Influencer marketing is constantly adapting and changing. For marketers, it’s important to keep your brand at the forefront of the latest trends. This will allow you to get the best returns from influencer marketing strategies while they are still fresh and novel.

Try these influencer marketing strategies to grow your brand in the upcoming year!

Loop Giveaways, Micro-Influencers, and Influencer Social Proof

Influencer marketing is no longer an option, but a necessity. As the internet becomes more and more saturated with paid advertising, the need for organic content for your brand increases. However, influencer marketing also requires a high level of creativity and authenticity in order to succeed. Here are three different strategies to help you freshen up your influencer marketing.

Loop Giveaways and Giveaways

Giveaways are still one of the easiest ways to capture leads for your brand. 91% of Instagram posts with 1,000+ comments are contests, according to Tailwind. You could also have a 79% increase in your giveaway’s performance if you use partners. However, only 2% of Instagram accounts post contest on a regular basis, so the competition is sparse. If you make the giveaway easy to enter, you’ll be able to grow your following, your email list, or both!

If you’re focused on growing your following, a loop giveaway may be the best option. You can partner with other brands and influencers to throw a giveaway that everyone benefits from.

What is a loop giveaway?

Loop giveaways typically have a large prize package offered in exchange for entrees liking all the partners of the giveaway. Each partner shares the giveaway on their page to extend the reach to each audience. The rules of the contest could be to go to one partner’s page and follow everyone they’re following. You can also give a list of the partners that they have to like in order to enter.

Get started with loop giveaways:

• Recruit influencer and brand partners that can help post about the giveaway. 5-40 partners is enough to get your giveaway going.
• Assemble a prize package that will entice your audience to enter.
• Post about the giveaway to your social accounts, and have your partners post too!
• In order to enter, participants will follow each partner. (Note: Instagram limits the number of people you can follow per hour. You shouldn’t have too many partners, or it may trigger Action Blocks for some users.)
• Finish your giveaway with a winner’s announcement. Then, offer some sort of coupon or freebie for the rest of the entrees.  

Some considerations:

1. Loop giveaways should never be your only method of growth on Instagram. Because new followers are motivated by the contest, you may notice a higher than average unfollow rate after your giveaway has concluded.
2. Be sure to follow your loop giveaway with promotions focused on retention and conversions. Once they have followed you, you should put your best foot forward with freebies, coupons, your best-performing content, and anything else that will captivate your audience and keep them engaged with your brand. You may even want to launch a new product at the conclusion of the giveaway to really take advantage of all these new eyes that are watching your feed.
3. Work closely with your partners. Whether they’re influencers or brands, you’ll want to send frequent communications during the giveaway so that they know what is expected. If you agreed that each partner would post to their Stories about the giveaway every day, then you’ll want to check at the end of the day and send a reminder if they haven’t already posted. The clearer you can be, the smoother your giveaway will run.

Other Types of Instagram Giveaways for your Influencer Marketing Strategies

If you’re focused on growing your email list, you can setup the giveaway with any number of tools available today, including Gleam.io, RaffleCopter, and Viral Sweep. From there, you can share the giveaway link with your influencer so that they can share it with their audience. That way, you’ll capture email addresses for these leads so that you can nurture them and increase the chances that they’ll convert. Influencers will love sharing a giveaway with their audience, as these kinds of posts typically have high engagement.

Working with Micro-Influencers

Micro is the new Macro. Instead of focusing on influencers with millions of followers, influencers with as few as 1,000 followers can yield results for your brand. These micro-influencers can help you spread the word about your brand, without breaking the bank.

Micro-influencers also resonate with audiences differently than macro-influencers. They appear more genuine, more honest, and generally more trusted. The social distance between a micro-influencer and their audience is also much shorter, meaning that the audience will consider them closer to a peer than other, larger influencers.

As competition for larger influencers increases, micro-influencers could be the best way to reach new customers with your brand’s message.

Benefits of Working with Micro-Influencers:

• Higher Engagement: These influencers typically have higher engagement rates than macro-influencers. While their reach might not be as impressive, their followers are actively engaged with their content. Their recommendation of your brand will resonate with their audience more than larger influencers. Some studies show that micro-influencers may be able to generate 60% higher engagement rates than other types of posts.
• Lower Cost: These influencers will typically have lower rates for collaborations and posts than a larger influencer or celebrity. Micro-influencers may even work for “in-kind” payments, which means that they post and collaborate in exchange for products as payment.
• Authenticity: Micro-influencers are considered closer to peers than celebrity influencers. As such, they carry a higher level of trust with their recommendations.
• Building Beneficial Backlinks: Micro-influencers are most active on blogging platforms and Instagram. Creating a partnership that has both Instagram posts and blog articles can help you build beneficial backlinks to your site. It will also increase your clout online.
• Less Competition: Micro-influencers don’t work on as many campaigns, so they won’t be burying your brand among other sponsored content. In fact, 70% of micro-influencers work on less than 5 sponsored campaigns per year.

Creating Influencer Social Proof on Your Website

If you have a library of influencer content that’s been forgotten, it’s time to start incorporating it into your website. Influencer content can help your site appear personable and trustworthy, as well as providing social proof. If you remember from the Psychology of Influencer Marketing, social proof is when people assume that something is right if other people have made the same assumption first.

Posting influencer content on your website shows consumers that someone else loves this product and that they should too.

Here are some ways to add influencer content to your website:

Add an Instagram gallery.

There are plenty of widgets and apps that can help you embed an Instagram gallery into your website. In addition to sharing your brand’s feed, you can also set up a gallery that pulls content from a specific hashtag or from mentions, so that you can make a gallery full of user-generated content. One of the best for Shopify is Growave, which allows you to approve the images before they appear in your user-generated gallery.

Add influencer images to your product listings.

Instead of taking the time to photograph lifestyle images of each product, you can ask permission to use influencer content on your product listings. You can even add their Instagram handle and follower count to the image so that people know that an influencer recommends the product.

Ask influencers for reviews.

If you know an influencer that would be recognizable to your audience, you can ask for a review of your best-selling items. Posting this on the product page will provide an expert recommendation from an influencer to create trustworthiness for the product and its quality.

Create influencer landing pages.

Giving your top influencers a landing page is a way of helping to reward your influencers for their hard work. You can add a few of their photos, add some of their reviews, and even feature their favorite products on the page to make it feel personalized. You may even want to share the influencer’s unique coupon code there if you want to further entice visitors to purchase. Then, the influencer can link to that specific page when they share about your brand, and you have a page that can be advertised through all your different marketing channels that has the influencer’s stamp of approval on it.

Adding influencer content to your website can help lend credibility and social proof to your site and it gives the influencer additional exposure. Be sure to ask for permission before using their images on your website, to make sure that you have the proper image permissions, but most influencers would be willing to participate as long as you are able to properly link and credit the content as theirs.

Try All 3 Influencer Marketing Strategies in 2020!

There’s plenty of innovations coming to influencer marketing in 2020. The trick to establishing a successful influencer marketing strategy is to try lots of different techniques. You’ll soon see what resonates with your audience most. You’ll be able to refine your process to work with influencers in the way that works best for your brand.

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