The influencer marketing industry continues to grow at a fast pace, emerging as one of the most effective solutions for brands to connect with their target audiences in a cost-effective and engaging manner.
With thousands of influencers available for collaboration, there are several ways to partner with them, depending on your marketing budget and objectives. Once you've established your brand’s goals, you simply need to decide on the best influencer marketing campaign to achieve them.
In this article, you'll find a list and detailed explanation of the five most popular types of influencer partnerships, helping you decide which one is best for your brand at this moment.
Providing fixed payments to influencers in exchange for social media content featuring your product offers several advantages if you have a marketing budget available for it.
You can first specify the type of content or deliverables you require, such as
Requesting a combination or package of posts can also be effective, spreading the content conveniently throughout the campaign.
The main advantage of sponsored posts is creative control. By compensating influencers, brands can ensure that their content aligns with their expectations by sharing a brief and requesting edits, which may result in better quality content, as influencers who are paid are usually more responsive and accommodating towards the brand’s needs. Additionally, sponsored posts can be utilized for social paid ads, enhancing brand awareness and reducing costs for paid ad creatives. When negotiating, ensure that usage rights for social media advertising are included in the fee.
Since influencer rates can be high, it's recommended to work with fixed payments for long-term relationships or with influencers who have previously demonstrated good conversion rates. Therefore, you can make a fair offer based on their previous performance. Consider offering a low flat fee along with a percentage commission of sales generated by the influencer's content for influencers with lower sales performance.
Therefore, you also need to think about the best package you can offer while working with sponsored posts. Just a flat fee, fee + commission, or offering them a discount code for their followers? You can combine all of these to create an attractive package for the influencer while trying to keep your costs as low as possible.
Gifting products to influencers in exchange for reviews and exposure on their social media platforms is a cost-efficient approach, especially for brands with limited marketing budgets. Whether it's an unboxing video or a comprehensive product review, this collaboration can yield positive results at a low cost.
Offer influencers a free product with an attractive retail value or allow them to choose from a selection of best-selling products from your store. This approach works better for micro-influencers, as macro-influencers typically request fixed payments. However, while product seeding campaigns may face challenges in onboarding larger accounts, offering an affiliate partnership in addition to product gifting can substantially increase the onboarding rate. Let’s review the details of this mixed type of partnership below!
In an affiliate partnership, brands offer the influencers a percentage commission on the sales made through their content, tracked via a customized affiliate link. This approach is ideal for conversion campaigns aimed at driving direct sales and maintaining a positive ROI.
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Offer influencers a free product for promotional content creation and compensate them with an affiliate commission on their attributed sales. The percentage offer depends on your budget, but it typically varies from 10% to 20%.
It’s essential to clarify that in affiliate marketing, the main challenge and long-term objective brands should pursue is to identify the high performers, meaning the influencers who can drive significant sales, which represent a small portion of all the influencers that you initially reach out to. According to the Pareto principle, around 20% of the influencers you work with generate over 80% of your revenue.
These are the ones that brands should consider building long-lasting relationships with, by inviting them to participate in their seasonality campaigns or brand ambassador programs. It can take time to build a reliable network of high-performers, but affiliate management software can streamline this process and once you identify them, they can compensate for much of your costs and bring in the real ROI, so it’s worth investing time in testing influencers. You can read more about this influencer programs strategy here.
Who has never commented on an influencer’s post hoping to be the lucky winner of a bundle for once? Whenever there's a free product involved, interest will be sparked right away!
A giveaway campaign run through the influencer’s account can be ideal for brand awareness objectives, as the influencer encourages their wide audience to participate in an action for the brand, thereby generating significant engagement and reach.
An influencer giveaway collaboration can be beneficial for both sides, as it allows influencers to provide value to their audiences and keep them engaged with their content. Therefore, it is a good strategy to onboard influencers to work with you for the first time. For the brand, it can help boost online presence and increase followers on social media, as participation often requires following the brand’s account. However, this collaboration works best when combined with other types of campaigns designed to increase sales. Therefore, in addition to the giveaway bundle, you can consider offering the influencer a discount code to share with their followers in the giveaway post and an affiliate commission on any sales.
Any influencer marketing campaign can be tied to specific public holidays, sales, or celebrations to promote content related to people’s specific online shopping priorities at certain times. For example, some major ecommerce events you could join include Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas holidays, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and Mother’s or Father’s Day.
Working with influencers during key holiday periods can help boost engagement and drive significant conversions, as people are generally looking for gifts and promotions during these times. Seasonality campaigns are therefore crucial for driving the majority of a brand's revenue and ROI.
A good strategy is to invite your existing influencers with whom you have already worked and who have shown good performance to join your seasonality campaigns. Offer them additional free products, an affiliate commission on any sales generated during the campaign, and an exclusive discount code to share with their followers.
One crucial thing to consider is that seasonality campaigns require advanced and strategic planning. Evaluate first which influencers you wish to invite to join this campaign and the compensation packages you can offer them, based on their previous performance and your marketing budget. Also, make sure to reach out well in advance to ensure the product arrives in time for the promotion.
In the influencer outreach, highlight that by joining this campaign, their commission could significantly increase as many people will be looking for gifts. This will help you onboard influencers with lower compensation packages.
Influencer marketing softwares like Influencer Hero can help you organize these types of campaigns with automated messages and A/B tested templates.Find more information on this strategy and how to create successful seasonality campaigns here.
Regardless of the type of collaboration you decide to undertake with the influencers, there are some basic tips and strategies that you should always follow to see better results:
To sum up, now that we have discussed the different types of campaigns you can create with influencers, you can decide which type of collaboration better fits your brand’s goals and needs. Please note that all these types of campaigns and strategies are not independent or exclusive! In fact, most of them typically work better together, so when possible, it is suggested to combine a few of them. For example, offer your influencers both an affiliate commission and gifting for your first collaboration together, and if they perform well, offer to send them an extra bundle of products to run a giveaway for their followers!
Finally, regardless the type of influencer marketing campaign you choose, make sure you build an effective strategy that will help you achieve your goals with The Ultimate Influencer Marketing Guide.
Sponsored posts offer creative control to brands, ensuring alignment with their expectations. Additionally, they can be repurposed for social paid ads, enhancing brand awareness and reducing ad creative costs.
Product seeding involves gifting products to influencers in exchange for reviews and exposure on their social media platforms. It's a cost-efficient approach for brands with limited budgets, particularly effective with micro-influencers. However, it works better when combined with affiliate partnerships.
Affiliate marketing involves offering influencers a commission on sales generated through their content, tracked via customized affiliate links. This approach is ideal for driving direct sales and maintaining a positive ROI.
Seasonality campaigns tied to specific holidays or events can boost engagement and drive conversions. Brands can offer additional incentives to existing influencers who have previously shown good performance and plan strategically for maximum impact.
Influencer marketing campaigns are often more effective when combined. Brands can offer multiple incentives, such as affiliate commissions and product gifting, to influencers for optimal results.
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