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POV: Combining influencer marketing with paid ads can be a powerful way to reach your target audience. With influencer marketing, you can tap into the power of social proof and word-of-mouth marketing, while paid ads allow you to quickly and easily scale your campaigns and target specific audiences. Together, these two strategies can help you build brand awareness, drive traffic, and increase conversions.
Using influencer marketing and paid media together is a smart move!
Influencer marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on influential people rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that influence potential customers and orients marketing activities around these influencers. As consumers gravitate towards brands with a personal message, marketers increasingly turn to influencer marketing.
It is no secret that Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram are powerful lead magnets thanks to influencers of all kinds. Content has a limited lifespan due to the abundance of platforms and content available. Despite this, marketers can quickly reallocate funds and grow their resources with paid ads. Scaling and allocating funds between campaigns are more cumbersome and laborious using influencers.
For this reason, it’s more important than ever to supplement your creator’s content with paid advertising.
Here are some strategies for combining influencers with paid media ads:
•Whitelisting influencers for PPC sponsorship:
This strategy involves letting influencers use social media to sponsor their content.
Marketing professionals can sponsor influencer content using social media PPC by whitelisting influencers. In essence, this involves creating a list of influencers who are authorized to promote your brand through paid advertising on social media. In this way, you can make sure that your brand is being promoted by trusted influencers aligned with your message and values. Furthermore, it can simplify the management of multiple influencer campaigns by reducing the time and effort involved. A cohesive and effective marketing strategy that maximizes your reach and engagement can be achieved by whitelisting influencers for PPC sponsorship.
Example:
An influencer could create a sponsored post on Instagram showcasing a product from their favorite brand, and the brand could then use targeted PPC ads to amplify that post.
•Paid Posts:
This strategy promotes your brand by paying influencers to post sponsored content
Example:
For instance, a clothing brand could pay an influencer to create a post featuring them wearing the brand’s latest collection, and then boost that post’s reach with a targeted PPC campaign.
•Influencer Takeovers:
This strategy involves allowing influencers to take over your social media accounts for a day or two.
Example:
An influencer could create a series of posts and stories that follow their day-to-day life, with each post directly connected to the brand that hired them.
•Influencer Giveaways:
This strategy involves partnering with influencers to host giveaways on social media
Example:
A beauty brand could have an influencer post a picture of one of their products, encouraging their followers to enter a giveaway for a chance to win the product.
As with any advertising strategy, there are benefits and drawbacks (challenges) that should be understood.
Pros of Combining Influencer Marketing and Paid Ads
Amplify your reach and exposure
Paid ads can help you reach audiences beyond the influencer’s followers and target relevant segments. By doing this, you can reach more people who might be interested in your products or services while leveraging influencer credibility and authenticity.
Make more sales and conversions
You can generate more leads and sales by using influencer content that provides social proof, recommendations, reviews, testimonials, or tutorials. A paid ad campaign can boost traffic to your influencer content, and convert those visitors into customers. Retargeting ads can remind people to take action who have engaged with your content.
Optimize your budget and ROI
Your marketing budget and ROI can be optimized by combining influencer marketing and paid ads by reducing the cost per acquisition (CPA) and increasing your customer lifetime value (LTV). Your campaigns can be optimized based on analytics tools and you can negotiate with influencers to get lower rates for creating content for paid ads.
Cons of Combining Influencer Marketing with Paid Ads
Risk of losing trust and authenticity
Maintaining trust and authenticity between your brand and the influencer is one of the biggest challenges when combining influencer marketing with paid ads. Consumers who feel deceived or misled might react to paid advertisements promoting influencer content that is not disclosed as sponsored or endorsed by your brand. Moreover, you may damage the influencer’s reputation, reducing his or her credibility and influence.
Searching for the right fit
Your brand, influencer, and platform must all be the right fit before combining influencer marketing and paid ads. The influencer’s niche, style, tone, values, and audience should match your brand’s objectives, message, and audience. You also need to choose the platform that best suits your campaign objectives, whether it is social media, blogs, podcasts, videos, or others.
The complexity of managing multiple campigns
It is also possible to add complexity to your marketing strategy and execution with Influencer Marketing with Paid Ads. To create, launch, monitor, and optimize your campaigns, you must coordinate with multiple influencers, platforms, agencies, tools, and metrics. Ensure that your influencer content is relevant, engaging, and compliant with platform policies.
Paid media advertising: what you need to do:
Setting clear goals and KPIs
Before you combine influencer marketing and paid ads, you need to define your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each campaign. What are you trying to achieve? Who are you trying to reach? How will you measure success? Having clear goals and KPIs will help you plan your strategy, select your influencers and platforms, allocate your budget, and track your results.
Choose the right influencers and platforms
Using tools like BuzzSumo and CoCo, you can search for influencers based on their niche, audience size, engagement rate, location, demographics, etc. For creating and managing paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Search, etc., you can also use Facebook Ad Manager or Google Ads.
Create engaging content and ads
You need to work with your influencers and platforms on engaging content and ads that resonate with your target audience once you have selected them. You need to ensure that your content and ads are relevant, informative, entertaining, or educational depending on your objectives. Use hashtags like #ad or #sponsored to clearly label your content and ads as sponsored by your brand.
Test and optimize your campaigns
Using analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights you can track your campaigns’ performance after launch. To identify what works well and what needs improvement, you need to track metrics such as impressions, clicks, views, likes, comments, shares, conversions, and sales.
The following examples will help clarify the issue for you by showing you what big brands and successful examples do in the field of advertising.
How combining advertising strategies works: a success story
1. Nike: Dream Crazier
Nike’s powerful and inspirational ads challenge stereotypes and celebrate athletes. The brand launched a new campaign in 2019 titled “Dream Crazier”, featuring female athletes who have overcome obstacles. Serena Williams narrated the campaign along with other icons such as Simone Biles, Ibtihaj Muhammad, and Chloe Kim. With over 28 million views on YouTube and a positive conversation on social media, the campaign inspired women to embrace their dreams and passions.
2: Netflix: Stranger Things
One of Netflix’s most popular shows is Stranger Things, a sci-fi horror series set in the 1980s. Netflix is a streaming service offering original and licensed content across many genres and formats. Several channels were used to promote Netflix’s third season, including influencer marketing, paid ads, partnerships, experiential marketing, and merchandising.
Collaborating with Millie Bobby Brown, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, etc.
3. Airbnb: #WeAccept
Airbnb connects travelers with hosts who offer unique accommodations around the world. The company launched a campaign in 2017 called #WeAccept to promote inclusivity and diversity in travel. People from different backgrounds, cultures, and orientations shared their stories and experiences with Airbnb in the ads. Refugees and disaster victims were also highlighted in the ads. Public response to the campaign was strong, with 87 million impressions and increased brand awareness.
Consclusion:
In conclusion, combining influencer marketing with paid ads can be a powerful way to reach your target audience. By leveraging the reach and credibility of influencers, you can create more engaging ads that are more likely to be seen and shared by your target audience. Additionally, by using paid ads to amplify your influencer content, you can ensure that it reaches a wider audience and drives more traffic to your website or landing page. However, it’s important to remember that influencer marketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution and requires careful planning and execution to be successful. By following these best practices and working with experienced influencers and ad agencies, you can create effective campaigns that drive real results for your business.
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