5 Ways to Get Better ROI From Your Influencer Campaign

by Sorilbran Stone, content strategist and procurer of vintage tees

So, you’ve decided to incorporate some influencer marketing campaigns into your marketing strategy. Welcome to the club! Influencer marketing has proven to be an effective strategy for attracting and engaging customers.

Even during the pandemic when we (marketers) were all kind of scrambling to figure out what to say or do, 🧐 the average brand running influencer campaigns only paused for about a month according to Forrester, before making a pivot in messaging and jumping right back into the mix.

Want to know why those brands were able to jump right back in? Relationship.

Most influencers never “lost touch” with their audiences. And they weren't particularly afraid of saying the wrong thing because when you have a relationship with your audience, you can just ask them what they want to talk about and it’s not a big deal.

And the brands that had influencer collabs in place? Well, they were just able to touch base with their influencers (who were already in touch with their communities) and pivot their messaging.

But…

Just ‘cause everyone is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s easy. Too many companies walk away from their campaigns feeling like it underperformed in some way. The fix may be to optimize your live influencer campaigns to get the greatest ROI. 

Optimize ROI? The heck…?

Not to worry, we’ll walk you through it with five easy tips that you can use to optimize today to get your influencer campaign optimized and 10Xing your views, follows, and clicks.

#1 Test your messaging

If influencers are creating content for multiple concepts, keep an eye on which pieces of content are performing the best. 

• For posts that aren’t getting great engagement, the visuals probably aren’t strong enough to elicit a stop-scroll. 
• Decent engagement with no comments probably means the caption isn’t compelling enough to make users engage beyond a tap. 
• For those posts that are getting lots of clicks and lots of comments, identify the things about that post that are working and tweak underperforming posts accordingly so they give you better results. 

#2 Make sure you’re targeting the right audiences. 

GO WIDE! But do it by going narrow a bunch of different times. Don’t try to target everyone. That’s crazy. Instead, focus on targeting different niches within your target audience. 

For instance, an outdoor gear brand will target adventurers, sure. But what about hunters? Nature lovers? Van-lifers? Homeschooling moms who go biking or who take educational night hikes with their kids? Extreme sports enthusiasts? Gardeners?

All of these different niches are relevant to an outdoor gear brand. Don’t knock the niche, ‘till you try the niche. (We ran an influencer campaign for Nite Ize and looped in creators who represented different segments of the brand's target audience.) 

#3 Confirm you’re getting the most out of each platform. 

Check each post’s analytics on engagement, reach, and click-throughs. You may find that the content you thought would perform well on Instagram is actually doing better on TikTok. Redirect your efforts to the top two platforms. This way, you maximize your ad dollars and solidify your ROI.

#4 Boost your top-performing posts. 

Whitelisting is when you turn an influencer’s organic post into a paid ad and run it through their account instead of yours. At The Shelf, we take care of this for you. Influencers give us advertising access to their FB and IG pages. Then, we create an exact copy of their post or Story, add a CTA button and website link, and run it as an ad. Pretty cool, huh? And it’s a great way to maximize one piece of content that’s already been paid for!

#5 Consider getting the creators of your top-performing content to do more collabs with you. 

Having user-generated content and sponsored content that you can reuse across your branded channels is far more effective than your brand-owned content.

When you've worked with a creator before and you already know they have the chops to create content that's visually appealing and emotive, it's smart to find ways to optimize your campaign performance by working with those influencers again.  

Some people just “get” your thing and capture your vibe. Establishing these kinds of relationships is always mutually beneficial and can help your brand long-term. 

Also, consider giving them even more creative freedom. This way they don’t just copy the same style of content every time you hire them. Give them a chance to think outside the box. Your audience and ROI will thank you for it!

We actually have a story about a time when we optimized to breathe new life into a sluggish campaign

Check out our case study on Greenvelope. For this campaign, the client was most concerned with getting Clicks, not Likes. Before we optimized the campaign, it got something like 118 clicks over to the client's website. After we optimized the campaign and boosted  top-performing posts, the number of clicks topped 4,000. We 40Xed the ROI for that campaign. #goals

Biggest takeaway

Get your money’s worth! The Shelf team is all about that ROI, and we’re great at optimizing campaigns for greater and greater ROI.