Following the real boom of influencer marketing in 2016, there was an intense demand for campaigns that focused on influencer content creation within one particular platform such as YouTube or Instagram. As the market has matured, and influencers have had more success diversifying their following across multiple platforms, we’ve seen increased demand for campaigns that go beyond a singular platform. Where an influencer collaboration would previously have been just a YouTube video, it is now a YouTube video and some Instagram posts or story content.
The problem with multi-platform campaigns is that they are twice the work with all the additional scheduling, briefing, approvals, reporting and admin… or are they?
Most influencer marketing service companies are focused on singular platforms, so if you want to run a campaign with content across more than one social media platform, you need to spread yourself across several different offerings, which can quickly become impractical. Another problem with this approach is that you can end up spending a lot more money as you are unable to benefit from content package prices where you receive a discounted rate on the content you ask for from one influencer, as each element of the campaign is being handled separately.
However, if you were to run that campaign on Post For Rent, you could run the campaign across multiple platforms and manage it all in one place, through their multi-platform campaign functionality. This allows you to make fee offers based on package deals, saving you money, and also enables you to handle all the content and reporting in one place, saving a LOT of time.
Why are multi-platform campaigns popular? Well, beyond the obvious benefit of offering more “bang for your buck” through the content package deals, they can alter the way the influencer’s audience perceives a brand’s relationship with that influencer as it makes the collaboration more of a 360 degree partnership, instead of a mere video shoutout. This builds additional consumer trust and doubles-up as a re-targeting method, allowing the advertiser an additional touchpoint with the audience they will hopefully have already reached through the content initially posted on the influencer’s main social media account.
It’s also important to keep in mind that certain platforms are better suited to certain purposes, so having a multi-platform campaign allows you to benefit from each platform’s strengths. For example, TikTok content is not useful for driving people to a particular site, but it is unrivalled at generating UGC, which is of course a whole additional level of value in itself.
However, pairing that TikTok content with an Instagram stories campaign using the same influencers, allows you to drive UGC creation, giving your brand great presence and value, whilst also then having content that will drive those reached to a specific site/download link, allowing you to achieve multiple different goals and ROI from one single campaign.
If you haven’t already harnessed the power of TikTok, there’s never been a better time to activate their 500million active users worldwide and 29% engagement rate. Post For Rent is the first influencer marketing platform to give you access to both TikTok talent as well as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. This opens a huge door into a previously self-contained market and has laid vital framework for coping with the rising demand for brand collaborations with TikTok influencers. You can also make use of their unique reach calculator to ensure you either maximise the audience overlap for your campaign across the influencers you are working with, ensuring you get a lot of attention from a more narrow combined audience, or you can minimise overlap to increase the total amount of people reached with the content instead - whichever best suits your purposes. Either way, you’re in complete control of your campaign.
Where workloads and influencer access may have prevented brands of all sizes from taking advantage of these campaigns in the past, there really isn’t a barrier to hold them back any more. Part of Post For Rent’s essential toolkit includes e-signature agreements and ‘one-click’ customisable report generation, allowing you to get the security you need when working with influencers without delaying the campaign, whilst also giving you the ability to report back on results faster and more easily than ever before, without sacrificing any depth of detail.
Brands should also consider how utilising a tool like Post For Rent can allow them to take a more integrated strategy between their sponsored content, influencer marketing and ambassador partnership content campaigns. The modus operandi for many brands currently involves launching piecemeal content across separate networks, which is risky as it offers very little budget flexibility as it ties the budget into separate places, rather than keeping them in a unified “pot”. This impedes the ability of a brand to react and maximise impact when content or campaigns exceed expectations and warrant further spend.
Grouping these elements within a unified team and budget allows brands the flexibility to easily react and scale the campaigns across social platforms through the Post For Rent platform. Taking this approach to integrated marketing with one team of managers supervising the various elements under one umbrella should also eliminate any risks to brand safety.
Flexibility is becoming more and more important given that a core part of influencer marketing involves re-purposing content from influencers across a brand’s wider social media channels, and other campaigns, so setting yourself up in such a way as to restrict your ability to react to content success is like shooting yourself in the foot. With the new changes to Instagram’s post promotion tools, which allow brands to boost an influencer’s own post, the marketplace of content creators is more open than ever, as you will no longer be as reliant on their inbuilt audience, and can focus on creators that make content that will align best with your brand instead. There are over 70,000 of them waiting for your brief on Post For Rent, so you are not short of options!
With the ability to combine campaign goals and create hybrid purpose campaigns that are all managed under one roof, it’s a perfect time to experiment and find the best combination for your business. Or if you don’t fancy experimenting, you can always ask an expert instead!
