Everyone wants guaranteed results, don’t they? Hint, it won’t be possible through Influencer organic social media posts alone… yes we’re an Influencer Marketing agency and yes we really did just say that.
This is not to say you shouldn’t be using Influencers as a central pillar in your marketing efforts, because you absolutely should be. We’re just here to tell you how to optimise that tactic with this magical, little thing called Amplification.
Over and over again, we see Brands spend time and budget on amazing Influencer content, having them post it live, and then just hoping for the best. But this is a risky strategy when you consider the nature of organic performance. Picture an Influencer with 100,000 followers. Now consider how many followers actually match your target demographics; and how many might actually be interested in your brand; and even how many will actually be shown the content by the algorithm. Suddenly, you’re only reaching maybe 10-20% of those 100,000 followers and the potential reach doesn’t seem so great anymore.
Leaving your Influencer Marketing at the fate of organic performance can lead to expensive, brilliant influencer content simply flopping or not reaching your target audience. But hope is not all lost! As an Influencer Marketing specialist, I always recommend my clients carve out some budget to strategically amplify the content, combatting this lack of predictability, control, reach & frequency.
Let’s look at how we do this:
Step 1 – Think About the Influencer & Content Strategy
The first thing is planning out your Influencer Marketing strategy. That means understanding your goals and sourcing the best Influencers to fulfil this. Then Brief your Influencers accordingly and encourage creative collaboration to produce the most authentic content possible.
BUT, hitting your performance benchmarks is far from guaranteed regardless of how perfect the Influencer and content may be. Not to mention, if your budget limits you to 24-hour Story sharing only (which is no bad thing, by the way… stories are one of the highest converting formats for brands).
Step 2 – Think About the Influencer Amplification Strategy
The amplification layer should kick in as soon as your Influencer content has been posted. Amplifying your Influencer content; AKA using it as social ads, is a fantastic (we’d say necessary) step to truly maximising your Influencer Marketing budget. Putting money behind content allows you to guarantee reach numbers, whilst also targeting the very eyeballs you want to be hitting. A well-curated amplification strategy can allow you to hit those same eyeballs more frequently, with multiple variations of Influencer content and have meaningful impressions on your potential consumers.
Step 3 – Consider how much?
We’re not here to tell you to add an additional expensive marketing tactic to your repertoire, rather that you carve out anything from 20% to 50% of your existing Influencer Marketing budget to allocate to amplification. These two tactics must go hand-in-hand.
Amplification Top Tips:
So how best to activate this Amplification element? Well, we’ve pulled our top tips and best practices below:
- Ensure the foundation of your Influencer program is designed for the Influencers’ audiences, ensuring content & messaging is personalised to them!
- Decide up-front how much of your Influencer Marketing budget you want to use on amplification – hold it back for a later stage, where predictability and control of reach, targeting and frequency can be implemented.
- Pre-negotiate digital usage rights in your Influencer Contracts from the beginning. Hold this as a clause for potentially activating further down the line. This will allow you to lock in a rate, but only activate it if the organic content is the right fit once produced.
- When negotiating, break down these usage rates into smaller chunks. E.g. a monthly fee, rather than a whole year. This allows you the flexibility to stop and see if the content fatigues after 1 month, or to continue momentum if it’s performing well.
- Remember Influencer content has been produced for their own audience and organic use, not specifically as an ad. Consider editing the content before amplifying it. I.e., make it shorter and snappier, with less influencer-specific elements included. Include only the relevant brand messages and a strong call to action.
- When editing Influencer content for ads, consider creating various versions/clips from the same piece of content. Multiple assets in an ad-set allows you to creatively test and learn. This might look like content with music or with voiceovers, content with text overlay or close captions, length variations, content in 9:16 or square.
If this all sounds great, but a little bit overwhelming, panic not. Hoozu offers support in all 3 areas, curating and implementing a holistic strategy that allows each branch to optimise each other, for truly outstanding results.
Cover photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash
