Engagement

Ways To Make Sure Your Campaign Stands Out

Now that you know the benefits of running an Influencer Marketing campaign, the next thing you need to consider is how to keep your campaign interesting and engaging. Check out these tips to ensure that your campaign will be the talk of the town.

1) Be Clear with Influencers

As a brand, you should be the first one to understand the kind of campaign you want the public to see. Influencers have an audience who will most likely judge them for any poor quality content. You need to be clear of the campaign goals and messages before approaching any influencer. Create an Influencer Contract that provides campaign requirements, messages, do’s, don’ts, and other campaign-related information. You want to give the influencers creative freedom to create what they want, but also manage the campaign messages.

2) Simplify Your Pitch

If you want to get noticed by your chosen influencer, you need to reach out first. In doing so, make sure you follow the K.I.S.S. directive—keep it short and simple (yes, we know it’s keep it simple, stupid … but we changed it up). Remember, you are probably not the only one who wants to partner with your chosen influencer. Be straightforward in introducing yourself and your pitch to them. While you’re at it, it never hurts to butter them up a bit!

3) Make It Long-Term

Surely you chose your influencer based on how they embody your brand, right? Have you considered partnering for the long run? If your brand is just starting out or has been around for a while, an ambassador program might be the way to go. Influencers can be more organic and authentic and provide more engaging content for you if they’ve seen you grow.

If you’re focused on finding the right influencers, your brand will be represented by people who truly believe in your product or service. If it’s a great partnership, then the influencer will become a lifelong fan and ambassador, continuously sharing how much they love your product or service. Not only will the influencer promote your product online, but in real life as well.

At Forward Influence, we managed a campaign for Shutterfly with a few influencers that turned into a multi-faceted campaign with the same influencers. During two separate 7-month campaigns, the brand ambassadors created monthly projects and shared with their readers unique and creative ways to use Shutterfly home decor products. The ambassadors even participated in a SoHo New York City loft design event. They also hosted in-home events, shared posts, and encouraged followers to enter giveaways. The loyalty that the influencers had to the Shutterfly brand resulted in incredible engagement with their followers and ROI for the brand

4) Provide Writing Angles

What makes influencers successful is their ability to keep their audience interested. As a brand, you can always pitch ideas on how you want your campaign to run. However, you need to trust your influencer on how to captivate their audience simply because it’s their audience. In your Influencer Contract, provide writing angles to get the creative juices flowing. From there, your influencers will have a better understanding of what you want to see as a result of the campaign. They should then be given the able to create freely.

5) Diversify Partnerships

To reach a large audience—regardless of the tiers of influencers—you’ll want to make sure you work with a wide variety of influencers. You’ll want to create a set criteria for the influencers and then vet against the criteria when reviewing influencer options. However, keep in mind the diversification aspect. In doing so, you’ll reach more people from various demographics based on your influencer criteria.

6) Boost Content

Once you are able to track your campaigns, you can now determine which content resonates with your audience. With the help of your influencers, take note of the factors that made your campaigns successful. By doing so, you’ll have evidence of what worked and what didn’t (you’ll want to keep this information handy for future campaigns).

7) Create Digital Events

An average person spends about two hours daily on social media. Why not maximize that time by creating events where your influencer and their audience can interact with each other? Creating ways to have their audience reach out to influencers will personally strengthen their trust and loyalty which can translate to your brand loyalty.

8) Mix Platforms

If you want the most out of your Influencer Marketing campaign then make sure you use the correct social media platforms. Mixing platforms and the content your influencers provide on each one helps you stay on top of the latest trends and gets that content in front of their audiences where they’re at.

Let’s say you have your heart set on a Facebook Influencer Marketing activation and you want to increase visits to your website. In your mind, that would be the ROI golden ticket. Do you know for certain that Facebook is the right place for your brand? At the end of the campaign, do you think you’ll be happy with the results? Will all of that hard work pay off?

Crafting an influencer marketing activation may get your creative juices flowing, but without focusing on results for your next sure-to-be-award-winning campaign, you’re not likely to improve your company’s bottom line. The last thing you want to do is run a Twitter campaign when your goal is to increase awareness on Instagram.

The onslaught of social media platforms combined with the constant shift of Influencer marketing strategies can make any marketer feel a bit confused. What social media platforms are best for your Influencer Marketing campaigns? Well, the final decision can either make or break a brand and Influencer Marketing campaign.

The social media platforms and the influencers play a vital role in the success of any Influencer Marketing campaign. However, no matter which social media platforms you choose to promote your brand, important factors such as platform audience, format, and pricing will play a role in maximizing your resources while achieving your return on investment (ROI).

9) Encourage Creativity

When you’re confident enough, you can try to let your influencers market your brand in their own manner. They know their audience very well which means they can help you scale your brand exponentially. Have trust in your influencers and their decisions since they know their followers best.

However, if doing so makes you nervous, then you can review the drafts before they go live. Try to provide as little edits as possible to the drafted content to keep the content true to the voice of the influencer. Also, be sure to include the “draft submission and review” process to the Influencer Contract. You want to make the influencers fully aware that their drafted content will need to be reviewed, edited (if need be), and approved prior to going live. Creativity will result in engaging Influencer Marketing content.

10) Include a Call-to-Action

Be clear on what you want to achieve at the end of the day. Do you want more followers on Instagram? What about more product sales? Is increasing your newsletter list a goal? You are still in business regardless of how much you put out for your marketing campaign. Therefore, you need to get your money’s worth and hit campaign goals while driving traffic and increasing sales.

How to increase social media engagement?

A. Here are the various strategies that you can use to increase your social media engagement:

• Incorporate humor into your content

Use humor regularly in your social media posts to entertain your followers and improve social media engagement.

• Host a giveaway contest

Another excellent way to increase social media engagement is by hosting a giveaway contest. This tactic drives engagement mainly because people have a chance of receiving something. It could compel them to engage with brand or influencer content on social media. And the best part? You could boost the amount of user-generated content for your brand based on how you execute the contest.

• Create original and engaging visual content

You can use tools like PixTeller, Piktochart, and Canva to create unique visuals that will engage your social media audience.

Alternatively, use Crello which has numerous templates and personalized designs you can choose from. You can also choose to create your images from scratch. Their design editor also allows you to customize your visuals using shapes, photos, text, colors, and more. It could be photos, memes, GIFs, or even original graphics.

• Schedule posts to publish at the right time

Social media users aren’t online all the time. If you happen to post something while most of your followers are inactive, you could potentially lose out on social media engagement opportunities.

• Feature fans and customers

One of the most effective ways to increase social media engagement is to feature your customers and turn them into brand advocates. When you share user-generated content on social media, you achieve a few benefits.

Q2. How can social media engagement be increased organically?

A. There are numerous strategies that you can use to grow your social media engagement organically. Here are the best ones:

• Schedule posts for publishing at the right time
• Go live
• Host giveaways and contests
• Come up with attractive visuals
• Enrich content with influencer generated content

Q3. How is social media engagement rate calculated?

A. You can calculate your social media engagement rate by using the below formula:

Divide the total engagements by the total reach of the post and multiply it by 100.

Q4. How social media engagement can help increase brand awareness? A. When more people engage with your social media content, the social media algorithms will start showing your posts to a wider target audience. This is because they deem your post to be more valuable and one that people might like to engage with. As a result, it’ll help in boosting your social media engagement which results in increased brand awareness.