How to Leverage Influencers for Rebrands and Product Launches

When your brand is ready to unleash something exciting, influencer marketing is the megaphone that amplifies your message to the masses. By strategically collaborating with creators, you can select influencers who resonate with your target audience, serving as the ideal introduction to your new product or brand revamp. At IZEA, we excel in forging these partnerships, offering expert guidance to ensure your brand’s exciting news makes the impact it deserves.

Tips to leverage influencers during rebrands and product launches

Let’s explore some effective strategies on how to leverage influencers during critical business moments such as rebrands and product launches.

Pick influencers who already love your brand

Selecting influencers is often one of the most challenging aspects of any campaign. You need influencers who align with your brand, have experience, and, ideally, know your brand and its products. 

Consider asking customers to become brand advocates and capitalize on their familiarity (and love) of your product.

Monitor your social channels to see who’s @mentioning your brand in organic posts, or use a social listening tool like the one built into IZEA Flex to identify advocates.

Inform your influencers

While it’s helpful to transform customers into influencers, providing an influencer brief is still essential. Customers and influencers might love your current products, but they probably aren’t aware of your new products’ benefits or selling points. Write it all out in a brief. 

An influencer brief should include the following: 

• Company overview
• New product overview with distinguishable features listed
• Campaign overview with specifics like content type and deadlines
• Call to action
• Review process
• Special requests like specific #hashtags or @mentions to include

Launch content all at once

When you introduce a new product, you want to make a splash. Consider working with a team of influencers who will publish their content on the day of the product launch or a day or two before it. Essentially, you want to flood social media channels with your new product, so timing is important. Plan the launch date and the influencer campaign to correspond to the product reveal. 

Use promo codes

Consider giving influencers a promo code to share with their followers as an extra incentive to buy. 

If you’re using an influencer marketing platform like IZEA Flex or working with our full-service team, you can assign unique URLs to each influencer to see which creator drives the most sales and quantify your ROI by the influencer. 

Make the checkout seamless

While a promo code provides an incentive, customers will likely abandon the cart if they find the checkout process tedious or cumbersome. 

Consider using tools like Click2Cart, a one-click, direct-to-cart shopping experience for social media. A user will click the link directly from a post and be brought to a cart on a retailer’s website pre-populated with up to six products that are part of the campaign.

On the backend, Click2Cart gives you more data, too, including traffic, cart, and product details you won’t find in your standard social media metrics. 

Make a re-sharing campaign

Ask influencers to re-share their content at least once within a week of the original publish date. 

If it makes sense, influencers can share it across multiple channels, too. For example, a Reel could be shared as a YouTube Short. 

Your brand should reshare influencer content, too. If you’re working with 50 influencers sharing content within a day or two, you might not get a chance to reshare everyone’s posts but focus on those that gain traction. 

Repurpose the content later on

Once the campaign is over, plan to reuse the content later. Maybe you’ll add the most effective product demo videos to a landing page for the product, or you could include a video or two in an upcoming newsletter to customers. 

To repurpose content, make sure you address content ownership in your influencer contract. Most contracts “lease the content” to the brand for six to 12 months after it is created, but make sure it’s addressed so you can get more mileage out of sponsored content. IZEA can help with this, too.

Examples of rebrands and launches

Get inspired with these campaign examples:

Bondi Sands

Bondi Sands is an Australian beauty brand known for its self-tanning, sun care, skincare, and body products. When the company launched its new Eye Spy Brightening Eye Cream it teamed up with IZEA to coordinate a 50-influencer campaign that resulted in a reach of 1.2 million people.  

The campaign asked creators to share before and after clips like this one:

Quest Nutrition

When Quest Nutrition rolled out its new formula, the brand turned to influencers to get the word out. Influencers not only touted the new taste but also gave followers a promo code to try it for themselves. Here’s an example of the influencer-generated content produced for this campaign: 

Ravensburger Puzzles

When everyone’s favorite puzzle brand rebranded its packaging, influencers pointed out all the new features, like a full image of the puzzle on the box (no obstructions), smaller boxes, and the removal of shrink wrap. See how this influencer summed up the changes: 

Product launches and rebrands lend themselves to influencer marketing. Collaborate with a team of influencers to share your big news and make a splash on social. Need a little help? Let IZEA create and execute a campaign for you. 

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