Influencer marketing is a relatively new tool for brands to spread the word about their products to targeted audiences. But with social media influencers ranging from multi-million-follower vloggers to niche micro-influencers, it can take time to decide who to trust with creating content for your brand. 

After all, not only do you want to put your product in front of a targeted audience of potential buyers, but you also want that content to be a good representation of your brand that builds trust with that audience. 

The key lies in choosing the right influencers for your campaign and strategically implementing influencer marketing as part of your overall content marketing strategy. 

Here is when to trust influencers with your brand’s content: 

When influencer marketing makes sense for your industry

Because influencer marketing is a new phenomenon, many brands still need to take advantage of it. While there is an advantage to being among the first in your industry to adopt influencer marketing, consider whether there is a reason other brands in your industry haven’t done so. 

In our experience, influencer marketing best serves brands that sell directly to consumers. Industries like apparel, beauty, sports equipment, technology, software, travel, and home goods have used influencer marketing strategies very well. However, some largely unexplored opportunities remain in certain service-based industries, entertainment, and nonprofit work. 

When the content they’ve already created fits your brand

Influencers are not just social media celebrities. They’re essentially freelance marketing agents and content creators. As such, they have an immense amount of knowledge about content creation, social media platforms, and marketing to their audiences. 

Most experienced influencers also have a distinct content creation style that may or may not fit your brand’s visual guidelines or overall brand personality. For example, some influencers prefer a more cinematic, polished type of content, while others use a more casual, approachable style. 

When choosing influencers for your campaign, choose those whose content style meshes well with your brand’s internally created content. When we’re putting together influencer campaigns for our clients, we pay close attention to which influencers have compatible audiences and which influencers create content that serves our clients’ brands.  

When the influencer serves as your on-screen talent

If you’re not interested in UGC (user-generated content), that doesn’t mean influencers are off the table for your project. Experienced influencers are not only talented content producers but also great on-screen talent. 

When using a content production team, you can ensure that influencer talent will remain on-brand. While you may incur additional travel and production costs, you can include terms in your contract to retain ownership of the content and ensure the influencers share the content on their channels.

When the content is live-created  

Live content can be tricky for brands. You may have incredible product experts on your internal team, but those people may not be great on-camera personalities. In addition, appearing in live videos may not be part of your internal team members’ job description!

A solution is to hire influencers to create live video content for your brand. Many influencers have a lot of practice appearing on camera, so they have an easier time looking natural and delivering all of the essential content than an internal team member might. They can also invite their followers to the live event, which can expand the audience for the content. 

Let us handle your Influencer Marketing

When creating an influencer marketing campaign, it’s important to decide precisely what audiences you’d like to reach and what type of experience you’d like them to have with your content. And bigger isn’t always better! Remember that smaller, more niche influencers could be the ticket to success. 

If you’re ready to work with influencers, let us build an incredible influencer marketing campaign for your business! Reach out today to get started.