness it.

Know target groups & know where to find them

There is no such thing as the “best” platform, influencer, or campaign format. Brands need to invest time in researching possible options and making a choice that will best help them achieve their goals. Accurately identifying the target audience is an important first step, followed by deciding the best platforms to reach them.

Read our blog posts about the evolution of social media platforms and different audiences here.

For younger dance enthusiasts, TikTok is a natural. 60% of users are Gen Zers and the two TikTok accounts with the most followers are young dancers

Stay relevant

What most users do on a platform is very important to consider. The chances of brands being successful increase enormously if they provide the kind of content that the target groups on the platform actively seek out and consume, such as video games on Twitch. The platform has over 9 million active users and all of the top 5 are gamers.

Segmenting audiences within each platform can increase relevance even further. For example, on Facebook, brands can easily create a custom list of people who have previously messaged the company to re-engage potential customers.

Make campaigns interactive

Social influencer marketing offers an agile, real-time communication channel with consumers. In influencer marketing and social media in general, brands should interact with consumers and aim for effective two-way communication. Too often, however, brands playout content to their audience without bothering to listen to find out what they really want. Interactive campaigns, on the other hand, lead to more engagement, brand advocacy, and likeability, as well as more conversions and better customer retention.

Social media offers brands the unique opportunity to make campaigns interactive and collaborative. By encouraging participation and interaction and integrating user-generated content, brands can transform their campaigns from brand monologues into real conversations. The close connection influencers have with their communities is ideal for engaging audiences in conversations and making campaigns interactive. Influencers can generate interactions in a variety of ways, including:

Challenges

Competition

Surveys

Q&A Sessions

Using the latest technologies

Actually, the concept of virtual reality (VR) is nothing new, but with the new release of the Oculus Quest in May 2019, it has become increasingly popular. VR allows people to share and interact with others around the world, which seems especially important given the ongoing need for social distancing. As such, Facebook is currently testing the Oculus VR platform to create a virtual world where people can connect and play games.

Augmented reality (AR), on the other hand, is even more accessible, as it requires no additional hardware other than a smartphone. AR filters can be used to promote fan interaction or new products.

The popular Kinder chocolate brand’s “Jump into Africa” campaign allowed its consumers to discover animated 3D safari animals while in Tesco supermarkets in the UK.

Staying up to date on the chosen social media platforms

Brands should always be aware of the various changes and new features on social media platforms, as circumstances change quickly. Twitter, for example, announced paid Super Follows on February 25, 2021, where users will have to pay for tweets. Furthermore, YouTube Shorts, which is considered a competitor to TikTok, entered the U.S. market on March 18, 2021.

“YouTube Shorts was first launched in September and has undergone various beta tests in India over the past few months, where adoption of the product has tripled since then.”

In addition, TikTok recently launched “TikTok For Business” to highlight tips such as information on various elements for building a brand, including insights on creative inputs, strategies for ads, and key trends. TikTok Ads Manager supports as a simple self-service tool that allows brands to create and post their ads directly to the TikTok feed.

Focus on people & use stories

Human interest stories help audiences identify with the brand and encourage interaction, for example, by showing people currently using the product rather than just posting photos or videos of the product itself. Social media stories can create a strong emotional connection with the brand and further its purpose. A study by SocialInsider also found that images in stories have a 5.65% higher tap-forward rate than videos. Images of people using a product in relatable situations can help users* connect. For example, these people could be hired actors, paid influencers, or satisfied customers – all are beneficial.

Consumers are 2.4 times more likely to say they find user-generated content (UGC) more authentic than brand-created content. In addition, many employees at all levels are likely already committed to their employer and its products or services. Brands should embrace and build on this enthusiasm because people who make their employer’s product are highly credible sources

MensPeople like to see other people. Research published in the Journal of Advertising Research shows, “Ads with people’s faces and ‘face-like’ (i.e., illusory) images attract more attention in a short time and are preferred over other ads.”

Represent authenticity and values

Consumers want to support brands that embody their own values. As noted in Inc, Gen-Zers “want to see authenticity in marketing, including evidence and a culture that backs up claims of strong company values.” Sixty-seven percent agreed that “staying true to yourself and your values and beliefs makes a person cool,” and they feel the same way about brands.

74% of respondents to a Twitter poll want brands to show acts of kindness, and 77% feel more positively about brands that try to help society during this crisis.

While it’s tempting to focus on stats like followers and likes, it’s important to remember that interactive exchange is a two-way street. Interacting with the community also helps build trust and credibility.

Follow Kingfluencers for more tips, on how to create your social media campaigns engaging.

Author: Megan Bozman, Owner @Boz Content Marketing

Succeeding as an Influencer – Tips from Successful Swiss Influencers

Posted on March 15, 2021January 10, 2024 by Yoeri Callebaut

Based on the GFM — Kingfluencers webinar from 9.12.2020

Kingfluencers and gfm recently hosted a webinar, “Influencer Marketing – a Glance into The Future.” You can watch a recording of the webinar here and we’ve highlighted top tips from our speakers, along with an influencer best practices checklist. Our featured speakers are two successful Swiss influencers, Antonella Patitucci, Actress, Presenter, Coach, Content Creator, and Steven Epprecht, Founder @ Strategy Leaders, Consultant, Content Creator.
More interested in the brand perspective? Check out our previous article here.

Put the Work in and Be Passionate

First, we asked our influencers what the most important requirements are to being an influencer, which included, put the work in and be passionate. Steven noted that it looks easier than it is. Be passionate about your main topic on your account and let your community be part of that.

Antonella recommended finding out what kind of influencer you are and what’s the best for you, then sticking with your decision. Select which channels to be active on, taking into consideration different media types, then have a strategy to be present there. “I speak a lot and I know my community likes to listen,” said Antonella.

Build a relationship with the community. Your community wants to somehow be part of your life, so interact and engage with them, which also helps build trust and credibility.

Becoming an influencer is creating a personal brand, including all the factors of a brand. As a brand, you must have a strategy how to be present on the different channels.

Create Value for Brands

Antonella added, “In creating value for brands, the first and most important is that it’s a match. You have to use the product. I believe all the people in my community could feel if I just did it because someone offered me money or if I really use the product.

“The value is in telling your own story and putting emotion behind it. Give the product a face and so people can relate. Share your unique story and opinion. A product alone is a picture, but with you and your story, it’s like a movie.

“Also, have longer-term collaborations rather than making just 1 or 2 posts. Brands get the most out of campaigns when they’re a longer-term partnership instead of one-offs.”

Steven stated, “The most important benefit an influencer has for brands is that we can reach our community on an emotional level, which can be difficult for brands with traditional media campaigns.“Influencer stories are a credible way for brands to communicate, and influencers can serve as real brand ambassadors. We give the brand a different approach, rather than copying and pasting the media and marketing strategy to another channel. The influencer is in touch with the brand and products and makes up their own story on implementing it in their daily life.”

Antonella Patitucci

Safeguard Authenticity

Recognizing that authenticity is a critical success factor, we asked our influencers how they maintain the trust of their audience.

Antonella advised, “Be yourself, stick to your opinion. If you make a mistake, apologize, and change your opinion. I was against TikTok at the beginning and I made an official statement that it’s shit and just for kids, and I made fun of it. But TikTok approached me and wanted me to do it. I looked at the statistics and saw that the audience is older than I thought. I researched and changed my opinion, I wrote in the caption, ‘First I hated it, then I laughed, now I’m copying.’ Then you stay authentic, but you have to be honest, and share with the community, even your mistakes and ups and downs.”

Steven added, “The most important thing is, if I collaborate with a brand, it’s crucial that I can stand behind the product, and it’s not just for the money. There are people doing it like that, which contributes to the negativity about influencer marketing.“I even differentiate the type of work that I do. I’m quicker to accept jobs as a model because it’s my face, not my name. But on my own channels, I’m saying I recommend it and I have a responsibility towards my community. It’s like a relationship with a friend. I consider if I’d recommend this to my mom or a friend. They trust you and you have credibility and shouldn’t play with that, otherwise it won’t work out in the long run. Only do what is you.”

Steven Epprecht

“I even differentiate the type of work that I do. I’m quicker to accept jobs as a model because it’s my face, not my name. But on my own channels, I’m saying I recommend it and I have a responsibility towards my community. It’s like a relationship with a friend.”

Move with Marketing Trends

It’s important for influencers to move with the trends, including interactivity. Social media enables consumers to get more involved and interact, resulting in trends like brands hosting polls or soliciting consumer feedback on issues such as new product development. Employees using social media can also serve as brand ambassadors.

Influencer Best Practices Checklist

Be passionate about your main topic.
Find out what kind of influencer, select your channels, and stick to your decisions.
Interact and engage to build a relationship with your community.
You have a responsibility to your community. Treat it like a relationship with a friend.
When promoting brands, tell your own story and put emotion behind it – don’t just copy and paste the brand’s marketing strategy!
Maintain trust and credibility – only promote brands you truly stand behind.
Aim for long term brand collaborations.
Be yourself & stick to your opinions.
If you make a mistake, apologize.

Top 6 Ways to Make Influencer Marketing Work: Practical Tips from Universal Switzerland

Posted on March 11, 2021January 10, 2024 by Yoeri Callebaut

Based on the GFM — Kingfluencers webinar from 9.12.2020

Influencer marketing has the potential to deliver exceptional returns for brands, from awareness and emotional connection with consumers, to conversions to sales. But like any marketing initiative, it needs to be properly executed, which must involve a tailored approach for your unique brand.

On a recent webinar, Martina Klieber, Publicity Manager, Universal Pictures International Switzerland, GmbH, shared lessons learned on making influencer marketing work. You can watch a recording of the webinar here and following are the highlights.

Incorporate Influencer Marketing into the Marketing Mix

As Influencer marketing emerged as a distinct discipline, it was often isolated, although many attributes make it highly complementary to other components of the marketing mix. A holistic and integrated approach to marketing disciplines is ideal. More organizations are understanding this and therefore start connecting the dots, having IM interact with and impact other marketing initiatives. The result is efficiencies and increased impact, enabling brands to achieve more with the same resources. Especially when influencer marketing content is repurposed in other marketing areas, the ripple effect of this integration can be very fruitful.

Each brand has to find out where IM works best in your campaigns. Over the years, we’ve experimented with and implemented IM in our mix. It has proven to be a very effective and efficient way to reach out to what we call our ‘persuadable audience.’ This is usually a group that is harder to reach with linear TV or other advertising media, with maybe a shorter attention span, but with a great acceptance of personalized and targeted advertisement,” explained Martina.

Campaigns to Enable Connections

Universal Switzerland doesn’t promote Universal Pictures as a brand, but rather single titles or film franchises such as “Fast and Furious.” Martina, explains, “Social media and influencer marketing have replaced the common gatekeepers between brands and consumers. Recent studies have shown that IM can be a powerful tool. For us, this means IM as an integral part of our marketing campaign provides us with an opportunity to promote an experience rather than a product. IM is an emotional, personal, and credible approach that is widely accepted by a younger target audience.”

Synchronize Influencer Marketing

“Influencer marketing is never a standalone measure. For the best outcomes, it’s crucial to carefully sync timelines between media and IM campaigns. Each and every touchpoint ideally links to a campaign tentpole, picks up some hot new AV content, and supports a specific campaign goal.

“You have to be aware of the narration of the story you want to tell. You can’t just have gaps in it. Find the space where it fits in best,” said Martina.

A Second Life for Content

If done right, IM content can provide additional value and be used in a second lifecycle. It can culminate in another campaign by creating press coverage, being used in a brand platform in an owned community, or even as advertising or even communication material. Influencer marketing can enable you to succeed with secondary or tertiary goals. Using the content wisely bring a range of wins and advantages and boosts ROI even more.

The Importance of Good Matches

Martina described a campaign to promote the newest installment of a large franchise. “The campaign was particularly successful because of the perfect match we made. We challenged top influencers to create their own trailer, engaging their community and activating them to go see the film. The selected influencers were huge fans of the franchise and went above and beyond to create top content. Our confidence in their capability and creativity, combined with their enthusiasm for the project resulted in a massive overperformance,” Martina explained.

Universal’s success shows that you can have great success when the influencer and community are a good match for your brand, and the influencer is excited about your brand and tells the story properly.

Additionally, Martina noted that when creating marketing campaigns for local theatrical releases using local influencers makes sense for credibility and local language, especially in Switzerland. The influencer help bridge the gap that international stars cannot.

Influencer Marketing Best Practices List

Martina first stated, “Let me assure you, we’ve done it all wrong and right,” and then proceeded to state an exceptional list of IM best practices based on years of experience.

1. Make the Perfect Match

Make perfect matches with not only the influencers, but the community. It’s worthwhile to take a closer look into the statistics of influencers, their community, and their account. It’s nice if you can afford an A-list celebrity, but your money might be better spent by choosing a smaller or more homogenous community.

2. Access Expertise

There’s no way to tell who’s the “best” influencer, so invest time in making the perfect match for your brand. Agencies offer expertise and data to help you source. Hit lists aren’t a substitute for expertise.

3. See the Content Creator, Not the Platform

Influencers are more than just a number on their profile. Use the expertise and creativity that content creators are willing and able to bring to the table. They know their community very well. Give them a precise briefing, but as much freedom as you can.

4. Influencers are Not a Media Buy

You might be able to pay them to say a specific slogan into the camera, but communities can be very harsh with content creators who do that. If they tell you that won’t work, listen to them. Maybe they have a better idea, but maybe they’re not the perfect match.

5. Let Influencers Do What They Do Best

Don’t tell them how to do their job. IM has massive potential to sell complicated brands and experiences. If you think about the story you want to tell with your brand, influencers can offer you a targeted, personal, and credible voice to tell that story.

6. Be Creative and Be Bold

Work with influencers that bring the right amount of creativity to the table, independent of their size. Make IM an integral part of your media mix to target audiences that are otherwise harder to reach. Carefully synch the timelines for the rest of your campaigns for the best results.

Top 6 ways to make influencer marketing work.

Author: Megan Bozman, Owner @Boz Content Marketing

The Magic of Creativity and Authenticity in Content

Posted on March 4, 2021January 14, 2024 by Yoeri Callebaut

We’ve known that “Content is King” for over a decade, but content must be creative and authentic to effectively captivate and engage audiences. By taking a creative, authentic approach, brands have the opportunity to connect with their audience and drive measurable results.

Authenticity is Vital and Consumers Notice It

Consumers want to support brands that embody their own values. They expect brands to be authentic in their operations as well as marketing. As written in Inc., Gen-Zers, “want to see authenticity in marketing, including proof and a culture to back up claims of strong company values.” 67 percent agreed that ‘being true to their values and beliefs makes a person cool,’ and they feel the same about brands.

Additionally, brands must not only show authenticity but also operate in accordance with the values they espouse. “If a brand advertises diversity but lacks diversity within its own ranks, for example, that contradiction will be noticed.”, explains McKinsey and Company.

Connecting with authentic influencers is one effective way to engage audiences. Influencers can also help your brand to be more creative, bringing fresh ideas no one else inside your organization may have thought of before. According to the Swiss Influencer Marketing Report 2020, about half of the marketing managers surveyed estimate the return on investment of their influencer campaigns to date to be higher than with alternative forms of advertising.

Experiment and Determine What’s Most Effective

Experimenting is vital in the quest for authenticity. Marketers cannot just assume they know what people want to hear — they must get the facts. Test ideas and gather input from a representative sample of your audiences. As you test, vary not only the content of your message, but a wide variety of attributes, such as:

Channels: Email, social media platforms, Point of Purchase (POP) displays
Themes: Current events, holidays, leisure activities
Topics: Individuality, environmental sustainability, social justice
Media: Text, videos, images
Social media formats: lives, stories, IG TV, Tiktok and reels videos, interactive polls, forums

Step outside the box.

Creativity and Authenticity. Experiment and Determine What’s Most Effective — @thefashionfraction for Samsung Switzerland Campaign

The accessibility of measurable results enables marketers to shift gears quickly and further boost the most successful campaigns. Additionally, working with creative experts such as Kingfluencers can infuse additional creativity into your experimentation repertoire and boost your outcomes.

Highlight Sustainability

According to a Facebook-commissioned study of 11,300 people across 11 countries, 68% of Gen Z expect brands to contribute to society. Influencer marketing can be an effective medium for brands to highlight their positive efforts, such as environmental sustainability. Kingfluencers ran a campaign with Evian highlighting the brand’s sustainability efforts with the hashtag, #bottlesmadefrombottles. Posts from influencers including Elvira Legrand achieved engagement rates as high as 4.15%.

Patagonia, an American manufacturer of outdoor clothing, pays a “self-imposed Earth tax,” 1% of sales, to support environmental nonprofits working to defend our air, land, and water around the globe. The company also leverages user generated content to build strong connections with consumers. As one Patagonia fan writes on Medium, “I love when brands use photos from their fans or ambassadors. I think it does a really good job of creating a relationship between the brand and the consumer, and makes them feel like they are appreciated by the brand… By posting the photos and giving credit to the photographer they [Patagonia] are not only getting breathtaking photographs, but also making their customers feel like part of the family.”

Make Campaigns Interactive and Collaborative

Brands that are more creative achieve better results, specifically:

Increased engagement
More conversions
Better customer loyalty

Social media, in particular, provides brands with the unique opportunity to make campaigns interactive and collaborative. By incorporating user-generated content and encouraging participation and interaction, campaigns become conversations rather than brand monologues.

For example, CoverGirl partnered with eight TikTok influencers to boost product awareness among Gen Z. The campaign encouraged audience interaction with the content by incorporating lip-syncing, one of the central engagement drivers on TikTok. The #CleanFreshHype branded campaign generated over 6.5B impressions and a 5.7% engagement rate.

User Generated Content and Other Sources

While influencers are an effective vehicle for connecting to your audience, they can also contribute their subject matter expertise and collaborate with you to develop creative campaign ideas. Creative ideation can be done either independently by an influencer or together with brands.

Additionally, social influence marketing includes more than professional influencers and content creators.

A wide range of individuals can contribute to your marketing efforts, such as employees, CEOs and other leaders, and consumers.

User Generated Content and Other Sources

User Generated Content (UGC) from brand fans and advocates can be very valuable and boost community engagement.

Most influencers have a high degree of specialized expertise. Their dedicated focus helps them earn big followings. As subject matter experts, they’re uniquely qualified to bring fresh, creative ideas to your brand’s marketing.

Creativity thrives on many platforms such as TikTok, helping the most creative users rise to the top. By tapping into their creative energy, you can collaborate to generate content that hits the right notes and truly engages.

Influencers Can Generate Content, Connect with Your Audience, + Both

And, of course, influencers can serve as channels to connect with your audience, sources of content creation, or both. For International Women’s Day, Microsoft leveraged one group of renowned adventure photographers for content creation and another group of established social media accounts to distribute and promote the images. The campaign, which aimed to encourage young girls to work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), featured photographs accompanied by authentic stories. The posts were sponsored on five of National Geographic’s Instagram channels, reaching 91 million total followers.

Kingfluencer’s own Chief Influence Officer Anja Lapčević, commented on the role of influencer marketing in making connections and forming relationships.

The nice thing about our work is that we always create relationships. The same principle applies here as in a love story: if the chemistry and values are right, the result is love. Love from the influencer for the brand and back results in the love message to the consumer. We want to work with this principle, and I look forward to many more love stories at Kingfluencers. But as it is in love, the way there is not always easy. Not every relationship has a happy ending and therefore we are constantly working on it. Because we believe that in the end every pot will find its lid.

Author: Yoeri Callebaut, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Kingfluencers