Marketing Brew: Perfecting Your Influencer IQ

On June 25th, we attended a creator marketing conference hosted and moderated by Marketing Brew, “Perfecting Your Influencer IQ”. Brands such as Duolingo and Jolie (and others!), along with creators and their talent managers delved into topics like maintaining authenticity, best practices when working together, how to successfully tap into trends for your brand, and more.

Please see below for a list of the speakers we heard from, our top takeaways, and how we plan to continue applying these tactics to M Booth’s influencer marketing strategies and execution plans.

Best Practices for Creator Partnerships

Think of a creator like a consultant!
- Go beyond the transactional content creation; creators can offer unique insights about their audience and feedback on the brand/product they’re partnering with. They can be tapped to participate in focus groups, even if they are not creating content.
- During briefing calls, ask them what ideas they have, what they think would resonate with their community, and trust them to deliver.
  - Creators are often used to including in-depth product messaging/branding. Even when you give them an “open brief” sometimes they need reminders/pushes to think outside-the-box
- Lean on them to find an overlap between their platform/audience and the brand’s goals.
Personalize the outreach & brief.
- Check the creator’s past content to understand what they enjoy making and what their followers love. Showing genuine appreciation for their work makes them more excited to partner with you + the brand.
- Only consider long-term partnerships (as opposed to a one-off) if the brand/product can consistently be integrated into the creator’s regular content.
- Ensure the product resonates with the creator personally and weave their genuine experiences into the content. Mixing personal stories with the product will create memorable content.
- If possible, focus on making unique content that only the specific creator can produce, rather than repeating the same ideas with different people.

Let them try the product first.
- When possible, offer to send the product for the creator to experience when gauging interest in a partnership, and give them the chance to try it out before collecting their concept, that way it is based on their specific experience.

Define success clearly from the start of the campaign since it varies for each brand and each campaign.
- Share your brand’s version of success so the creator can tailor their content accordingly.
- Include how the brand measures success in the brief, such as “Our content will be successful if XYZ”

Best Practices for Celebrity Partnerships

Find the right fit.
- Collaborate with someone who represents your target audience. Identify who your brand fans adore and work with them.
- When looking to work with a celebrity, aim for those who already are brand fans or have an organic connection – this can make or break the success of the partnership!

Leverage big moments.
- Use any moments in the chosen celeb’s life as a key theme in content, especially when attempting to make the connection between the person and the brand/product.
- Leverage major brand moments to work with celebrities to give the partnership meaning. For Always-On programming, opt to work with creators instead.

Trendjacking 101

Moving quickly is key.
- If you spot a trend after it’s everywhere, it’s likely already fading. Trendjacking works best when you’re among the first to do it. It’s key to be part of the conversation as it happens – it’s worse to join once it’s over.
- Be realistic about what’s feasible with your team.
  - Pro Tip: Having partners contracted in advance for this purpose can be helpful. E.g. contract a partner for 1-2 posts over a 6 month time period, with the expectation that they’ll quickly hop on a trend when relevant. That way the brand doesn’t need to approve the partner roster, fee, etc. you can just quickly align on the content.
  - Pro Tip: Use tools like Exploding Topics to utilize search data in real-time as a way to identify trends before they go mainstream.

Only lean into a trend if it is a strategic fit.
- Trends are tempting to hop on to, but make sure it aligns with your brand’s values and ethos before doing so.
- Trendjacking is a great way to complement your creator strategy, but it should also be based on what’s already proven successful, using data from past partnerships, testing and learning, etc.

Product Seeding Tips

With gifting, the goal is to spark conversations. People influence people!
- Get the product into people’s hands so they can talk about it naturally, like they would with their BFF over dinner.
- Gifting can lead to unexpected wins for the brand. Sometimes, the best content happens when you let go and let things happen naturally!
- Paid partnerships sometimes lose that casual, authentic product talk. Gifting with no strings attached lets creators decide if and how they want to share, keeping it real and organic.

Cast a wide net!
- This can create a sense of FOMO/urgency for others to try the product and share it organically!

Sustainability is key.
- Be mindful of packaging waste. Audiences care about environmental impact, so it’s crucial to avoid criticism for excessive packaging.
- Only send products to those who will use them to avoid unnecessary waste and keep costs down.

Use Data to the Brand’s Advantage

Don’t overlook “shares” as a metric of success.
- It indicates social chatter and how well content resonates, boosting reach and impressions.
Experiment!
- With different types of creators, content styles, and partnerships to gather performance data. Knowing what doesn’t work is just as valuable as success when sharing recommendations or crafting strategies.

Don’t underestimate the insights you can get from influencers.
- Go beyond basic content analytics – for example, send them ALL of the products to try and provide feedback. This can gather valuable insights for future strategies.

Look at what competitors are doing for inspiration.
- See which influencers they use and how their content connects with the target audience – understanding their successes and failures can guide your brand.

Throughout the half-day of sessions, we were able to gain insight from a variety of players within the influencer marketing world. This provided M Booth with an amazing opportunity to gather valuable tips to elevate our client strategies, enhance our relationships with our creator + manager friendlies, and power up our future plans!