Ads types

Product placement

Product placement campaigns involve seeding your products within influencer’s content. For example, an influencer might take a photo of themselves during a holiday and they’re holding the sunglasses you’ve sent them. Within a product placement campaign the influencer may or may not write something specific about the brand but they will more often than not tag the product so that those who are interested can check out the brand for themselves.

Unboxing

From the moment your customers receive their product, they’re on a journey with you to connect with your brand. Unboxing influencer marketing campaigns are effective as they allow influencers to take their audience on the journey with them. For example, you might send a well packaged product to an influencer and ask them to open it on camera, use the product and talk about their experience with it. Their audience is then able to make informed decisions about whether the product (and unboxing process) is something they’d like to try as well. Unboxing campaigns are also a great way for you to go above and beyond to position your brand leagues ahead of your competitors. This influencer created an unboxing video on her Instagram Stories after Les Georgettes By Altesse gifted her new jewellery. During the video he takes viewers through the process of unboxing a beatiful personalised package by our clients.

Pre-release

Pre-release campaigns work well for brands who want to drum up excitement about a product or launch before it happens. Pre-release campaigns work well because influencers who are invited to take part feel a sense of exclusivity that they have their hands on the product before anyone else. When running pre-release campaigns be sure to check whether the content the influencer’s posted resulted in any sales once your product does launch. Alternatively, if you’re using a ‘coming soon’ sign up strategy, have your chosen influencers link to this page in order to directly track and attribute the influencer’s role in driving sign ups.

Sponsored content

Sponsored content is any content you’ve sponsored the influencer to create. For example, if you’re a travel agency, you might sponsor an influencer to go on holiday. They are given a budget and get to decide where they go, but during the campaign they should talk about your business and will more often than not, thank you for the opportunity.

Brought to you by

Brought to you by campaigns are similar to sponsored content, but there is less need for the content published to have a direct relation to the brand. For example, if you own a supplement brand, you might work with an influencer on their ‘moving house tour’ video. It might seem like a strange strategy but it actually works well if you get your influencer targeting right. You want to work with influencers who have an audience that might buy your products. That way, even though the content of the video isn’t directly related to the products you offer, the influencer’s audience would still have a genuine interest in checking out your business.

Brand ambassador

Brand ambassadors usually work with a company for an extended period of time. Brand ambassadors refers to influencers who regularly post content for a brand. Creating brand ambassadors is a great way to merge multiple of the influencer campaign types listed above. What’s more, brand ambassadors aren’t always paid for the work they do. Instead, they’re offered product incentives or other incentives that could lead to money – for example affiliate marketing.

Shoutout

Shoutout campaigns are fairly easy to do and often used by smaller brands who can’t afford to pay for a dedicated piece of content on social media. Influencers might talk about your product in their insta-story, snapchat or other time sensitive content. Shoutout content is super effective when you work with an influencer who has actually bought your product – as they have a much higher chance of giving a shout out about it on social media compared to someone who has never heard of your brand.

Influencers for B2B

Regardless of the approach you plan to take when setting up your B2B influencer marketing campaign, if you don’t find the right influencers, you won’t be able to reach the right business audience. By understanding the B2B buyers you’re looking to target, you’ll stand the greatest chance of success. To do so, you should create a B2B buyer persona – an in-depth profile of your target buyer. Once you’ve created a comprehensive profile, research the businesses you feel best fits the mould regarding the services you offer and look at which websites they visit, which trade organisations they’re a member of, who they interact with on Linkedin and who they follow on social media.

By collecting this data and using your newfound knowledge to paint a detailed picture, you’ll be able to understand the kind of content you’ll need to create to engage with them, as well as which industry influencers to use to your advantage. At this point, you’ll have a decent idea of the influencers that are worth branching out to, but if you need a helping hand sourcing the best people for the job, these tools will help:

• BuzzSumo
• Followerwonk
• Pitchbox
• GroupHigh
• Traackr
• Onalytica

Create yourself a comprehensive buyer persona, conduct your market research, use the above tools to find the most valuable influencers for your marketing efforts and you’ll be able to forge new business relationships in no time. Once you’ve sourced your influencers, you’ll want to execute your strategy. There are three additional components to an effective B2B influencer marketing strategy…

Create a content campaign directed at the influencers you’re targeting. Put together a secondary marketing campaign for the influencers to drive greater awareness to a larger set of target buyers. Track key metrics relating to reach, sales and brand awareness to measure the ongoing success of your campaign.