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Influencer Campaign Types: Matched to your marketing goals

How to Succeed with the Right Type of Influencer Campaign

With such great potential for companies to raise brand awareness, establish valuable partnerships and boost sales, it’s no wonder that influencer marketing has become a core part of current digital marketing strategy. When you think of influencer marketing, the first thing that probably comes to mind is sponsored posts.

“When asked to pick the content formats they find effective for influencer marketing, 78% of marketers chose Instagram posts [as] the #1 choice.”

– MediaKix

But don’t let that fool you. From giveaways to un-boxings to ambassador programs, there are now so many more creative ways that influencers and brands can get together to come up with fresh ideas that keep their audiences engaged and excited to give brands a go. The question is how do you pick the right one to align with your marketing campaign goals? Well, we’ve figured it all out for you with this comprehensive list.

Campaign Types
  1. Giveaways, Sweepstakes and Contests
  2. Social Media Take Overs
  3. Affiliate Marketing Links
  4. Sponsored Posts
  5. Unboxing and Reviews
  6. Brand Ambassador Programs

Giveaways, Sweepstakes and Contests

depicts a woman winning an online giveaway to illustarte influencer campaign type of giveaway

Along with sponsored posts, this is the most quintessential form of influencer marketing. Giveaways can be a great option to increase brand awareness at the start of your digital marketing journey. They’re a popular option given their mutual benefit; Brands supply influencers with a product or service and in return they have something to give away to their followers. Their simplicity and mutual benefit can help drive a high growth rate when it comes to social actions (likes, follows ,shares). Likewise, contests can be a great way to drum up free content for your marketing by outsourcing marketing material to people who want to compete in the contests.

Our top reasons for choosing a giveaway for your influencer campaign type.

Minimum Input : Once your contest is set up it requires very little work to maintain, you can just sit back relax and watch the brand awareness role in.
Make Free Content: Asking people to submit pictures or videos linked to your product as a contest submission can be a easy way to generate free content for your brand
Easy Brand Awareness: People who are not following you have a chance to hear about your brand because others will be talking about your contest.

What to watch out for:

Rules and Regulations: The FTC has strict rules about the way that sweepstakes take place so make sure your contest follows them. Also ensure that your method of picking a winner is clearly demonstrated and fair.
Potential drop off after giveaway: You’ll likely see a sharp decline after the contest finishes as some people may only follow to have an entry into your sweepstake.

Social Media Take Overs

Woman pointing to an instagram feed to illustrate social media takeover influencer campaign type.
Social media takeovers involve allowing your organization’s social media account to be taken over by another for an agreed upon amount of time. Guests, celebrities or influencers can bring their creativity and personality to your brands image through new posts and stories. Despite the fact that no two social media takeovers are the same, you can set ground rules to ensure your event meets specific objectives. 

Here are our favourite aspects of choosing social media takeovers as your influencer campaign type:

Showcases Brand Personality: Picking the perfect takeover influencer can help communicate your brand voice to those who know the influencer but aren’t familiar with your brand yet.
Potentially free: Unless you aim to work with a large influencer, takeovers can often be negotiated for free given their mutually beneficial nature. In any case, even if you ended up forking out some marketing budget, the cost will generally be much lower than other campaign types such as sponsored posts of reviews.

What you should watch out for:

Requires high level of trust: Since you’re handing over the reigns to your social media persona, you should be 100% certain beforehand that you have picked the perfect guest. So be sure they won’t potentially harm your brand image. Also ensure they’ll communicate brand personality authentically AND consistently.

Affiliate Marketing Links

WOMAN SHARING AN AFFILIATE LINK TO ILLUSTRATE INFLUENCER CAMPAIGN TYPE.

If cost is your main concern, look no further than affiliate links. Influencers promote a sale or product using a link and get commission for every sale that happens through this. You can check out our detailed posts about them here. In the meantime, all you need to know is that they can be a great low risk alternative compared to other influencer campaign types.

Here are our favourite aspect of choosing affiliate links as your influencer campaign type:

High ROI and Low Risk: Since you only pay for every sale made the risk is low but the return on the investment can be super high.

What you should watch out for:

Difficulty Measuring some KPI’s: Hard to measure for simple impressions or brand awareness.
Logistical set up: Requires an individual tracking link for each blogger.
#Label

Sponsored Posts

Depicts a sponsored post to illustrate sponsored post influencer campaign type.

The most quintessential form of influencer marketing; This is where brands pay users for Instagram posts that promote them. (Think the Kardashians and hair gummies or Tammy hem brow and fake tan!) 

An influencer typically has an engaged fan base and a personal brand. So they can charge a certain amount of money to create an organic post that features the brand’s products or services when a brand in their niche wants to sponsor them. By doing so, the influencer exposes the brand to an audience it would not otherwise reach.

Here are our favourite aspects of choosing a sponsored post as your influencer campaign type:

More Control: These types of posts begin by sending the influencer a campaign brief that outlines certain guidelines, instructions, and requirements. Because of this, it’s much easier to keep a consistent brand image with sponsored posts.

Relatively fast: These types of posts are easy to approve and publish.

What you should watch out for:

Regulations: We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, the rules and regulations on these types of posts are now very tight. MAKE SURE THAT YOUR INFLUENCER CLEARLY LABELS YOUR COLLAB AS AN ADVERT/SPONSORED.
High Comparative Cost: If you’re working with a larger influencer these types of posts will require a much larger marketing budget than other campaign types.

Unboxing and Reviews

Illustrates unboxing influencer campaign type.

More popular on video platforms such as Youtube, Twitch and Tiktok, these are essentially another form of a sales video for your products. The hook of them is that they mimic that first-time experience of opening a box or buying a new gift to viewers. 

Benefits of choosing an unboxing/review as your influencer campaign type:

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Gives potential customers a final push: People actively look for reviews because they want to buy a product. If these people find yours influencer videos it can help push customers to make a purchase by which they’ll be able to see the features first hand.

What you should watch out for:

High Risk (But potential for High reward): Once the product is in the influencers hands its up to them to pass judgement. This is a huge risk and can go one of two ways. But of course, high risk can also mean high reward if a big influencer totally raves about your product to their dedicated fanbase.

Brand Ambassador Programs

Illustrates brand ambassador campaign type.

Influencer brand ambassadors serve as the face of a company’s culture to spread the company’s message using their following and credibility. Given that 71% of consumers say they would trust recommendations coming from a social media referral of someone they trust, they’re a great tool in your social media marketing arsenal.

“71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals.”

INVESPCRO

Here are our favourite aspects of choosing a brand ambassador programme as your influencer campaign type:

Retention Focused– they focus on brand retention and brand loyalty rather than initial brand awareness.
More long term than other campaign types – Brand ambassador programmes can last anywhere between 6-12 months on average. It’s this period of time that can help your company build consumer loyalty more organically and sustainably.
Can be lower cost than other types : Often times ambassadors will accept gifts and recognition in exchange for participation. This drastically lowers the cost compared to sponsored advertisements and shout-outs. In addition this means that the influencer you choose genuinely loves and uses your products creating a greater sense in authenticity to potential consumers.
Helps Create a Community: The great aspect of these programmes is that they can help you target consumers from all walks of life. Additionally small media influencers are just as valuable since they target very specific niches in your consumer pool.

What you should watch out for:

Requires high level of trust and strong working relationship:  Since you’ll be working together for a long period of time a strong business relationship beforehand is a must. Again, just like takeovers, you’ll need to be sure they won’t potentially harm your brand image through this period of time as well. 

That was our comprehensive list to help you choose an Influencer Campaign type. We hope it was useful! All illustrations were provided by StorySet and Freepik.

Once you’ve settled on your campaign type the next step is writing an Influencer Campaign Brief. Check out our guide post with our free downloadable template to get you started.

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