Influencer Marketing Guide for Performance Marketers

Influencer Marketing: A Performance Marketer’s Handbook

Performance marketing and influencer marketing are intrinsically linked, but are managed separately. Find out why we think it’s time for a change.

Time For A Change?

Influencer marketing and performance marketing – if you’re a brand operating in these channels, chances are you strategize them separately, plan them separately, budget them separately, execute them separately and optimize them separately. Sound familiar?

That makes sense.

They’re both complicated, highly specialized and require huge effort to deliver week-in, week-out. Team members probably developed their careers working in one channel or the other, rarely crossing over.

From a commercial perspective, it’s logical to split them: performance marketing focuses on turning dollars into clicks, clicks into sales — and sales back into dollars.

Performance campaigns tend to focus on Bottom-of-Funnel activities. Regardless of whether you measure against CPA, ROI, or ROAS, ultimately the same question is always asked: “What was the return on our performance investment, and how can we do better next week/month/quarter/year?”

Contrast that with influencer marketing, which is often planned and measured primarily against very different (arguably Top-of-Funnel) goals: reach, opportunities to see, brand lift and engagement, to name just a few, and is often given more room and time to prove its value.

From a creative perspective, influencer marketing is often seen to offer much more scope than text-based search ads or a simple retargeting banner. But ironically it’s often the latter two that are seen to drive results.

But consider this: Influencer marketing is hugely performance-driven, and its insights on audiences, consumer preferences and platform trends can be gold dust for performance teams.

Ultimately, performance and influencer strategies have immense strength on their own, but we believe brands can achieve breakthrough impact when bringing them together.

1. Plan performance and influencer marketing in a single funnel

When it comes to practical steps to align performance and influencer teams, a great first step is to figure out where your campaigns are already overlapping. One place they’re likely to overlap is your marketing funnel.

Let’s make a couple of assumptions to set the scene:

If a user searches for your brand on Google or Amazon, and goes on to make a purchase, we need to assume they didn’t suddenly wake up with your brand front of mind, and their awareness of your brand has come from somewhere.
If you don’t feed the somewhere, the branded searches that show those sky-high conversion rates simply won’t happen.

Say a user searches for information around a certain product and comes across your ad in Google. They might spot a social ad on Facebook a day later. Without interacting with these ads, they have paid attention and are starting to build awareness around your brand. At this stage, we could consider the user activated.

With the product in mind, this same user may see their favorite influencer demonstrate the product as part of an Instagram sponsored post and be inspired to take the plunge and buy. We can now consider them converted.

The bottom line? While you consider your channels separately, chances are they complement each other much more than you think.

2. Align measurement as much as possible

It’s time for performance and influencer marketers to join together on measurement.

Separate measurement tools can lead to wildly different conclusions, which can prevent teams from identifying patterns or similarities across the data.

By aligning data from analytical tools, deciding attribution and accountability models up front, and reviewing the data from different platforms at the same time enables different teams to look at marketing activity holistically, exploring the relationships between different results and outcomes.

3. Share and align audience data

Here’s the idea: audience data from influencer marketing can be used to improve performance marketing metrics. When planning campaigns, marketers carefully consider which audience their chosen influencers reach and how those audiences align with the brand’s goals.

Where we see opportunity is when marketers are able to take audience insight from influencer marketing, and apply it to performance campaigns.

4. Share performance and creative insight across channels

This piece is around sharing insight, then delivering successful messages across multiple channels.

Performance Ad Assets: Google automatically combines messages to find the best results. This can generate ideas for branded content ads and influencer content.

Influencer Content: Equally, look at what’s resonating.

Customer Comments: Life can be found in the comments. Positive comments can be used in Search Ads, Programmatic Ads, leading to increased click through rate.

5. Collaborate on content

Equipped with greater insight on what is working well across your channels, you can effectively turn your attention to combining performance and influencer marketing at a campaign level.

Harnessing high-performing IGC

Influencer-generated content reaches new heights when used to power paid campaigns. It combines highly-engaging content with the ability to target specific audiences informed by previous influencer campaigns.

Meta Branded Content Ads

Run by Meta across Facebook and Instagram, these ads appear from chosen influencer’s own social media handle. They lead to higher purchase outcomes and conversions.

TikTok Spark Ads

Marketers can take high-performing content and use it in Spark Ads, which can be set to appear from the creator’s handle.

Conclusion

A combined approach allows teams to gain deeper insights, share learnings and take advantage of content which is performing well, while better reaching prospective customers at every touch point.