By Grapevine’s Matteo Alampi
From strategy to tactics and everything in between, there are so many things marketers can do to optimize their influencer marketing campaigns. But what about the execution of the content itself? How do you optimize it to perform?
Honestly, it’s actually simple. But therein lies the problem: people underestimate the importance of the many little details that drive content performance.
How do you incentivize users to take action before the effect of influence dwindles? How much effort does it take to convert?
In this blog, we’ll run through those questions and everything else you’ll need to ensure top-tier performance from your influencer content!
This is the contents of every influencer marketers performance dream: A big engagement spike when content goes live, followed by consistent evergreen views from search. To infinity and beyond!
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Driving Rapid Action
Research has shown that the effect influence has on making a purchase decision diminishes over time. As such, ensuring that people take action quickly after seeing influencer content is key. The two primary ways to achieve that are through calls to action and coupon codes.
Calls to Action (CTAs)
For those who don’t know, CTAs are simply when an influencer tells their audience to take a specific action. Besides giving a clear and simple action for the audience to take it’s also important to tell them why they might want to do it.
“Alright guys, that’s a wrap! Like and comment below if you want to discuss more!”
“Smash that subscribe button for more videos like this!”
“If you want to buy one of these shirts, click the link in the description!”
You get the picture.
Note that an influencer shouldn’t try to convince/sell the audience during the CTA. If the influencer did their job successfully in the rest of the video, the audience should be sold already. They just need to know what to do (“click the link”) and how to know if they’re one of the people that should do it (“if you want to buy this”).
We do it too!
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There are multiple different ways to integrate CTAs into content, depending on the content type.
For a video, you’ll want to have at least two CTAs – one at the beginning and one at the end. The one at the beginning will ensure that any audience member who leaves the video early will take action. The one at the end will remind those who made it all the way through what to do (it’s easy to forget over the course of a video).
Additionally, you’ll want to vary the wording of the CTAs a bit to avoid being annoying. As mentioned before, us humans are simple, but we’re also ridiculously good at noticing patterns.
For an image, you’ll want to keep the CTA out of the content itself, as this will ruin its quality. Fortunately, people do usually read image captions since they usually provide important context that can’t be directly communicated through the photo. As such, the caption by an image becomes the best place for your CTA!
Coupon Codes
The next key to getting people to take action quickly is providing influencers with a good coupon code that expires! A coupon code can be something as simple as a five character word that people can enter into your website to get a discount.
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At minimum, the coupon code should provide a 20% discount. Anything less generally isn’t compelling enough to drive action. Additionally, the coupon should be better than other codes you offer, as having better discounts available discredits the influencer (leading to worse performance).
It’s best to make the coupon code valid for only a limited time (such as one month) to drive immediate action. However, don’t make it too limited — such as one or two weeks — as you’ll miss miss some of the initial engagement from the influencer’s followers/subscribers.
Finally, be sure to include the code in the description. This will enable the audience to copy/paste it before clicking the link. It will also make it easier to find if they come back to the post at a later date!
Simplifying The Influencer Marketing Conversion Process
The next most important step in driving influencer marketing performance is to simplify the process by which you’ll convert the influencers’ audiences into customers. There are many ways to do this, but below are a couple of the most important ones.
Video description link(s)
Make sure this is above the “Show More” fold! People seem to be allergic to clicking that button, so anything below it is virtually invisible. Additionally, you should really only have one link here, as having more than one may cause confusion.
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Landing page
Generally, the best and most simple landing page strategy is to just make it the product page. People should already be sold when they click the link, so there’s no need to add extra steps.
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Recap
While optimizing your influencer content to get top-notch performance is comprised of a few relatively simple factors, knowing and consistently executing all of this can be rather difficult. But in the end, it all boils down to driving rapid action and simplifying the conversion process.
Use this as your own checklist when writing your campaign brief, communicating with influencers, or reviewing/approving their content!
If you liked this blog want other tips, or feel free to check out Grapevine’s Influencer Marketing Academy here.
The post How To Get Influencer Marketing Content To Perform (GUEST) appeared first on VideoInk.