Co-creating content with Influencers: Best Practices
With social media, the voice of customer has become the most important tool of marketing. When we decide to buy a product, we not just read reviews online but also ask for recommendations on Twitter and Facebook before we arrive at a decision. Social media has made peer recommendation a huge deal that it is part of ever brands marketing strategy.
According to a McKinsey study, marketing-inspired word-of-mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising, and these customers have a 37% higher retention rate. With the importance of social media and word-of-mouth marketing, influencers have become high in demand and more brands are realizing the power of influencers and using them.
The most vital aspect to influencer marketing is the content creation. However, brands should also make sure the content is not one sided, this is where influencers come in. don’t you think, it will be impactful to create content with influencers to offer to your audience rather than create one sided content from the brand alone?
Content co-creation is about realizing that your audience is a part of your brand too, and harnessing that connection to keep consumers as engaged as possible.
Here are a few tips to make sure your brand is making the most out of its content strategy to optimize participation from influencers and advocates.
Plan your goals and set expectations
For a successful influencer campaign, planning is the most important first step. The brand should know some basic information before starting their camping.
- Who is the information for?
- What objectives does this program help your business achieve?
- How w ill you measure success?
- How many influencers will you be roping in?
- What goals do you have for your campaign?
The end goal of your influencer campaign should be crystal clear from the word go. For instance, you may seek to increase brand awareness, create and publish compelling brand stories, drive traffic to content, boost online sales on your website, or increase mobile app installs.
Identify and partner long-term relationship with Influencers
There are millions of people on social media and identifying the right person who would work for your brand is the biggest challenge these days. The influencer’s content needs to be in synch with the brand they are representing. You must look beyond audience size and look at content quality, credibility, engagement, and last but not least, audience statistics to make sure we are reaching our target market.
Always remember to choose quality over quantity. Some influencers might have a lot of following but their content might not suit the brand. While both of these traits are desirable, the main goal is to offer good content to your network and audience.
Let the content be authentic
According to Forbes, 43% of millennials value authenticity above content alone. One of the recent examples of authentic content is the ‘My Choice’ starring Deepika Padukone had gone viral on social media. My choice’, directed by Homi Adajania and starring 98 other women from different walks of life was an initiative of Vogue magazine sent out a powerful image. This went viral largely because of the authentic content that the video had.
So letting the influencers have a little bit of control over the content is a good idea. They are representatives on the brand and the more authentic the content is, the more successful the campaign will be. For content to be engaging, brands also need to give some incentives to influencers. Incentives are always a great way to encourage consumer interaction. Conduct keyword research to provide data on topic choices for what your target customers are searching for. Primary themes and focus topics are also essential decisions to make in order for co-created influencer content to be useful to customers, valuable to influencers and as an effective marketing asset to the brand.
While it is not possible to control what people are saying about your brand, you can make sure that interactions are as positive as they can be. To keep audiences engaged and happy, make sure all public interactions, any post replies or retweets from followers have a positive tone.
Measure Results
By creating engaging content and giving fans a good reason such as prizes, discount for those who share, participate and even create their own content, brands can get even more mileage out of the campaign. Brands can substantially increase promotion, participation and reach with tools such as:
- sharing images
- pre-written tweets
- embed codes and
- short URLs
To measure a campaign, you need to set parameters to track results. Key examples of social media metrics to track include:
- Reach
- Site traffic
- Leads generated
- Sign-ups and conversions
- Revenue generated
- Click through rate (CTR)
- Page views
- Followers
- Subscribers
The best way to find out if your social campaign is gaining traction is by using Google Analytics. It provides:
- The total number of unique visitors to a particular page on your website.
- Records the total number of times a particular page on your website is viewed.
Promoting the co-created content
Once you have the plan and the content, the next obvious step is to promote it on social media. All content should be optimized for audience. Influencers are also invested in the success of your project because their name is attached to the content. Be sure to offer them feedback on what’s working and what is not.
Here are a few tools you can use to promote your content:
With over a billion users, Facebook let you connect with friends, share links, photos, videos, and events, join groups, and more. You can promote your content organically and through paid promotions.
This micro blogging site lets users post messages of up to 140 characters, share photos and videos create and custom lists. You can promote content on Twitter organically, with Twitter cards or paid promotions.
Display Ads
Display advertising is a type of online advertising that comes in several forms, including banner ads. This is one of the most common way of promoting content as it reaches a variety of people.
Outbrain
This service promotes content on other pieces of content. It is a content discovery platform whose content marketing module offers to help Internet publishers increase web traffic by presenting them with relevant website links.
Examiner
Examiner is a website that allows content creators to publish on their website. It reads like an online magazine and is updated by community members constantly.
Taboola
A content marketing platform, Taboola gives a web widget to content creators on their website to offer extra links to associated articles, videos, and slideshows, both from within the site and from other publishers.
Content.Ad
Content.Ads distributes the content, which doesn’t look like advertising and delivers engaged visitors to your website.
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