After investing time and effort into running impactful influencer marketing campaigns, it’s only natural that you want to get the most bang for your buck. Amplifying influencer content with paid media is an effective way to maximize the reach and conversions generated by your influencer campaigns. Integrating influencer-generated content (IGC) into your digital advertising strategy will help you to optimize IGC with better audience targeting and a clear call-to-action to help you drive better results. Promoting influencer content with paid media relies on your business having a robust omnichannel strategy, and seizing opportunities to repurpose and amplify high-performing IGC for your brand-owned channels.
In this article, we’ll highlight 5 steps for amplifying influencer content with paid media Knowing the key steps needed to use IGC in your digital advertising strategy will help you to repeat this repurposing process for all your influencer marketing campaigns.
Step 1 – Set your goals
Why promote this piece of influencer content?
Before selecting a piece of content, whether it be a video, image, or written review, be clear about why you want to amplify it with paid media and what you want to achieve? Repurposing influencer content for advertising is beneficial for your business, helping you to increase the reach of your IGC, and boost ROI by reusing content across different channels. But it’s worth setting yourself specific goals for each piece of content that you decide to promote in this way.
Amplifying IGC with advertising is an opportunity to get more value by using strategic audience targeting to generate more conversions. But, it is also an additional cost. Make sure that the amount you spend on digital advertising will help you reach your goals and stay ROI positive. Perhaps you want to increase web traffic by 15%, get 2,000 subscriptions, or generate a 10% increase in sales for a specific product line. Whatever your goal, make sure the choice of content and the budget you’ll spend will help you meet it.
Step 2 – Choose the content and how you’ll repurpose it
The next step is to choose which pieces of content you want to promote with online ads. A good place to start is by looking at which specific posts from influencers have performed well. Is it an Instagram Reel that shows users how to use your brand’s coffee machine? Perhaps there’s a TikTok of an influencer doing a workout in a pair of your brand’s leggings that’s generating a buzz? Has a YouTuber posted a makeup tutorial featuring your brand’s maximum strength mascara? The possibilities are endless, but it’s up to you to comb through a selection of the best posts to pick out the most engaging pieces that can be repurposed in your advertising strategy.
Once you have a key content piece in mind, you need to think through how to take it from a post in a creator’s feed to an effective asset for a digital ad. Perhaps you want to turn a TikTok video into a Facebook video ad? Or an Instagram image into a display ad? Think about the format of the video or image you’ll use in the final ad and what changes might be necessary. You can take snippets from a longer YouTube video and run them as short ads on TikTok or Instagram for example. You can use an influencer’s photos of them using the product and quotes from their caption to put together a great carousel ad on Facebook.
Get creative about how you can slice up your influencer’s content to create something new that will resonate with your audience. Remember, the reason that promoting IGC with ads works so well, is the authenticity that comes with influencer content. Keep as many original elements as possible. The content doesn’t need to be as clean and polished as a corporate ad. Using images and videos that feature the creator themselves will be instantly more engaging than a product photo from the catalog!
Step 3 – Choose the right advertising channel
You have several different options when deciding what kind of digital advertising format to use to promote influencer content, including display ads, social media ads, video ads and so many more! Depending on the type of content and the message, you can decide which platform makes the most sense for you to run that ad.
Think about how your customers use specific social channels and how your ad can align. On TikTok for example, people are looking for entertaining and funny content, so running an ad that feels too corporate or too commercial won’t work as well. Instead, use this opportunity to highlight how your product can become a fun part of someone’s everyday routine.
On Pinterest and Instagram, we know that users are primed for product discovery so will be more open to seeing ads that talk about product features and functionality. What’s more, if you have a native social commerce store on Instagram for example, you can run ads that talk about product features and offer social proof like a star rating or a quote from the influencer’s review then link directly to your shop.
Step 4 – Select your target audience
One of the most obvious advantages to promoting influencer content with digital advertising is the possibility to reach new people beyond the influencer’s own followers. Setting up online ads allows you to strategically target specific segments of your customer base and therefore generate better results. Amplifying influencer content in this way helps brands to target a larger volume of relevant people with engaging ad content. You can use this strategy to push ads featuring content from different influencers to appeal to all the different demographics within your target customer audience. Don’t forget you can test out different ad content with different audiences to find the best fit!
Step 5 – Set up influencer whitelisting for ads
Influencer content whitelisting is an effective strategy to get even more value from your IGC ads. The process involves running ads using influencer content through an influencer’s own social media ad account while in reality it’s managed by the brand. This leads to better-performing ads as the content appears to be posted from the influencer’s account, so users are more likely to interact and engage with the post. Running whitelisted ads means brands benefit from the advantages previously mentioned including higher reach, reduced content costs and higher conversions with the addition of using the influencer’s account for added authenticity to drive more impact from influencer content.
With whitelisting, brands can add another dimension to their audience targeting by creating lookalike audiences. This means brands can use whitelisting to show their ads to new social media users who match the demographic profile of people who are already following the influencer’s profile.
If you’re new to influencer whitelisting, we’ve set out the key benefits and talked about everything you need to know to get started in these previous posts.
Resources to help you get started:
- Download the Guide to Whitelisting Influencer Content on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok & YouTube.
- Read our blog to learn how to optimize ad control with influencer whitelisting.
- Watch our Influencer Marketing Masterclass video dedicated to getting the most from your influencer campaigns with repurposing.
