Just as you can’t create an amazing meal without great ingredients, you can’t pull off an effective influencer marketing campaign without the right influencers.
They are the fundamental basis of your campaign, the ambassadors for your brand and the people communicating your message to prospective customers. Finding the right influencers can be tricky and time-consuming. It can also be – if recent headlines are to be believed – a near impossible task due to the number of influencers fraudulently inflating their followings. so how do you work with the right influencers for your campaign? Vamp’s platform has been designed to connect you with the right influencers for your campaign, focussing on four key areas.
Authenticity
What do we mean by the ‘right’ influencers? There are some general good practice rules to follow. These are the must-haves for content creators joining our influencer platform: a genuine following with no sudden spikes in numbers, a professional manner, strong engagement, consistent with their follower count, and a genuine connection with their audience, like replying to comments on their posts.
High-quality
They should also, above all, produce high-quality content that is creative and inspiring with a distinctive, individual aesthetic. While it may be tempting to think that the ‘right’ influencer for your campaign is the celebrity with the most amount of followers, that may not be the case. Modern consumers are bombarded with content. The best way to cut through the noise is by prioritising awe-inspiring content to stop them in their tracks.
Influential
Influencers with smaller followings, on average, have more engaged audiences. With fewer followers, it’s more manageable for them to reply to comments, DMs and build a closer relationship with their followers. They also tend to be more relatable and trusted, meaning their recommendations are taken more seriously. The fact that they are a more cost-effective option means you can also run numerous micro-influencer campaigns for the price of one hyper-influencer campaign. So you might find the ‘right’ one for you is a micro influencer, rather than a celebrity.
Relevant
Relevancy is an essential part of a successful influencer marketing campaign and helps the campaign feel authentic. The product placement needs to be believable and in context for it to be trusted and hold merit. Influencers taking part in your campaign should be people who truly would use your product. For example, when Adobe promotes their latest editing software, they use photography and videography professionals and enthusiasts who will use it in their day-to-day lives, because they are the best people to showcase it. Vamp’s Creator Sampling Tool uses machine learning to help you find more relevant creators from within our community. When you fill in the demographic details and keywords you’ll see a subset of creators who match your criteria. Simply select the ones that are a brand fit.
Getting the brief right
Even when a brand has followed all this advice – and found the right influencer for their campaign – they can undo all their good work too easily with a bad brief.
Issuing a tight, prescriptive brief, that puts marketing jargon into the mouth of the influencer and stipulating they shoot the product in a certain way, limits their imaginative content creation talents. Clients should allow influencers to be the experts they are by handing over creative control. Yes, it sounds scary but remember, these influencers know their audiences better than anyone. They have spent years cultivating that following and honing a distinctive tone of voice which, if altered, is a tell-tale sign that the collaborative posts are yet another ad to be dismissed.
At the other extreme, a confusing brief which fails to provide the necessary information can hinder a campaign from the start. Vamp’s easy briefing tool guides brands and marketers through the process. It reminds you to add the essential details, clear do’s and don’ts, but doesn’t allow you to squeeze the creative magic out of a campaign – getting your campaign off to the best possible start.
The reality is, you could have a fantastic product, a healthy budget and a killer campaign idea but if you fail to select the right influencers, or fail to use them to their full potential, you could be massively limiting the effectiveness of your campaign. The right influencers, used in the right way, are the make or break ingredient, so select them with care.
And there you have it, that’s how to work with the right influencers for your campaign. It’s now time to put this to work. Vamp’s tools allow brands to run their own beautifully effective campaigns. Watch a quick demo here. Or if you’re needing a little extra help, learn more about how to select the right influencers for your campaign here.
