Influencer Marketing Is Busting Through The Walls Of Social Media

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VP of Marketing and Strategy at Linqia , Keith Bendes is a leading voice in the intersection of marketing and technology.

As influencer marketing rose to fame over the last decade, it's gone through several stages of maturity. Influencer marketing 1.0 was fairly simple and straightforward. Brands worked with people with social media followings to post about the brand. That content reached the creator's audience, and their following was a predictable signal of reach.

Now fast-forward, and we have fully entered influencer marketing 3.0, where brands are not just using creator content in their paid social, but across all marketing touchpoints, from CTV and OLV to retail media and everything in between. This includes paid channels, but also owned channels like product detail pages, brand websites and even product packaging.

You've likely seen commercials of late that look and feel like social media content, and that's intentional. The more the content feels social, raw, relatable, authentic or whatever word you want to use to describe the magic that is social-first content, the better it performs.

So let's take a moment to dissect how the best brands are doing this as part of an influencer playbook.

1. Design With The End In Mind: This means mapping the owned and paid content needs before an influencer campaign is scoped. This includes detailing every ad placement spec (size, length, file format, etc.) to create a grid that can be populated with creator content once it's produced.

2. Brief For All Content Uses: If you know you need b-roll, portrait and landscape, different hook messages and more, account for that in the brief to creators. And if the future applications of the content are really important, don't be afraid to have deliverables that the creators never actually post but produce for your own use.

3. Invest In Post-Production: It's amazing what you can do with content after it's created, such as resizing, cutting down, adding overlays, stitching, etc. Too many brands are only seeing what's in front of them and not experimenting with how the content can be adapted for different uses with a little post-production magic.