How can brands help to maximise externally run influencer campaigns?

We often get asked by the brands we work with whether there’s anything they can be doing to help their influencer campaigns to succeed.

If you’re experienced in running influencer campaigns externally then you might already have an internal playbook of activities to follow to boost the impact of your campaign.

If you’re new to influencer marketing, creating this playbook can really help the reach and success of your campaign. We’ll still make sure the influencer side of things goes well, but you can work through a list of brand actions internally which will further boost your results and secure more ROI.

Reacting and commenting on non-campaign influencer content

Influencers appreciate brands who show personality and interact with their wider audience.

Once you know which influencers you will be working with it is worthwhile spending some time reacting and commenting on those influencer’s existing posts, building a positive relationship and bond of trust with the people you will be ‘working with’. It adds to your credibility and can secure influencer loyalty before and after the campaign, particularly if you are a brand with a large competition pool.

Your influencers will get their campaign out to their audience and beyond, but that doesn’t need to be where the reach of your campaign stops.

Resharing campaign posts on your Instagram story, for example, will help reach, signpost to future customers the level of trust current customers have in you and build up trust with the influencer whose content you’re sharing.

And the opportunity doesn’t need to stop here either. Your influencers and your accounts are producing great organic reach, but why not take the campaign creative and generate some paid reach as well? Boosting the posts produced by your influencers can be a very effective way of taking a positive message out to your audience and beyond.

Engaging in the campaign conversation

As your influencer campaign builds, conversations will start up around the influencers’ posts. It’s possible that the influencers won’t have the answers to all the questions that come up in these conversations (“How much does it cost?”, “When is it available?”, “Does it come in blue?”). Looking out for these questions can lead to you developing purchasing opportunities amongst those interacting with the influencers’ content.

Responding to more general comments needs to be done carefully. You don’t want to give the impression that you’re ‘big brother’, checking in on what your influencers are doing, but equally you don’t want your social account to be a ‘faceless bot’. Engaging with the conversations around your campaign can be a good way to appropriately enter the conversation.

Repurposing influencer content

We’ve mentioned already that you can repurpose influencer content by sharing what your influencers are creating to your story, but there’s more you can do than this if it’s appropriate.

Firstly, before going any further, you’ll want to make sure that you have the correct permissions to use your influencer’s content. If you work with us then our terms pass the image rights of the influencers’ content over to you as standard, but it’s still good practice to let influencers know how you plan to use the material they produce.

Collating the creative content onto a landing page, or using the content in a further campaign, have both been tactics which have paid dividends for agencies and brands we work with.

Spotting opportunities for the next campaign

One of the best things about working with influencers is the creative spark that they can bring to your marketing. A good brief combined with creative freedom can produce results that are as good as, or even better, than leading agency or internal creative efforts.

With these creatives put out into the world, you never know what might come next. At worst, you’ll have a new creative take on a brand campaign to inspire your next influencer campaign. How did your audience react to what your influencer produced? Could you create a brief for a ‘stage 2’; a similar campaign that further influencers could help you to take to market? What about your general online marketing? Have your influencers produced something which could inspire your brand messaging?

Approaching influencer campaigns actively

If you can do some or all of the above actions whilst your influencer campaign is being run externally then you’ll be helping to boost the results and increasing the chances of your long-term influencer marketing being successful. The overall rule is to approach your campaigns actively, even when they are being run externally. We love taking your campaigns and getting great influencer marketing results for brands, but we love proper long-term partnerships even more, with both sides active and invested in campaign success.

Written by Harriot Rockey

COO, Influence Network