As a brand owner, you’re probably looking for ways to boost your business’s online visibility and reach more potential customers. One strategy which is extremely effective is combining influencer marketing with FB/IG ads.

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Influencer Whitelisting: Run Ads on Behalf of Your Influencers

This process is called influencer whitelisting where you gain access to an influencer’s ad account and can run ads on their behalf. This approach has several benefits, including better targeting, improved ad performance and scalability. Instead of having to ask an influencer to post every single time you could just upload a high quality post (UGC) and put a budget behind it to have more people see the content.

You might be asking yourself how on earth do I set this up? For a step by step explanation on how to partner with an influencers through your meta business manager account read our detailed article: 2X your FB & IG Ads performance using Influencer Whitelisting here.

In this article we will mainly focus on how to convince the influencer to give you permission to run the ads through their account as this is a crucial step in getting started with whitelisting.

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Build a Solid Relationship & Trust with Your Influencer

In case you have a budget, which you can offer to the influencer, you could ask an influencer right away in exchange for monetary compensation. In case your budget is limited, you might want to follow a different approach. Getting access to someone’s Instagram page is quite sensitive, meaning that it is recommended to build up a relationship with the influencer first.

Start to work with the influencer on a regular basis to build up a relationship and trust. To learn more on how to work with influencers and build up your influencer program for your brand read our ultimate Influencer Marketing guide here. After having established a relationship with the influencer and having worked together on a couple of campaigns follow the steps below to ask for permission to run ads through their account.

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Email 1: Reaching Out to Your Influencer

1. Reach out and explain what influencer whitelisting entails.
2. Highlight the benefits of influencer whitelisting for both your brand and the influencer (more details in next paragraph).
3. Ask if they already have a Meta business manager account and if they would be interested in this opportunity.
4. If they show interest, request for their business manager ID and ask them to accept the partnership request in their Instagram account under messages.

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Explain Benefits for the Influencer

What is always crucial when asking anything from an influencer is to clearly outline what is in it for them. Brands often tend to write a lot about themselves. The truth is no one really cares about you. Everyone cares mostly about themselves and creators aren’t any different in that regards.

Meaning: clearly highlight the benefits for the influencer. You might be thinking “great thanks for the tip, but what is the benefit for the influencer?”. Read on as this is the single most effective way to instantly get access to the influencers account.

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Pay for Ads: Gain More Audience for the Influencer

Let’s take a step back and consider the influencer’s main asset: it is their audience. It’s quite simple, the larger the audience, the more attractive they are to brands seeking partnerships. You can use this to your advantage by explaining that you’ll be paying Meta to showcase their profile to new people, increasing their following and personal branding, all paid for by you.

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Using Their Affiliate Link & Code Can be More Beneficial for Them

Additionally you could explain that you will be using their personal affiliate tracking link and their code in the ad and offer them an affiliate fee on each referred sale. However, depending on your ad spend, you may want to be cautious when offering an affiliate fee as it can become expensive with larger number of sales.

Many influencers are already familiar with this concept and may have already partnered with other brands using whitelisted ads. In these cases, they probably already know the process. Some influencers may even request a fixed fee to partner with them for influencer whitelisting. In such cases, you can either try to negotiate or accept their fee to proceed.

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Whitelisting Benefits for Businesses

What are the main benefits for you as a brand to implement whitelisting as part of your marketing strategy? ‍

By displaying sponsored content through the influencer’s account, viewers perceive it as regular content, leading to increased view and click-through rates and ultimately better ROAS. Video content, in particular, can be highly effective in this regard, as it often resonates more strongly with audiences, conveying authenticity and building trust.

Additionally, you can create LLA’s based on the influencer’s followers, target their audience directly, and much more. Even if you don’t have cold acquisition campaigns running on Meta, it’s still recommended to use whitelisting for your retargeting ads to significantly improve your conversion and ROAS.

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Use Influencer Hero to Automatically Collect UGC from Influencers

Using an influencer marketing software like Influencer Hero can help to reach out and start working with influencers. The platform automatically collects all user-generated content from influencers which you can download and directly upload into your Meta Business Manager to run your whitelisted ads.

Want to learn more about influencer whitelisting? Contact our experts and schedule a meeting here.

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