Influencer marketing campaigns are effective. When you add paid media, they’re often even more effective.
Brands connect with influencers to create authentic content and reach a new audience but imagine how successful the content could be by investing a few advertising dollars. More marketers are looking to level up their influencer campaigns with paid media.
Reasons to pair paid media with influencer content
What’s important to know is why paid ads are more beneficial to brands than just promoting an influencer’s post. Instead of boosting, which is promoting an influencer’s post on their own feed, dark ads can make influencer content more successful. A dark ad is a paid ad on social media that appears only to specific users chosen by the brand. Here are some benefits of paid media for brands:
Ability to choose different ad placements
You can choose where you want to place your ad, including not just the platform but whether the ad is on mobile and desktop feeds. Different platforms have options for placements as well. For example, on Facebook, you can choose Facebook feed side ads, Messenger ads, Instagram Stories, instant articles, and audience network.
Use of specific ad goals
Your ads will depend on your campaign and business goals. Objectives can include store traffic, conversions, lead generation, and more.
Creative control
With paid media, you have more control over the ad and how to use the content. You can create specific copy and call-to-action buttons that align with your goals and motivate your audience to take your desired action. You’ll have many more creative and formatting options available as well.
Valuable metrics
Influencer marketing can be hard to measure, but paid media comes with its own tracking features and metrics. More metrics mean marketers can learn from each campaign and make tweaks to maximize their ad spend.
More mileage out of influencer content
Paid media exposes the content to new people and gives marketers, who likely spent a fair amount of time coordinating the campaign, the chance to get more out of the picture or video. During a campaign, the content is directed at an influencer’s audience, but with paid ads, you as a marketer have more options when selecting the audience, such as overlapping audience types or lookalike audiences.
How paid media works with influencer marketing
How do you go about incorporating paid media with influencer content? After all, the influencer posts the content on his or her social channels, so how are ad dollars put toward it?
Creating dark ads
In addition to working with influencers for objectives such as brand awareness, you can then pour some ad dollars into the content and target specific, custom audiences in your desired locations using dark ads.
To repurpose content like this, you need to make sure that it was agreed upon in the contract signed by the brand and influencer at the start of the campaign. Most brands do ask for a limited-time use (anywhere from six months to a year) of the influencer’s content as marketing collateral.
IZEA’s paid media team handles all of this for the brands that work with us. Our experts use our influencer marketing software tools and data-driven approach to find influencers that are the perfect fit and then gain access to larger-reach, geo-targeted audiences and performance metrics. Our software also helps marketers determine the best-performing content to help guide future marketing decisions.
Influencers:
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Marketers:
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