5 Types of Influencer Campaigns and How to Run Them Easily

Influencer marketing has seen massive popularity and growth recently. While older generations may rely on traditional advertising, millennials believe it to be intrusive and unreliable.

Millennials trust social proof and word-of-mouth over brand advertisements. They believe in the words of real people. In fact, 70% of millennials are more influenced by bloggers than by celebrities. Content published by their favorite influencers has a real impact on their purchase decisions.

And the effectiveness of influencer marketing in swaying purchase decisions isn’t limited to millennials alone. 60% of shoppers in-store have been influenced by social media reviews in their purchases.

Many brands understand and are taking it very seriously. To effectively harness this influential power, brands can leverage advanced influencer marketing software, streamlining the process of identifying and collaborating with the right influencers who resonate with their target audience.

The good news is that you can run influencer campaigns in a number of ways with or without software. Different types of campaigns can help you determine the best influencer marketing approach for your brand.

5 Types of Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Here are the most common and successful types of influencer marketing campaigns that you can try out:

1. Gifting

Gifting or giving away a few samples of your product is a great way to showcase your products on a large scale. In this type of influencer campaign, brands gift free products to handpicked influencers with good follower counts.

Most influencers get excited to receive these freebies. However, some of them may expect some monetary compensation as well. When these influencers feature your products or share their experiences of using the products with their audiences, it can persuade their followers to make a purchase.

For example, if you are promoting a new skincare product in Singapore, you can collaborate with SG influencers who have a large following among Singaporean millennials. These influencers could then feature your product in their social media posts and stories, and share their personal experiences of using it. If their followers see that they love your product, they will be more likely to try it themselves.

Daniel Wellington has seen a lot of success using this strategy. They generally gift watches to their influencers along with a unique coupon code to drive more conversions. Here’s an example of one such sponsored post by an influencer flaunting a Daniel Wellington watch.

Image via Instagram

Such campaigns can provide several benefits to brands:

• Gifting has an element of surprise which pleases most influencers. Their reactions to these free samples or gifts encourage them to create more compelling content.
• Gifting also helps to build good relationships with your influencers. They feel valued when you provide them early access to your products.
• When influencers use and recommend your products, it builds trust and credibility in the minds of consumers. This drives greater appreciation and engagement.

2. Giveaways

Running an influencer giveaway campaign is a great way to ensure high engagement on your influencers’ posts.

A giveaway campaign is one in which an influencer runs a contest on social media in association with a brand. The contest entries and winning criteria are clearly stated well in advance.

Influencers facilitate and promote the giveaway while the brand offers a product, service, or an experience as a prize. Participation in the giveaway usually requires people to share the post, like it, and/or follow the brand.

Image via Instagram

Giveaways have a number of benefits:

• They increase brand engagement – they are great at boosting likes, followers, and shares on your branded content.
• They don’t require huge budgets. However, a decent budget is still needed since the prize should be attractive to the audience. It may be an expensive product, a service, or an experience.
• Giveaways can be run across all social media channels to increase brand awareness and drive traffic.

3. Takeovers

Are you willing to try something more exciting and challenging? Then, an influencer takeover may be the right choice for you.

In this type of influencer campaign, an influencer takes over one or more of your brand’s social media accounts for a specific period of time. They then share their content with your followers. You can have them include a branded hashtag to make it even more effective.

Image via Instagram

Takeovers can help in a number of ways:

• They can drive an influencer’s followers to your page owing to their cross-promotion, and boost engagement as well.
• They help to strengthen your relationship with the influencer.
• Takeovers don’t require you to give complete access of your accounts to influencers and is thus, a safe practice. You can ask the influencer to send you the content to post on their behalf along with their captions.
• Content created by influencers performs better than professionally created content.

Image via Linqia

4. Events

Many brands host events to which they invite influencers. Then they ask the influencer to promote the event through their posts. These can be shared before, during, or even after the event.

Sometimes, brands invite influencers to an event they’re participating in, like Coachella. These types of influencer campaigns are a great way to capitalize on popular events happening around you.

Events are a great place to create cool content to promote your brand – whether you do it yourself or have your influencers do that for you.

Image via Instagram

Events are an effective way to promote brands because:

• They create a buzz on social channels and drive engagement – especially when paired up with a unique hashtag.
• They provide a platform to connect with your influencers on a more personal level and strengthen your relationships with them.
• They provide the perfect opportunity to create engaging content. The photos or videos from such events can be used to create amazing content.

5. Affiliates or Discount Coupons

Influencer campaigns that offer discount coupons with a unique code can drive sales. This strategy is often used in collaboration with other campaign types such as gifting or giveaways.

You may even share an affiliate link with your influencers that they can include in their content. Such campaigns can work both on social media as well as blog posts.

To increase its effectiveness, most brands work with influencers on a commission basis for such campaigns. You will need to create a unique discount code or affiliate link for each of your influencers. When someone uses these codes or links to make a purchase, you will need to pay a certain percentage to your influencer.

Image via Instagram

You can easily track the ROI from the campaign using the unique discount coupon codes. This is an effective strategy that engages your consumers, compels them to make a purchase, and boosts sales.

The Best Platforms to Help You Run Your Influencer Campaigns Effectively

Although influencer campaigns can give you great returns, some aspects of them can be challenging. For example, it may be difficult to find the right influencers for your brand or to measure the ROI from your campaigns. If you’re trying to do it all manually, that is.

The good news is that there are numerous platforms and tools available that can help you run your campaigns. Let’s take a look at a few of the best influencer marketing platforms:

BuzzSumo

Although many people consider it to be a content research platform, BuzzSumo is also a great way to find suitable influencers. It has a powerful search capability that allows you to filter by niche, social media platform, or location. The platform also helps you filter potential influencers by their reach, authority, and engagement statistics.

Image via BuzzSumo

Reelio

Reelio is an effective influencer marketing platform that can help you find the right influencers and connect with them. You can negotiate and discuss compensation, review their content, track ROI, and scale your campaigns too. You can choose to run your campaign by yourself or even have them run it for you.

FameBit

FameBit is another platform that connects brands with the right YouTube content creators based on their requirements. It’s really easy to find relevant influencers, get access to their proposals, and run your campaigns efficiently.

Other than these, there are several other influencer marketing tools that can help you with your influencer campaigns.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen above, there are many different ways to work with influencers. And you don’t need to run every influencer campaign manually.

There are a variety of influencer marketing tools and platforms available on the internet. These can get a lot of the work done for you, making your influencer campaigns easier, quicker, and successful.

However, you need to figure out the best influencer campaign type for your niche, brand, and audience. Determine your goals, collaborate with the right influencers, and launch your influencer campaign with zeal.

Can you think of any other types of influencer campaigns that you can run easily? Please let us know in the comments below.

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