It's no secret that the influencer marketing industry is booming – a successful social campaign can rapidly build brand awareness and turbocharge sales growth. With 47% of consumers now using Adblock technology, influencer marketing is by far the quickest and most-efficient way to engage with your customers and generate premium content.
In order to create an effective TRIBE brief, it’s vital to ask yourself three key questions: why, what and how? The answers to these will determine how well your social strategy plays out.
What is your campaign objective?
A clear campaign objective is essential.
Consider what you want to achieve: is it about driving sales? Or building your brand identity? Do you want to engage your core target market, or reach consumers who are unaware of your product?
Influencer marketing can be an effective tool for any number of objectives, whether it’s growing your online community, finding and connecting with your customers on social media, or simply generating a suite of branded content.
Regardless of what it is, a strong campaign objective is instrumental in achieving outstanding results.
What is your campaign strategy?
Planning out your strategy and clearly defining your objective is the first step toward generating unique, engaging content for your brand. There are endless ways brands can utilise influencer marketing, it’s just about figuring out which one works for you.
For example, when promoting competitions or events, it can pay to use a combination of social and traditional media to generate interest in a campaign and communicate the brand’s key message.
Brands can also associate themselves with existing social trends by leveraging an influencer’s identity and following.
Brands have hijacked cultural movements by linking their campaign to significant cultural events, or even used their campaign to promote causes – such as the Salvation Army – which not only spread awareness for the brand, but also for the cause they’re supporting.
Taking the ‘localised content’ route is a way of utilising local influencers to create content close to home, while jumping on the personalised products trend creates an authentic relationship with your customers, who will then share their authentic praise with their followers.
Sending creators samples of new, unaccessible or pricey products is also a good way to inspire original, creative and personalised posts.
You can extend a campaign with an ‘always on’ strategy, which enlists influencers to post about a range or product over a long-term period, or amplifying existing content by purchasing the rights to your most successful posts and to use on your other marketing channels.
How do you execute your strategy?
The final question is how to execute your campaign strategy, or, in other words, the format. The influencer-marketing space has evolved into a wide community of creative, talented and incredibly diverse social media masters who can produce unique marketing material for your brand. From fashion flat-lays to beach bonfire boomerangs to experimental After Effects videos, the potential content combos are truly endless.
While it’s good to be specific with campaign strategy, it’s important to be flexible with creative formats.
There’s a whole world of creative ideas that you may not know about, and the most powerful ideas - those that will cut through the noise online - often come from experimentation.
Just a few formats you can request or expect from influencers include Boomerangs, stop-motion, slow-motion, flat-lays, cinemagraphs, drone footage, after-effects, time-lapse, insta-stories or unique art – the list goes on!
Remember that creators are the experts of their craft! Inspire your ‘brand fans’ to reach their audience – your potential customers – in the best way they know how.
Now that you've nailed your strategy
This is the fun part! You can now look through the submissions to pick and choose the perfect influencers and content for your campaign.
When deciding which submissions to approve, some good considerations can include content quality, brand fit as well as the demographics of the influencers you choose. As a rule of thumb, you should only purchase content you’d be happy to use on your own marketing channels in the future.
When you pay an influencer to post on Instagram, you can then re-post that content on other social media platforms. However, you can also license the content outright to use it anywhere you like!
Stop, collaborate and listen
When sifting through submissions, it’s important to treat your creators with kindness and respect – it's a collaboration after all!
You’re dealing with existing and potential customers, so make sure to build and nurture your influencer relationships by providing constructive feedback and responding promptly.
If you’re not receiving the content you want, the simplest tweak to your brief could radically transform the content that your campaign is inspiring.
Click here for a few examples of brands that have absolutely smashed their TRIBE campaigns!
Or, get in touch and discover how our combination of tech + team provides solutions to executing creator marketing strategies that rival the world's most innovative brands.
