The phases of the consumer buying journey has changed. And the channels where people spend most of their time are rapidly evolving.

On-demand videos and social media have taken the place of television. This change in consumer behavior is forcing marketers to think of new and improved ways to market their products.

Branded content coupled with the power of influencer marketing is one such marketing strategy that can drive faster and better results.

Branded Content + Influencer Marketing = The Holy Grail of Marketing

Branded content is a form of modern advertising where advertisers share articles, videos, webinars, or podcasts that add value to the lives of consumers.

Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing where you pay influencers to endorse your products. These influencers are real people with a host of loyal followers on social media and the ability to influence people’s opinions.

Both branded content marketing and influencer marketing are different from traditional advertising. In traditional advertising, brands are focused on creating ads and running them on a variety of channels like newspapers, TV, radio, or websites.

Traditional ads are a type of push advertising, where you directly promote your products to a selected group of audience. In other words, you push the product in front of the audience. This no longer has the kind of impact that it did before.

Branded content marketing and influencer marketing are forms of pull advertising. This is where you implement a strategy that pulls your audience toward your products.

Combining the power of these two forms of marketing can help you drive audience engagement and increase your overall sales.

Here are five smart tactics to combine branded content and influencer marketing to generate the best results:

1. Find Influencers Who Match Your Target Buyer Personas

Instead of sharing your branded content on irrelevant profiles that receive no engagement, it is better to find influencers who match your target buyer personas.

Do not select influencers based solely on their follower count because that is a vanity metric.

Always make sure to check the engagement rate of every influencer before you partner with them.

Engagement is what that matters for your brand. At the same time, you should also have a realistic idea of industry averages so you have a proper benchmark to work with. Average engagement rates for influencers may differ by following size and niche.

According to influence.co, photography and design are the two niches that receive the highest engagement per post on Instagram.

You can use these industry benchmarks when vetting influencers based on their engagement rate. To calculate the average engagement rate for any particular influencer, use the below formula:

Engagement rate by reach (ERR) = Total engagements generated per post / Total reach per post x 100

To calculate the average ERR, simply divide the total ERR with the total number of posts. Hence:

Average ERR = Total ERR / Total Posts

Choosing the right influencer is key because this will directly impact the success rate of your marketing campaign.

Make sure to follow the below tips:

• Choose influencers who have an engaged follower base. Both follower count and engagement rates are important.
• Check the average number of shares or retweets they receive per post.
• The influencers should be familiar with your content and/or products.
• Look for influencers who regularly share content not just on social media sites but on other niche websites via guest posts. Check the Domain Authority and Trust Score of the sites to see how reputable they are. A mention on a reputable site will give additional exposure to your products or services.
• Find influencers who have a good distribution network. If the article is picked up by other sites/profiles as soon as it is published or shared, your content reach will be amplified quickly.

Base your choice of platform and influencers on your buyer personas. This will help your business differentiate itself from competitors and get maximum reach.

2. Have Influencers Create Branded Content for Your Business

Some brands are even using influencers to create branded content for their businesses.

Earlier, some brands would create the content themselves. And influencer only had the job of sharing the content.

But with more brands realizing the importance of influencers in content creation, they are tasking them with content production tasks as well.

The whole idea behind content creation is to showcase the influencer using your product within the content. This makes it easier to fit the product into the story naturally.

Some brands go so far as to involve influencers in the product development process. This further opens up opportunities for the influencer to naturally create branded content.

The cosmetics brand, Too Faced, worked with an influencer, Jackie Aina (having around 1.4M followers), to create a new shade for their Born This Way foundation line. The influencer ended up creating content promoting the new line very naturally as you can see in the screenshot below.

Also, it is equally important to define your marketing goals and performance metrics before you start working with an influencer. Do not set extremely high expectations at the start. You will start to feel the difference that influencers add to your marketing strategy slowly and gradually.

3. Have Multiple Influencers Share The Same Branded Content

Another great tactic is to use several influencers to share the same branded content because this instantly helps to maximize the reach of the content.

A great example of this is the Share a Coke campaign, which was a huge success.

During this campaign, Coca Cola collaborated wit h several influencers who created around 22 sponsored posts using the hashtag #thisoneisfor on Instagram. The campaign generated over 1,73,000 likes with an average engagement rate of above 7%.

When you are working with several influencers, then it becomes important to put influencers through a screening process.

Also, you must develop a campaign brief to educate them about your expectations from the campaign. You should give them clear instructions about the entire process – right from content creation to content sharing.

4. Run a Contest on Social Media

If you are looking to get more content on a fixed budget, then you can leverage the power of user-generated content.

Hire influencers to invite their followers to participate in a contest that features them posting content with your products (same as Coca Cola did in the above example).

The only thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to choose influencers who have the ability to convince their followers to participate in the challenge.

Once you have hired several influencers to promote the contest for you, people will start creating and posting content on behalf of your brand. This strategy uses the power of networking to grow your brand.

5. Partner with Reputable Publishers and Authors to Develop Long-Form Content

Influencers are not just present on social media. You can also find them in the form of authors on popular publications both online and offline.

You can partner with such reputable publications and authors by having them produce long-form research content on behalf of your brand. The content should have tons of research-backed information that people will want to link to. And content that comes from a reputable publisher or author adds credibility to it.

This way, your content quality will be superb and your content engagement will soar. You will also increase the probability of content sharing by other publications and editors who are themselves some of the strongest influencers on the web.

Final Thoughts

Branded content and influencer marketing are similar in nature because they aren’t just advertisements. Following a hybrid approach involving both methods helps businesses launch effective marketing campaigns.

This integrated form of marketing will offer great reach and impressive engagement among relevant audiences.

Got any tips to add about combining branded content and influencer marketing? Let us know in the comments.

The post 5 Smart Ways to Combine Branded Content and Influencer Marketing appeared first on Tricky Enough.

This move is expected to change the influencer marketing landscape completely. A big reason for this is that Instagram is the #1 platform for influencer marketing. Hence, any change in Instagram is bound to affect influencer marketing. Before we get into how it’ll affect influencer marketing, let’s see why Instagram is making this change. 

Why are Likes Being Removed? 

There has been a lot of criticism worldwide about the negative side-effects of social media platforms. The race for more likes on Instagram is just one example of these side-effects. It’s led to lower self-esteem and less real connections. 

In a bid to give a push to personal connections and make people worry less about likes, Instagram decided to remove the likes feature. They want the focus to be on creating and sharing quality images and videos rather than the likes that they get. As of now, they are testing this feature in 7 countries, including Canada, Australia, and Brazil. 

Effect of Likes Being Removed From Instagram

1. Impact on Engagement

The removal of likes will have a major impact on the engagement rate of posts. Those posts that were doing well instantly were more likely to become successful as people simply jumped onto the “likes” bandwagon. However, now that the likes will be hidden, users won’t be as consumed by the fear-of-missing-out (FOMO). They will be more choosy at liking images and videos. 

It will almost be impossible to figure out which post is getting more likes. This might result in posts getting less likes than usual. 

For influencers, this means that they won’t be able to bank on just likes to show their engagement. They’ll need other engagement, such as comments, to show brands that they have a highly-engaged audience. 

It might be safe to say that the practice of buying or exchanging likes might go away with the introduction of this feature too. The whole purpose of buying likes will become null and void. 

2. Things Made Simpler for Agencies

Agencies who are into influencer marketing will likely get a huge boost due to this move. It will likely result in better transparency as creators will have to focus more on creating quality content rather than concentrating just on likes. 

At the same time, brands will find it tougher to determine the engagement rates of influencers. In which case, they may prefer to approach agencies. 

Agencies have lots of historical data on influencers and their engagement rates. The removal of likes will make this data vital because engagement is a critical metric for checking the success of an influencer marketing campaign.

3. Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories may become more important tools for influencer marketing as they already don’t have the likes feature. Additionally, over 500 million people see them every day. Stories generally feature short videos and some even have images, and they are extremely engaging as well.

The removal of likes may push people to start using Stories even more. Videos are highly engaging, and this makes them favorable for Instagram too. Hence, a push towards Instagram Stories is very likely. 

Additionally, with likes being removed as a key performance indicator (KPI), the major ones that will remain are the time spent on the platform, engagement, and views. 

Brands such as Jeep are already partnering with major influencers on Instagram, such as Discovery to promote their brand through Instagram Stories.  

4. Focus on Content 

As mentioned before, the focus will shift from likes to the quality of content. Hashtags such as #like4like will likely cease to exist, and instead, quality content will become the main attraction for people. 

The quality of the engagement might be judged as well. For instance, on some posts, people just leave a simple emoji or tag someone else. This sort of engagement is poor and posts with such engagement may be pushed down. True engagement between influencers and people may start becoming more important. They’ll likely need to have real conversations through the posts. 

This move could improve the engagement between the influencers and their followers. People may start reading captions more often, and influencers may put more effort into engaging with their audiences on a more personal level. 

They will have to work harder to create an engaged community and need to put effort into sustaining it as well. It’s already very common to see such communities on YouTube. Instagram influencers can take inspiration from them to create their own loyal fan bases. 

You can expect more diverse content to be posted on the platform during influencer marketing campaigns as well. This is because people will look for variety in content rather than just liking posts that already have a lot of likes. Those influencers who are posting repetitive content may not get the sort of leverage they used to, and brands may be forced to look at for other people with whom to partner. 

5. Impact on Relationships With Brands

While the likes will not be visible to an influencer’s audience, the influencers themselves will still be able to see them. This makes the process of finding influencers slightly tricky for brands. Previously, brands were able to take the number of likes into account to help them determine the effectiveness of an influencer. 

However, now they will need to rely on other metrics to decide if an influencer is worth partnering with or not. This means that brands will have to rely on influencer marketing platforms more to find genuine influencers in their niches. 

6. Rise of Influencer Marketing Platforms

Brands will soon start turning to influencer marketing platforms such as Influence.co, BuzzSumo, and BuzzStream to find influencers in their categories. Those platforms which offer better analytics and give brands more information on the demographics of the influencer’s audience will likely be popular choices. 

Some influencer marketing platforms can also provide detailed insights into the progress of influencer marketing campaigns. This makes them even more useful because brands will find it difficult to figure out how successful their campaigns are without seeing the number of likes. Without these platforms, brands will need influencers to be completely transparent with their metrics.  

Final Thoughts 

While the removal of likes from Instagram is only being tested at the moment, it could soon become a reality for all users. That’s why it’s crucial for influencers to start creating quality content that can drive real engagement. 

Brands may also find it difficult to find reliable influencers without the use of influencer marketing platforms. The value of Instagram Stories may increase as well as they already don’t include likes and are highly-engaging. Agencies will benefit from this move as they have lots of historical data that can be useful for brands. 

What are the other ways through which influencer marketing will change due to the removal of likes? Do you think Instagram will implement this feature for all users? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. 

The post Instagram’s Move to Remove Likes and Its Impact on Influencer Marketing: All You Need to Know appeared first on Tricky Enough.