4 tips for an effective advertising campaign with influencers

Digital advertising combined with influencer marketing is a powerful tool. Although it is a difficult skill to master, its concept is very simple: Businesses want to grow. And advertising, if done properly, facilitates this growth by helping companies reach new audiences and engage with existing customers.

There are five main steps to creating an effective advertising campaign with influencers. But besides these essential steps, there are other factors to keep in mind.

In this blog post, we listed the top four tips on how to create a successful advertising campaign with influencers.

In advertising, one of your main goals is to create a message that will resonate with your target audience. This message needs to be aligned with your brand values and the overarching marketing strategy.

But if you don't know your target audience, how can you create a message that will resonate with your buyer persona? And what does the phrase "know your target audience" even mean?

Google Analytics or social media can help you get a basic understanding of who your customer is: their age, industry, gender, profession, favorite device, etc. But your customer profile is not limited by demographics.

You need to know your ideal customer on a deeper level:

• What are their pain points?
• How long have they stayed with your company?
• What motivates them to provide referrals?
• What are their hobbies?

Demographics can help you target the right segment on social media. But knowing your ideal customer will help you create a message that will resonate with this segment.

It sounds obvious but many marketers still believe that it's enough to have a plan only in their minds without writing it down. Some marketers also believe that they don't need a plan because they either know what to do or have done this before multiple times.

Writing down a clear plan will help you navigate through the rough waters of the shifting marketing landscape and stay focused. You don't need to set it in stone but it definitely helps to set your plan on paper.

It can be as simple as a Google document that outlines your project on a few pages. And there's no hard limit on the number of pages—after all, it's not a school essay.

The marketing campaign plan needs to have several sections:

• Background. Why do you even need to launch an advertising campaign? Why organic marketing is not enough anymore?

• Problems. What problems do you want to solve with your campaign? It's time to back up your Why with decreasing key performance indicators (KPIs) that you want to improve.

• Strategy. How do you want to solve these problems? What are your tactics to increase your KPIs?

The How is a very important part of your document. It needs to be specific. It's easy to say: "We will do A/B testing for different ad formats". But what formats do you want to test? What will be your A and what will be your B? Why? Have you done any research or do you have a feeling that this will work?

These are all important questions that should be asked and decided upon before you launch a campaign. Otherwise, you risk ending up with a wasted budget. Lewis Carroll once wrote: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there".

As your advertising campaign evolves, so should your plan (remember, it isn't set in stone).

It doesn't mean that you should abandon your plan in the middle of your campaign and start writing a new one from scratch. The plan is there to guide you (and should not be re-written every time things do not go as smoothly as expected). If you develop a habit of going back to your plan on a regular basis, you'll find ways to improve the original document.

For example, there are probably a few steps in your plan that are only roughly outlined at the beginning of the campaign. But you can add more details to these steps as you go. This might seem unnecessary while the campaign is running but it'll help to document your journey and learn from it in the future once the campaign is over.

Your marketing department has a lot of things on their plate: search engine optimization, brand partnerships, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, etc.

Your team doesn't need to be the master of all. As the collective wisdom says, "Jack of all trades, master of none". That's why many companies reach out to influencer marketing agencies who act as intermediaries between advertisers and influencers. They help choose the most suitable influencer for a specific brand and campaign and determine the right message for the target audience.

For example, HypeFactory is a global influencer marketing agency that has launched hundreds of influencer marketing campaigns around the world. Have a look at our case studies!