6 Alternative Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Influencer marketing campaigns are fast becoming an essential part of many brands’ digital marketing strategies, with 65% of marketers increasing their influencer marketing budgets for 2019.

For many marketers, the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about influencer marketing is ‘sponsored posts’. It’s the most commonly used influencer marketing tactic as sponsored posts are easy to produce, approve, and publish meaning they are relatively affordable for lots of brands without huge budgets.

Sponsored Instagram Posts accounted for 78% of influencer-brand partnerships in 2018.

Statista

Whilst these types of campaign might work well in the short term. There are lots of other ways to collaborate with influencers and build long-term relationships to help your brand resonate better with their audience.

We’ll take a look at 6 alternative types of influencer marketing campaigns to help you think beyond sponsored posts. Keep reading to get inspired for your next influencer marketing campaign…

6 Types of Influencer Marketing Campaign

Whether your budget is limited and want to start small or you want to go big and focus on reach, there’s an opportunity for influencer collaboration that is right for your brand. Here are 6 successful types of influencer marketing campaigns, aside from sponsored posts, that you can try out…

1. Brand Ambassadors

There are two ways you can work with influencers; on a one-off collaboration basis or by building long-term partnerships. Long-term partnerships often come in the form of brand ambassador roles. This is where an influencer becomes the face of the brand for a period of time.

If you’ve already used influencer marketing and found a particular influencer who really resonates with your brand and target audience, try building on that original success by engaging them in a long-term campaign and creating a brand ambassador role.

Seeing an influencer support a brand they genuinely love over a long period of time, as opposed to a one-off campaign, appears more authentic and genuine to your audience. This means these types of collaborations work particularly well to help resonate with your target audience.

With 94% of marketers believing that ‘transparency and authenticity are key to influencer marketing success. Long-term relationships are definitely becoming the best way to overcome this concern.

2. Product Collaborations

As this type of collaboration is quite creative and can be costly to carry out. It should be reserved for opportunities to work with larger influencers. So you can really generate ROI from the campaign.

Allow an influencer to take the creative lead for a project. Such as designing a fashion collection or creating a cosmetics range. This may seem a little daunting, but the results are definitely worth letting go of the reigns.

Influencers know their audiences. They know what they like to buy, so giving them the creativity to bring this to life means their audiences will be highly invested in and likely to buy products designed by their favourite influencers. This makes influencer collaborations extremely beneficial to your marketing campaigns.

49% of consumers today depend on influencer recommendations for their purchase decisions.

Digital Marketing Institute

3. Host Giveaways or Competitions

If the goal of your influencer marketing campaign is to raise brand awareness and gain exposure to new audiences. Competitions and giveaways are a great way to achieve this.

Either collaborate with an influencer to host your competition or use their following to promote a competition hosted on your platforms. Make sure to be creative with your giveaway and the entry requirements, to get new audiences engaged with your brand.

Competitions and giveaways are also great for increasing your social following, engagement and growing your email marketing list. Make sure to include following your social media accounts or signing up to your email newsletter in the entry requirements.

4. Social Media Takeovers

For a more outside of the box approach, work with influencers to ‘take over’ one of your social platforms for a period of time to share content that is relevant to your brand.

So, how do social media takeovers benefit brands? Influencers will want to cross-promote the collaboration and takeover on their platforms. This will drive traffic and new followers to your profiles and landing pages.

This type of campaign helps to create more meaningful connections with key influencers in your industry. It’s a great marketing campaign because it generates content and increases social media engagement too.

5. Discount Codes & Affiliates

Using discount codes and affiliate links is a great tactic to drive sales through influencer marketing. Offering an incentive for both the consumer and the influencer.

Offer influencers an exclusive discount code or offer to share with their audience, encouraging them to make a purchase on impulse with an offer too good to refuse. Create a unique discount code for each influencer you collaborate with so they can share it in their content to.

In addition to discount codes, lots of brands set up affiliate programs for influencers to provide further incentive for them to get behind their products or services. Affiliate links generate passive income for influencers and boost sales for brands. These are a mutually beneficial way of working with influencers – at a relatively low cost.

It’s important to bear in mind, that affiliate marketing only works well if the influencer and their audience are a good fit for your brand. Make sure they get good levels on engagement on their platforms to benefit your marketing campaigns.

Discount codes and affiliate marketing make it easy to track and report on the success of your campaigns. Also allowing you to attribute sales to each influencer. They will help you understand which influencers generate the best ROI – use this information when planning future campaigns.

6. Host Brand Experience Events

Events are a great way to engage a whole group of influencers with your brand at the same time. Be sure to present huge opportunities to maximise your coverage and brand exposure.

As influencers are constantly invited to attend events, you’ll receive the best turnout if your event is unique. The most important thing when hosting a brand event is inviting influencers whose following fit your target audience. This means they can spread the word about your brand to consumers who are likely to be interested and engaged.

A key goal of hosting brand activation events is to increase brand awareness within the influencer community but also with the influencers’ audiences. If you want influencers to share their event experience on social media and help create a buzz about your brand, you should make sure your event has lots of photo opportunities with fun decor and good lighting.

Summary

There are lots of ways to collaborate with influencers to reach new audiences. So you don’t have to just stick to the obvious and often overused ‘sponsored posts’ strategy.

Hopefully, you’ve learnt about some alternative marketing campaigns. Try running these and see how they can help your brand gain exposure and increase engagement. For your next campaign, why not try exploring some of these alternative ideas to switch up your strategy?

Make sure to get the most out of your influencer marketing campaigns by checking out our top tips for success; set goals and have a clear target audience defined, research influencers, and build long-term relationships with influencers in your niche.