How to Reach Your Target Audience with Influencer Marketing Campaigns

In today's digital age, there’s an abundance of information and choices available to consumers. With endless options at our fingertips, it’s become increasingly difficult for brands to capture the attention of their target audience. This is where creator and influencer marketing campaigns come into play.

By partnering with creators and influencers who have established trust and credibility with their followers, brands can leverage that power to reach a wider audience and build meaningful connections with potential customers. 

Creator and influencer marketing campaigns also allow brands to tap into niche communities and target specific demographics, providing a more personalized and authentic approach to marketing that resonates with consumers. As a result, this type of marketing has become an increasingly important tactic for brands to connect with their target customers in a meaningful way.

So how can brands tap into this marketing approach? Let's break it all down. 

Get to Know Your Target Consumer

Before you can craft effective influencer and creator marketing campaigns, you need to know how your target consumer is influenced and who influences them.

Depending on whether or not your business has reached product-market fit, you can tailor these questions for previous customers or focus group participants, to be asked in a quick five-minute interview:

• How did you find out about us?
• Which social media platforms do you spend the most time on? 
• Who are some of your favorite people to follow on these platforms?
• What’s your favorite thing about them?

Set Goals and KPIs for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

Once you have a good understanding of how your target consumer is influenced, it’s important to define success for your influencer marketing campaign. When selecting influencers or creators for your campaign, it’s paramount that your company’s desired result aligns with the participants that you choose.

For instance, if the KPI that you’d like to impact is…

• Engagement, you might want to consider paid user-generated content or work-for-hire content from influencers. To create buzz around the Barbie movie, Barbie created a #BarbieTheMovie selfie-generator that allows fans to “become” their favorite character.
• Reach or Impressions, you might want to consider partnering with one or more macro influencers (300K–1M followers). Walmart partners with influencers like @jalisaevaugn, to create evergreen lifestyle content that keeps Walmart top-of-mind with her audience over a long period of time. 
• Conversions, you might want to do a controlled test of micro (5K–50K followers) versus mid-tier influencers (50K–300K followers), and track purchases using UTMs and custom discount codes. Sephora’s ​​#SephoraSquad beauty influencer program recruits micro and mid-tier influencers like @ndeye.peinda to post content about Sephora’s products and share honest, unfiltered reviews while receiving perks like free products and samples.

Determine which social media channel is best for your campaign

After doing the research to understand how your target consumer is and setting your goals and KPIs, you’ll need to determine which social media channel is best for your campaign.

• TikTok is a great platform for reach, impressions, and engagement. It's important that this content feels informal and authentic to the channel; it shouldn't be too polished. When working with influencers on organic TikTok campaigns, be mindful that the demographics of the audience that the content reaches in your campaign may not necessarily be the audience that you set out to reach given the way content is served up in the app.
• Meta platforms (Instagram and Facebook) can be great for engagement and conversions. Facebook and Instagram users tend to be more comfortable with polished content than TikTok users. However, you’ll still need to work closely with your influencers to create content that is authentic to their audience on those platforms so that their followers do not feel like they’re being “marketed” to.
• YouTube can be a great platform for search engine optimization. Partnering with influencers on YouTube will allow your brand to generate content that will be searchable and visible to your target consumers long after the campaign is finished. And while YouTube is heavily pushing YouTube Shorts, it remains a great platform for longer videos in which influencers can provide more in-depth reviews, tutorials, and more.

Test Influencers with Your Audience

If this is your first time working with influencers and creators, it’s important to test for the right fit, no matter which KPI you’re aiming to impact. Here are some tried-and-true methods of testing influencers and creators.

Influencer gifting or seeding

• Launch a small P.O. Box gifting campaign. Several influencers on TikTok and YouTube make their P.O. Box information publicly available so that brands will send them products, which they unbox in long-form lifestyle videos and share with their communities.
• Seed new product launches with influencers that are on your target list. Send a quick DM to target influencers, asking if you can send them a product, with no strings attached. This is a great way to build an authentic relationship with someone who you’d like to work with long-term.

Invest in paid user-generated content

• Use an affordable user-generated content agency to pay for content creation at scale. You can use tools like Trend.io or Billo, to pay for user generated content from content creators who fit your target consumer. This is a great tactic to scale content creation for paid and organic social media influencer marketing campaigns.
• Upgrade your customers to influencers. If your customers are organically creating content that is useful for your brand, try incentivizing them by offering a commission on any sales that use their discount code.

Do a “test and learn” engagement with target influencers

• Before paying a creator for a large-scale influencer marketing campaign, do a short-term test first to see how impactful their content is for driving sales.

Invest in the Right Creators for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

One secret about influencer and creator marketing that no one really talks about is what influencers truly want. Influencers and content creators have built large communities, but working with brands isn’t the long-term goal; stability and creating something that they feel ownership over, is. So how can you build long-lasting relationships with creators?

Set up long-term engagements or “always on” influencer campaigns

Once an influencer or creator has proved they’re a good partner for your brand, you should think long-term about how to engage them for evergreen content beyond tentpole moments and campaigns. This might look like signing a one-year contract with an influencer at a discounted rate versus their campaign rate, or creating a system that allows your company to constantly feed them new products and initiatives to talk about. Eden Bodyworks’ brand ambassador program is a long term commitment for creators that rewards them with free products, swag, and commission for sales.

Give influencers ownership over a social media channel for your brand 

For example, All Ways Black by Penguin Random House is a social media channel that is curated by an influencer who built her influence around books and being a Black woman. Partnering with influencers to own a social media channel or persona for your brand can often allow you to build equity with a new or underserved target consumer.

Give influencers ownership over product

Amazon’s The Drop gives ownership to fashion and lifestyle influencers, over Amazon’s Fashion products, during a limited time “drop.” Every few days, The Drop promotes their products repackaged as made-to-order “influencer collections.” Partnering with influencers to co-create a bespoke product or promote a product that you already have (but repackaged as “new”), will give them ownership over an initiative and incentivize them to continue to grow with your company.

Finding Success with Influencer Marketing Campaigns

In conclusion, creator and influencer marketing campaigns have become a crucial part of any well-rounded marketing strategy in today's digital age. Influencers enable brands to connect with their target customers in a more personalized and authentic way, leveraging the trust and credibility creators have built with their audience. By following these tactics to test influencer marketing, set up goals and KPIs, and craft effective creator and influencer marketing campaigns, brands can build long-term relationships with influencers that drive engagement, reach, and conversions.

Interested in tapping into the power of influencers to grow your brand and connect with new audiences? Shoot us a line at growth@rightsideup.co to talk to one of our experts.