Anyone in influencer marketing has heard the phrase, “the influencer knows their content and their audience best,” before. Yet, somehow, this can sometimes fall on deaf ears and as a content consumer you somehow still see a piece of content on your daily scroll and think, “this doesn’t look like the influencer’s usual content? Oh, it’s an ad, okay, makes sense, moving on,” and you continue scrolling without engaging further. The brand on the other side sees the results from the campaign and wonders why the content didn’t resonate when the content direction presented to the creator was so specific and clear, when their audience is the right fit for the product, and their engagement is typically very high. So, with all the standard marketing boxes checked, what went wrong?
Influencers Are Successful Because of THEIR Content
Brands with very attuned influencer marketing teams or those that work with tapped-in influencer marketing agencies (shout out to our sister agency Sundae Creative!) are lucky to have people who understand the nuances of the influencer landscape and what content performs best. The disconnect happens when the recommendations from these partners are disregarded in favour of what brand teams think or feel will work best from a traditional marketing perspective. Influencer marketing has long been lauded as an effective marketing vertical because of how rooted it is in authenticity. Creators can seem like friends to consumers, recommending products they truly believe in and use, versus impersonal marketing campaigns with faces you don’t always recognize and you can’t forge a genuine connection with.
Creators who have built a successful following have done so based on their unique personalities and content niche. When brands partner with these influencers on a project and erase the personality and overlook the content niche in favour of their own brand identity and messaging, they lose the opportunity to reach the goals they intended to reach. The whole point of partnering with a creator is to tap into their audience and have them connect with the content and, by extension, the product(s) featured in the content. Credit must be given to creators who push back on overly specific briefs in order to respect their own brand and their content, but not all creators have the luxury or confidence yet to decline big brand opportunities with strict briefs.
But Brands Need to Ensure They Are Being Well-Represented!
We can hear brand marketers shouting back, “but we have very specific messaging that we need to communicate to consumers!”. Great, but we recommend stepping back. Let’s dial it all the way back to how brands can work with creators collaboratively. When a brief is presented, it should come with an opportunity for feedback from the creator to offer their input and present their own vision for how the content could be presented. Brands could be surprised by what they see. It might not be what was expected, but if it was what was expected, you could have developed the campaign yourself internally and it’s not why, as a brand, you wanted to try something different in playing in the influencer marketing space. In admiring the power of the creator economy and being excited to work with a specific talent, there should be an openness to honour that admiration and recognize how the unique perspective of a specific talent can empower a campaign to success. It could feel risky, but there can be tremendous value in testing and learning to see what works best for a brand. Perhaps it’s not about always partnering with your personal favourite mega influencers simply because you love their content and they have seemingly massive followings and churn out sponsored content multiple times a day, but instead it’s about working with a blend of macro, mid-tier, and rising hyper-engaged influencers who are all open to collaboration and have strong ideas of how to make your product shine in an unexpected and unique way.
What Should an Effective Brief Look Like?
- Create individual briefs (Each influencer is different, and they all should get a unique brief that speaks to them!)
- Include content examples (What type of content do you like from them? Or what content examples from other content creators do you like that also aligns with their style?)
- Top key messages to choose from (If only one can be mentioned, what’s the #1, and yes, it might just be one and not a grocery list of messages.)
- Offer a collaborative working session (Work WITH your partners, not shoving firm concepts down their throats with no wiggle room - they may never want to work with you again and that could also negatively influence audience sentiment seeing a creator never feature your brand in a paid or organic capacity again.)
- Ask them to share their vision for the content (this ensures both sides feel confident with the content before it is filmed, thus limiting any risk of re-shooting, which can create friction!)
Ultimately, the brands that will win on highly-engaged, authenticity-driven platforms, such as TikTok, are those that loosen the ties that bind creativity and allow for the freedom of creative expression. Just wait and see those comments and views roll in (and, in time, brand awareness will increase and sales can follow!).
