7 Last-Minute Influencer Campaign Tips

Your brand found influencers, planned a collaboration, and reviewed the influencer’s content. Now, all that’s left to do is have the influencer publish it. Before your sponsored content goes live, run through these last-minute influencer campaign tips to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Review the influencer’s content according to your approval process

In your influencer contract, you explained the approval process. Now’s the time to put it into action. You’ll review the content, which should be delivered on (or before) the due date, and offer feedback or request changes if necessary. 

If your content brief was specific and laid out expectations, brand tone, and target audience, the content should be spot on. If you’d like to see a few tweaks to the message or a hashtag added, request the updates via email or text. 

If the content misses the mark, get on the phone with the influencer to talk things through. Sending critiques via email or text can be off-putting. It’s better to discuss it. Start with a compliment, and then discuss the issues you have. 

If the miscommunication results from your brief, update it for future campaigns. 

Recap FTC guidelines on sponsored posts

As you review the influencer’s content, make sure it meets FTC guidelines. The influencer must label the content as an ad and must do so in a prominent place. 

Take a look at the Instagram post below shared by a home-school influencer. Notice “paid partnership” at the top of the message and #ad used once at the beginning and again in the list of hashtags at the end. 

Make sure it’s clear to the influencer’s audience that the content they’ve created is an ad. 

Confirm the launch plan

Once you’ve signed off on the content, confirm the launch timeline. 

What day will the content go live? What time? You’ve probably already talked about this, but it’s best to confirm it a day or so before the campaign. Ask the influencer to reach out to you when the content is published too. 

Establish a communication channel

If you haven’t done so already, decide how your marketing coordinator and the influencer will communicate during the campaign. While the influencer might interact with one or two members of your marketing team, during the campaign, assign one person as the main point of contact.

Pick a preferred communication channel too. Will you text? Send emails? Establish a way to discuss the campaign as it unfolds. 

Discuss the management of comments, good and bad

You want the influencer’s audience to interact with the content, but what happens if someone starts bad-mouthing the brand or mentions a negative experience they’ve had with the sponsored product?

Since the influencer shares the post, he or she should respond to comments, but as a brand, you should offer guidance for those not-so-nice notes.

You can advise the influencer to publicly acknowledge the negative comment and mention that a brand representative will contact them to discuss their problem further. From that point, the brand can follow up in private. The rule of thumb is to acknowledge the public comment but solve it in private. 

Ask the influencer to text you when there’s a negative comment, too, so you can keep tabs on it.

Reshare the content or whitelist it

As a brand, share the influencer’s content on your channels during the campaign. Add a little note about how much you like working with the influencer. 

Your brand can also whitelist the influencer’s content or boost the influencer’s content with ads. To make this a reality, an influencer must grant a brand permission to advertise via his or her social channel, and then a brand can invest advertising dollars into the influencer’s post. 

It’s usually a win-win. Brands and influencers are exposed to new audiences.    

It’s something you likely discussed during your planning stages, but if you do plan to boost a post, make sure the influencer has given you the necessary permissions before the campaign starts. 

Review your metrics

Take a few minutes to review your expected campaign goals and KPIs. You can recap them with the influencer too, so they’re fresh in everyone’s minds. 

Check your measurement platform. Are you using Google Analytics to track analytics or an influencer marketing platform like IZEA Flex? Before the campaign, walk through the platform to make sure everything is connected and ready to go. 

When the campaign goes live, you should check on the metrics regularly. If you need to make any adjustments, your metrics will indicate it. 

Launching an influencer campaign is exciting, but there are a handful of last-minute checks you need to work through before content is shared. Use this checklist to ensure your campaign, whether your first or your 30th, runs just as you want it to.