How to incorporate influencers into your video marketing campaigns
It’s well-known that influencer marketing can help increase your followers, but the benefits extend far beyond just increased numbers. Influencers are seen as thought leaders and experts in their respective industries, which helps increase engagement and ultimately, credibility and authenticity for your company.
Social video content is a great implementation of influencer marketing. Video allows businesses to engage audiences quickly, and in an interesting way. Videos are now an integral part of an influencer marketing strategy, so understanding how to make the most out of influencers and videos is key. Here are five tips to incorporating video into your influencer marketing campaign:
1. Choose Relevant Influencers
As a business, you may be tempted to solicit influencers with the really large followings, but relevance is more important. If you move forward with a YouTuber for your influencer campaign, he or she needs to relate to your target audience.
Audiences do not want to be sold to - they want to be entertained. So, the product or service that the influencer is pushing needs to align with his or her existing audience in order to be effective. A successful video campaign will utilize existing YouTube channels that align with what you’re selling. For example, although there are beauty vloggers that have HUGE followings, they won’t be effective selling products or services outside the beauty industry - even if their existing audience is the same demographic that you’re attempting to reach.
2. Give the Influencer Creative Freedom
It’s crucial to have some of your influencer’s flare in the campaign you’re creating. Their audience is watching that particular influencer because they like them - not you. The influencer has garnered their followers on their own, which means they know their audience. So, allow the influencer some creative freedom when they create videos for your company. If an influencer produces something that seems unlike them, it will automatically seem inauthentic.
By no means does this mean that you should give total creative control to your influencer. But, communicate with your influencer and explain your goals with the influencer campaign, and the message that you’re trying to convey. Then, allow the influencer to determine the best way to communicate that information to their followers. The best way to go about this is to let the influencer push your product or service in an existing video that they’re already producing. The more seamless “sell” the better.
3. Track Performance
Tracking and analyzing video performance is key with any campaign - but especially if you’re working with more than one influencer. Understanding how the influencers’ videos are performing, and the reason they are performing well or poorly will help you strategize on how to create more effective campaigns. Utilizing custom links and code will allow you to properly track video performance, as well as utilizing a video analytics software.
4. Use Influencers as Talent in Videos
When collaborating with influencers for video campaigns, take it a step further and feature the influencer in your actual video content. Doing that can help capitalize on that influencer’s following on their channel, and migrate some of that traffic to your channel - with some promotion.
Driving that traffic from their channel to your own can be mutually beneficial for both your company and the influencer. The influencer can increase their audience with your followers, and your existing followers can engage with new, fun content.
5. Encourage Influencer to Create Videos
4X as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it (source). So, utilizing an influencer to do the explaining for you can work for this type of campaign. If your product or service could use an explainer video, have the influencer create a video to explain how and why it works. While you can’t hide that this is sponsored content, it doesn’t have to be super promotional, and can be much more engaging than typical explainer videos.Influencer marketing is a strategy that has proven results, and video is THE marketing trend for 2017 - so why not combine the two? If you help to need to incorporate video into all of your marketing campaigns, contact us.
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