What is Your Role in Influencer Campaigns?
Influencer marketing campaigns are a lot more complex than most realize. As an influencer, you are a piece in a larger promotional effort to create awareness about a brand or product, which hopefully influences more sales. For the overall campaign to be successful, all of the various pieces of the campaign must fit together perfectly. Before you can understand the big picture, we need to take a look at your “job” as an influencer and what it entails.
Your job as an influencer: Create excitement among your followers and fans in a way that encourages them to take action.
This is where frustration often comes in on the part of individual influencers. BlogPaws always strive to share as much information about the overall campaign as possible, without overwhelming you with information that will not help you succeed. When an influencer is chosen for a campaign, they are chosen according to any number of criteria, some more apparent than others. Don’t get frustrated if you were not chosen; use the opportunity to hone your skills and re-invest in yourself.
When you are chosen for a campaign, the brand is saying, “This influencer will be a great extension of our marketing efforts.” They are counting on the story you can tell, the pictures you can take, and the promotion that you can do on their behalf to get their product in front of as many potential consumers as possible. Your job is to create awareness and encourage action.
Your job as an influencer: Put your best effort into every campaign that you are a part of.
In order to help you understand what that means exactly, let’s take a look at what is being measured and how your efforts as an influencer impact those results.
Impressions: The total number of people who have potentially been exposed to your content and the information you have shared about the product.
Impressions directly correlate to the number of readers, followers, and fans you have access to. The more consumers that potentially see your content, the larger your actual reach. Back in January 2016 we created the Boost Your Blog 10K challenge to help you grow as an influencer and be better prepared for future campaigns. It’s never too late to start working on that now. Every new follower is one more person who will hopefully interact with your content and potentially be moved by your call to action.
Engagement: Any interaction with the content that you have produced on your blog or social media channels.
I want to break this down a bit more so that you can measure your success. Some engagements–like a comment on your blog post–equals one impression. The same goes for a click-through on a brand link. Brands love the interest and time taken to perform the additional action. It shows the brand that your readers, followers, and fans are interested in what you had to say about the product and want to learn more.
A share by one of your readers on Facebook equals more impressions for the brand and potentially more engagement for you. The same with a RT on Twitter or a save on Pinterest. Anything that your readers, followers, or fans share with their family and friends equals additional impressions and more potential engagement. An influencer strives to have the story they are telling get shared by their followers.
The content you are able to create, the pictures you share, the ideas you plant in your followers and fans directly correlates to your success as an influencer. Each and every campaign, and post within a campaign, should be viewed as another way for you to engage with your fans in a way that shows your commitment as an influencer.
What can you do today that will help you hone your skills and become a savvy influencer? Here are some action items to help you produce your next masterpiece:
1. Research the brand and the product so that you become as much of an expert about that brand/product as possible.
How will you incorporate the product into your life? How might someone else incorporate it into their life? Share the product or service as a solution in your own life. How did it help? How do you use it? How might someone else use it? Are there other ways to incorporate it into your home that might make it the solution to a problem for your reader? Don’t go off label, but share the various problems it solves.
2. Plan your post and the images that will go along with it.
What type of content really engages your readers, followers, and fans? Dig into your analytics and see what has worked best for you. Do they prefer stories, how to’s, listicles, tips, or a research paper? Use this as an opportunity to present the content you want to share in the way that best reaches your audience. Every influencer is unique, and each has created a community that expects them to deliver content in a specific way.
Think about the end result: What images do you need in order to achieve the result you desire? When creating your images be sure to consider their use across social media. Do you want different images for each channel or will you reuse some of the images from your blog post? What types of images does your community react to and engage with? How can you recreate that for this campaign?
3. Now that you know what you want to focus on, how will you get that across in the content that you create?
Carefully craft your content and images to get your readers interested. Think about how you would want the content presented to you in order for you to take action. Chances are your community will feel more connected with content that is created and presented in a genuine way.
How will you share and promote your content so that as many people as possible are able to interact and engage with your content? The most effective and successful influencer creates engaging content that encourages organic interaction, creates a lasting memory of the product, and sparks ideas in their community about how to incorporate that product or service into their own lives.
What questions do YOU have about your role as an influencer? Please leave them in the comments so we can address them here and in future Influencer Marketing Series posts!
And, don’t forget to join us for the entire series every Friday in September as we shed some light on Influencer Marketing. ICYMI, the first post in the series answered the critical question: What is influencer marketing?
Felissa Elfenbein is the Director of Influencer Marketing for BlogPaws. During the day Felissa can be found creating proposals for new campaigns, on the phone with brands, working on VIP events for the conference, and Skyping with the Pet360 Media Sales Team. Felissa lives in the Northeast Georgia Mountains and has two senior Cavalier King Charles Spaniels better known as the Two Little Cavaliers.
Images: Anna Lurye/Shutterstock.com and RossHelen/Shutterstock.com
