There are many different types of influencer campaigns that brands can use when using influencer marketing on social media. Influencers on social media are those who hold significant power in swaying their followers’ opinions and purchases and they are particularly powerful now in the peak age of social media marketing. To find out more about influencer marketing, please see our article “What is influencer marketing?”.
The first type of influencer campaign you can run is a social media takeover. This is characterised by a social media influencer using the brand’s social media page to post content like videos, stories and doing live streams. The influencer can even do “question and answer” features on stories and interact with your audience. This is a great way of gaining traffic to your profile since the followers of the influencer will make their way over to your page in order to see what the influencer is posting and to interact with their posts. A great example of this is when Nikkie de Jager (a beauty guru YouTuber from The Netherlands with 13.8 million subscribers and over a billion video views) took over the Eurovision Song Contest social media channels since she was one of the hosts of the show this year (2021). This was a brilliant move from those at Eurovision headquarters since it engaged a whole new category of people who may not have watched before but will watch since a huge YouTube personality has endorsed it.
Another type of influencer campaign that you can use is choosing an influencer to be a brand ambassador. This style of influencer marketing is a much more traditional style of marketing that is reminiscent of celebrity endorsements. When you appoint an influencer as a brand ambassador, this essentially means that this influencer will be the face of your brand or of a certain product. This form of the campaign would be perfect for those that have already built up a relationship with certain influencers as it is a rather long-term campaign compared to a quick discount code or a social media takeover. It is also important to reserve this form of a marketing campaign for someone who really resonates with your brand and someone who has a substantial number of followers since it can be rather costly. An example of this is Maybelline having beauty guru YouTuber, Manny Gutierrez as the face of their brand in 2017. This means that Maybelline products are featured in his makeup tutorials quite frequently and he would actively promote the brand to his 4.86 million subscribers. He was also the first male Maybelline ambassador at the time which was huge news, thus leading to more traffic for the brand.
Finally, you can use influencers in order to host giveaways and competitions for their followers. This type of campaign will involve you sponsoring a social media giveaway by sending your products to the winner. An alternate way of running this campaign is to use an influencer to promote a giveaway that you are hosting on your own social media page. This can drive up engagement, followers and traffic since you can set the conditions for the giveaway. For example, in order to enter your giveaway, one of the rules could be that to enter you may have to follow the brand page and share the page. This is done quite often on social media by brands of all sizes. Beauty Bay have done this several times as well as companies like e.l.f cosmetics and Hydroflask.
