5 Types of Influencer Marketing Campaigns

May 22, 2024
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Peter Nettesheim
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5 Types of Influencer Marketing Campaigns

The influencer marketing industry continues to grow at a fast pace, emerging as one of the most effective solutions for brands to connect with their target audiences in a cost-effective and engaging manner.

With thousands of influencers available for collaboration, there are several ways to partner with them, depending on your marketing budget and objectives. Once you've established your brand’s goals, you simply need to decide on the best influencer marketing campaign to achieve them.

In this article, you'll find a list and detailed explanation of the five most popular types of influencer partnerships, helping you decide which one is best for your brand at this moment.

1. Sponsored Posts

What are Sponsored Posts and How it works

Providing fixed payments to influencers in exchange for social media content featuring your product offers several advantages if you have a marketing budget available for it. 

You can first specify the type of content or deliverables you require, such as 

  • Reel or Feed posts
  • IG stories
  • YouTube videos
  • Blog articles etc. 

Requesting a combination or package of posts can also be effective, spreading the content conveniently throughout the campaign.

Benefits of Sponsored Post

The main advantage of sponsored posts is creative control. By compensating influencers, brands can ensure that their content aligns with their expectations by sharing a brief and requesting edits, which may result in better quality content, as influencers who are paid are usually more responsive and accommodating towards the brand’s needs. Additionally, sponsored posts can be utilized for social paid ads, enhancing brand awareness and reducing costs for paid ad creatives. When negotiating, ensure that usage rights for social media advertising are included in the fee.

Since influencer rates can be high, it's recommended to work with fixed payments for long-term relationships or with influencers who have previously demonstrated good conversion rates. Therefore, you can make a fair offer based on their previous performance. Consider offering a low flat fee along with a percentage commission of sales generated by the influencer's content for influencers with lower sales performance.

Therefore, you also need to think about the best package you can offer while working with sponsored posts. Just a flat fee, fee + commission, or offering them a discount code for their followers? You can combine all of these to create an attractive package for the influencer while trying to keep your costs as low as possible.

Image: https://www.instagram.com/p/C0SdljvsUk3/

2. Product Seeding and unboxing

Gifting products to influencers in exchange for reviews and exposure on their social media platforms is a cost-efficient approach, especially for brands with limited marketing budgets. Whether it's an unboxing video or a comprehensive product review, this collaboration can yield positive results at a low cost.

Offer influencers a free product with an attractive retail value or allow them to choose from a selection of best-selling products from your store. This approach works better for micro-influencers, as macro-influencers typically request fixed payments. However, while product seeding campaigns may face challenges in onboarding larger accounts, offering an affiliate partnership in addition to product gifting can substantially increase the onboarding rate. Let’s review the details of this mixed type of partnership below!

3. Affiliate Marketing

In an affiliate partnership, brands offer the influencers a percentage commission on the sales made through their content, tracked via a customized affiliate link. This approach is ideal for conversion campaigns aimed at driving direct sales and maintaining a positive ROI. 

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How Affiliate marketing works

Offer influencers a free product for promotional content creation and compensate them with an affiliate commission on their attributed sales. The percentage offer depends on your budget, but  it typically varies from 10% to 20%.

It’s essential to clarify that in affiliate marketing, the main challenge and long-term objective brands should pursue is to identify the high performers, meaning the influencers who can drive significant sales, which represent a small portion of all the influencers that you initially reach out to. According to the Pareto principle, around 20% of the influencers you work with generate over 80% of your revenue

These are the ones that brands should consider building long-lasting relationships with, by inviting them to participate in their seasonality campaigns or brand ambassador programs. It can take time to build a reliable network of high-performers, but affiliate management software can streamline this process and once you identify them, they can compensate for much of your costs and bring in the real ROI, so it’s worth investing time in testing influencers. You can read more about this influencer programs strategy here.

4. Giveaway campaigns

Who has never commented on an influencer’s post hoping to be the lucky winner of a bundle for once? Whenever there's a free product involved, interest will be sparked right away!

A giveaway campaign run through the influencer’s account can be ideal for brand awareness objectives, as the influencer encourages their wide audience to participate in an action for the brand, thereby generating significant engagement and reach.

An influencer giveaway collaboration can be beneficial for both sides, as it allows influencers to provide value to their audiences and keep them engaged with their content. Therefore, it is a good strategy to onboard influencers to work with you for the first time. For the brand, it can help boost online presence and increase followers on social media, as participation often requires following the brand’s account. However, this collaboration works best when combined with other types of campaigns designed to increase sales. Therefore, in addition to the giveaway bundle, you can consider offering the influencer a discount code to share with their followers in the giveaway post and an affiliate commission on any sales.

5. Seasonality campaigns

Any influencer marketing campaign can be tied to specific public holidays, sales, or celebrations to promote content related to people’s specific online shopping priorities at certain times. For example, some major ecommerce events you could join include Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas holidays, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and Mother’s or Father’s Day.

Working with influencers during key holiday periods can help boost engagement and drive significant conversions, as people are generally looking for gifts and promotions during these times. Seasonality campaigns are therefore crucial for driving the majority of a brand's revenue and ROI. 

Check out our detailed $30k Father’s day case study to illustrate how you can drive sales using influencers from seasonality campaigns.

A good strategy is to invite your existing influencers with whom you have already worked and who have shown good performance to join your seasonality campaigns. Offer them additional free products, an affiliate commission on any sales generated during the campaign, and an exclusive discount code to share with their followers.

One crucial thing to consider is that seasonality campaigns require advanced and strategic planning. Evaluate first which influencers you wish to invite to join this campaign and the compensation packages you can offer them, based on their previous performance and your marketing budget. Also, make sure to reach out well in advance to ensure the product arrives in time for the promotion.

In the influencer outreach, highlight that by joining this campaign, their commission could significantly increase as many people will be looking for gifts. This will help you onboard influencers with lower compensation packages.

Influencer marketing softwares like Influencer Hero can help you organize these types of campaigns with automated messages and A/B tested templates.Find more information on this strategy and how to create successful seasonality campaigns here.

Some effective rules for any influencer marketing campaign

Regardless of the type of collaboration you decide to undertake with the influencers, there are some basic tips and strategies that you should always follow to see better results:

  1. Always ask influencers to include a UTM link to your website or ecommerce in their posts. This will help drive more conversions and allow you to track influencer performance such as clicks and conversions. For this reason, it is also suggested to include or encourage in their deliverables a story post so they can add the sticker link in their post.
  1. All posts should be made in a way that is both engaging or useful for the influencer’s audience and that looks authentic to the influencer’s style. This will make the content look more organic and result in better engagement.
  1. Efficient communication with influencers during the outreach and negotiation process is essential in determining the campaign's success in any type of influencer marketing campaign. You can find a guide on how to communicate with influencers effectively here.

To sum up, now that we have discussed the different types of campaigns you can create with influencers, you can decide which type of collaboration better fits your brand’s goals and needs. Please note that all these types of campaigns and strategies are not independent or exclusive! In fact, most of them typically work better together, so when possible, it is suggested to combine a few of them. For example, offer your influencers both an affiliate commission and gifting for your first collaboration together, and if they perform well, offer to send them an extra bundle of products to run a giveaway for their followers!

Finally, regardless the type of influencer marketing campaign you choose, make sure you build an effective strategy that will help you achieve your goals with The Ultimate Influencer Marketing Guide.


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FAQs
What are the benefits of sponsored posts in influencer marketing campaigns?
What is product seeding, and how does it benefit brands?
What is affiliate marketing in influencer collaborations?
How can brands leverage seasonality campaigns in influencer marketing?
Are influencer marketing campaigns mutually exclusive, or can they be combined?

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