If you haven't noticed the rise of influencer marketing campaigns, you haven't been paying attention. Influencer marketing is the cousin of celebrity endorsement - updated for today's consumer.
With traditional celebrity endorsements, you'd have a well-known person appear in your TV commercial or ad. With influencer marketing, you're playing more to authenticity by getting well-known figures to integrate your product into their daily lives and share the result on social media, YouTube, and in blog posts.
If you're not sure where to start, take a page out of the book of these three successful influencer campaigns and the lessons they teach us.
Glossier
Takeaway: You don't have to have a Kardashian on speed dial to create a successful influencer campaign. Certainly, the bigger following an influencer has the bigger the impact, but marketers know that targeted is better than broad. Sometimes putting your own audience members in the influencer seat can drive authentic connection that yields results.
Blue Apron
Blue Apron is a meal-in-a-box delivery service in an increasingly saturated market. Most of these services offer similar pricing and models, so Blue Apron needed a way to stand out.
They started as most influencer campaigns do - with blogs and social media (nearly half of marketers using influencer campaigns use blogs and create content on Facebook and Instagram). Posts of everyone from former contestants from The Bachelor to Olympians such as Michael Phelps cooking Blue Apron meals became so ubiquitous, that brand awareness couldn't help but grow. And by providing each influencer with a unique promo code, Blue Apron created a low barrier to entry and the ability to track each influencer's impact.
Takeaway: Influencer marketing campaigns aren't one and done. Repetition is the key to memory so plan your campaign to build upon a customer journey. The more they see your product, the less they'll be able to ignore it. Covering multiple channels at the right intervals will require the power of a marketing automation tool , so be sure to have the right one in place before embarking on your campaign.
I Am a Witness by Ad Council
In 2015, the Ad Council called upon the power of influencers to spread the word about their anti-bullying campaign, I Am a Witness, and the related emoji keyboard that participants could use to call bullying.
The creators of the campaign were targeting teens, of whom have witnessed online bullying, so they looked for strong influencers with that demographic. The cornerstone of the influencer campaign was a video in which influential YouTubers read aloud the meanest comments they had received online then talked about next steps to combat bullying. They also had individual YouTubers post to their own channels with videos that mentioned the campaign, like this one , in which Grace Helbig paints her face like the "old man" emoji then talks about the I Am a Witness emoji.
Takeaway: The power of influencers is that they can speak in the voice of your demographic - a voice you may lack. Don't be over-instructive when working with influencers. Instead, let them take the lead with ideas. The video example above may not make a whole lot of sense to a marketing manager more than 10 years out of college, but it clearly spoke to teens.
