So, you’ve got some marketing dollars to spend, you know that there is a lot of buzz around influencer marketing, but your digital advertising efforts in the past have seemed to do the job. What should you dedicate them to? You’ve come to the right place.
First and foremost, your marketing should never feel too comfortable. With each and every campaign you launch, you should be searching for a way to build upon the last. Whether this be tweaking the ad copy, changing the graphics, adding a new placement on a platform, revisiting your audience targeting, or building out a retargeting audience to use later in the campaign, it’s important that you’re always on the hunt for ways to optimize and improve based on your results. Alexa, play “Nobody’s Perfect” by Hannah Montana.
This is where a buzzworthy influencer marketing campaign could come into play. In fact, an influencer marketing campaign coupled with your already established paid advertising strategy may just be your ticket to fortune and fame. But before we get into that, let’s break down both tactics to understand what makes them unique and successful on their own.
Social Advertising
How does it work?
Social advertising is the perfect place to start if you’re just dipping your toes into digital marketing and have an initial goal to meet. It’s straightforward: you identify which self-serve advertising platform(s) best fits the criteria for the campaign (think Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other major social channels), choose an objective that aligns with your goals and KPIs, build out your target audience, set the budget and length of the campaign, select the most suitable placements, upload the creative, review, and launch! (Ok, I may have oversimplified it just a tad, but you will want to check these boxes off before launch!)
Selfish plug: If you’re unsure or hesitant around any of the steps listed above, my team of strategists recently created 3 blogs that can help lead you in the right direction and answer the overwhelming questions like, “Which platform should I be on?” or “How much budget should I be spending?”
- Planning an Ad Campaign: 5 Mistakes to Avoid
- How to Build a Campaign That Generates Actionable Insights: Questions You Should Ask
- Inside the Mind of a Campaign Manager: Top Questions I Ask Myself
When should you leverage it?
There is a time and place for everything!
If your marketing initiative checks any of the boxes below, a social advertising campaign may be a successful route for your brand:
- Specific Conversion Goals: With the help of detailed tracking and analytics, a social advertising campaign is ideal if you are looking for a very specific outcome or conversion point like website visits, form submissions, purchases, or clicks
- Control Over Messaging: By utilizing a self-serve platform, you’ve got total control over what you say, how you say it, and the opportunity to tweak or revisit messaging later to ensure you’re meeting your goals! This is especially important for industries that have lots of legal considerations
- Testing and Optimizations: Going off the above, social ads allow you to utilize A/B testing to see what’s working and access a robust amount of performance data, which enables you to make decisions in real-time (and save you $$$!)
- Budget Control: Having control of your budget on a real-time basis is crucial for brands who are limited in their spending but are trying to maximize their ROI. This is also important if you’re interested in breaking up spend evenly amongst your brand’s various products or services
- Short-Term Campaigns: If you need to reach X amount of people quickly for a time-sensitive event, promotion, or offer, paid advertising is your best option
- Detailed Audience Targeting: While some platforms offer more robust targeting opportunities than others, you’ve got one leg up on getting as close to your target audience as possible through social ads. This will aid in maximizing your campaign’s performance (and making your ad dollars go further) upon launch and later through leveraging retargeting audiences
What gets created?
As a social advertiser, you’ve got a lot to consider in how you’d like to share your message or offer and what assets need to be created to support the campaign. Below is a brief list of ad types and content you may think about incorporating into your campaign:
- Static Ads: The most common way to deliver your campaign message digitally on just about every social platform is through these ads which are graphics and accompanying copy
- Video Ads: Think about a basic in-feed ad, or for greater reach, consider Instagram reels, TikToks, or YouTube shorts! We would not recommend exceeding 2 minutes
- Story Ads: A post or short video/animation that reiterates a campaign message. These are typically a quick tap for your audience, so these are best used for brand awareness goals
- Landing Page: If an existing website page does not perfectly speak to the messaging and product(s) you’re advertising, then a new, dedicated landing page is 100% necessary to connect the dots for your audience
- Gated Content: This content should be of high value that the audience would want to fill out a form to access it. Think whitepapers, eBooks, templates, webinars, etc. This content could be directly downloaded from the landing page, sent in a follow-up email, or directly linked to the form on an ad as far as delivery
- Drip Campaigns/Follow-up Emails (if applicable): If your campaign requires the user to give you their email address, consider creating a drip campaign or a follow-up email to further educate and build a relationship with your audience in hopes of converting them into customers (or even repeat customers)
Influencer Marketing
How does it work?
Influencer marketing is not as cut and dry as social advertising; however, the risk is definitely worth the reward!
There are some similarities, though, like identifying your goals and KPIs, budget, key messages, and target audience. Once this is established, you’ll then want to do your own research on which influencers can/and will best suit your brand and your target audience (do not skip out on background checks!). After that, you’ll wrap everything up from above into a short campaign brief that captures what your brand is ideally looking for and share with the creator.
In the coming weeks, you can expect negotiations, further discussion around deliverables and timelines, potentially a formal contract, and other expectation setting. This process can be unique to each campaign and creator, so be mindful of that!
When should you leverage it?
While influencer marketing may not be for everyone, it’s important to keep an open mind around it as it could make sense in places you may not have expected it to. (Yes, it works in the B2B space!)
Consider the following criteria to determine if your brand could benefit from this hot tactic:
- Building Trust and Loyalty: Influencers became influencers because of their ability to gain their audience’s trust through their content. It’s a perfect opportunity to use this pre-established loyalty to your advantage and create the same feelings for your brand
- Brand Awareness: Like the above, an influencer can help create a lot of buzz for you if you’ve got a new product or service or are branching out to a new market. Because these “ads” don’t feel like ads, people are more likely to consider your brand since it’s presented to them more organically
- Niche Audiences: Sometimes the targeting capabilities when advertising on social will not meet your needs fully. That’s why, for a more niche audience, we’d recommend scouting an influencer or creator whose followers might be interested in your offer for a more successful campaign
- Unique Content: Let’s give these creators credit—they’re good at what they do because they can talk about topics in their own, unique way! You can guarantee they’ll nail the marriage of their personal brand and your wishes from a creative angle
- Long-Term Brand Advocacy: If you’re willing to “trust the process,” forming a long-term relationship with a creator and having someone who can consistently advocate for your brand could reap high rewards over time. Typically, small businesses and less prominent products/services benefit from this style of advocacy the most.
What gets created?
The beauty of working with (and trusting!) a content creator is that they can create a combination of content that will be unique to your campaign in more ways than one.
Here are just some of the ways you and your chosen influencer can partner together based on your budget and KPIs:
- Sponsored Static Content: A post talking about you or your product. This is great for brands who want to offer a few pointers on what they’d like the influencer to mention
- Sponsored Short-Form Videos: Think Instagram reels, TikToks, or YouTube shorts! Again, an opportunity to offer a few talking points
- Sponsored Stories: A post or video like the above, however, this will only be live for 24 hours
- Giveaways: Your brand could host a giveaway of your product on an influencer’s page
- Product Placements: The influencer will not chat about your product directly, but it may be placed strategically in a few posts or videos
- Affiliate Marketing: The influencer will make a commission based off an affiliate link or code you give them to share with their audience
- PR/Gifting: Maybe the influencer will post your product, maybe they won’t! This is a low-cost, no strings attached, way to create brand awareness if they choose to feature your brand in a post, story, or video
- Ambassador Programs: The influencer is tied to discussing your brand/product for a longer period of time and will likely work with you in other tactics like events, blog posts, emails, etc.
And the list goes on! These were just a few for you to get your wheels turning. We recommend coming into the partnership with an idea of what you’d like, but being open to other avenues considering everyone’s got a different budget, style, and success stories to back them up!
How to Make Both Strategies Work in Harmony
So, you’ve now learned that in social advertising, you’re fully responsible for practically… everything from start to finish. (Unless you hire an agency, hi, we’re Liquid, nice to meet you!) You’ve also learned that you’ve got a lot less creative control in influencer marketing and a lot of what needs to be created will be in the hands of the influencer. It feels like these approaches can’t possibly work together, can they? They can! In fact, you can create quite a success story when you let both of these strategies work in harmony. Alexa, play “The Best of Both Worlds” by Hannah Montana
Here’s a few scenarios:
- Content Creation: Depending on your contract, you could repurpose top-performing influencer content from their campaign and use those graphics or videos for your next social advertising campaign. This way, the same message is being communicated through multiple platforms and tactics. This will also further amplify the amount of reach and impressions you’ll receive
- Authenticity and Credibility: Influencers provide a level of genuineness and trust with their audience that is hard to achieve on a one-off paid social campaign. Like the above, if the influencer content is allowed to be repurposed, then you can achieve the same level of credibility with your social advertising audience, which in turn, means more results
- Audience Targeting: The reality is it’s not possible for you to reach every target audience member through one singular platform or tactic. By hand-picking and creating your target audience on paid social coupled with reaching the social media users your chosen influencer caters to and is followed by, you’ll heighten your chances of getting in front of all interested audience members
- Measuring Success: Social advertising campaigns offer better analytics attribution with tracking through UTM parameters and KPIs like cost per result, whereas influencer marketing campaigns are typically more focused on reach and engagement metrics (and occasionally sales or leads tracked with UTM parameters or affiliate links/codes.) Together, you’re able to cover the entirety of the sales funnel, and should largely be able to track all of the activity from initial reach and impressions to final conversions and your ROI.
- Warm Audience Targeting: Influencer marketing and social advertising can both be successful for drawing initial interest and awareness individually, however, to maximize conversions on your campaign, you could create retargeting ads on paid social based on the warm audience you’ve garnered from influencer marketing. This is a win-win considering you’re also flexing the ability to reach a wider audience outside of what’s available on paid social and drill the campaign message home
Conclusion
In the battle of social advertising vs. influencer marketing, there’s no clear winner—in fact, the winning strategy just might be your ability to use them together. By blending the creative flair and trust factor of influencer campaigns with the precision and control of social ads, you can build a strategy that not only resonates with your target audience but also drives killer results.
Lucky for you, my team’s no stranger to building out winning campaign plans. Contact us today and let’s make some magic happen!