Over the last couple of years, influencer marketing has evolved beyond organic reach and engagement measurement, with a heavy focus on measuring the full-funnel impact of campaigns. Alongside attribution strategies, paid amplification of influencer content has increasingly become a standard method for maximizing the ROI within campaigns.
Whether you’ve developed a paid media strategy already or are just getting started, chances are you’ve encountered some challenges along the way. From walking influencers through the laborious ad permission process on Facebook to the piecemeal and manual effort it takes to report back on your campaigns, scaling a paid program for maximum impact is complicated. But it shouldn’t be.
Here are five tips to help you create a more efficient paid media strategy - without the headaches:
1. Engage with your paid media counterparts
Whether your paid media experts sit next to you, down the hall, or work at another organization, getting to know the team goes a long way when integrating influencer and paid strategies. Try to learn who executes the campaigns that use your content, who serves as the administrators for your Facebook Ad Manager accounts, and how many Ad Manager accounts you have. This will be useful to you later on.
2. Streamline the ad permissions process
Requesting ad permissions from creators is a hassle that usually takes up too much of your time and your creators’ time. The manual effort can be discouraging, resulting in a rate of success that is likely lower than it needs to be. Your ability to scale (obtain ad permissions for far more creators with a fraction of the effort) is dependent on adopting a solution that automates requesting ad permissions in a simple and secure way.
3. Leverage creator handles
One way to bypass the whole ad permissions process is to download creator content and use it to run ads from your brand’s owned and operated handle. However, there are a few immediate issues with that. First, that’s a lot of content management. Second, it may be creator content, but it’s still coming from the brand’s page, which isn’t the most authentic look.
With ad permissions, your paid media team will have easy access not only to a library of pre-approved branded content, but also to creator handles to run ads as the creators. You’ll also have the flexibility to optimize for performance by editing the messaging, including a CTA and more - while never risking that the ad may appear on your brand’s feed or your creator’s. This is a distinct benefit of Dark Posts.
4. Tap into engaged audiences
Creator content isn’t the only benefit of gaining access to creator pages via ad permissions; you’ll also tap into powerful targeting options. Within Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll have access to a creator’s engaged audience segments (think users who have interacted with their posts or visited their page). You can leverage these audience segments to create unique lookalike audiences based on those most engaged people.
The bottom line? Extend the life of your branded creator content by vastly expanding the number of people it can reach. Your KPIs will thank you!
5. Integrate your reporting
You’ve executed your paid campaign and now you need to report on its performance alongside your organic metrics. This can be the hardest part of the process -and obtaining ad permissions is already hard! You may have very little insight into how the paid portion of your campaign performed. When you chase down those metrics, you may be manually combining them in an excel spreadsheet with your own, or just attaching those metrics as a separate document. When reporting is tedious and siloed, the true impact of your integrated strategy can be lost.
Finding a solution that integrates paid metrics automatically and facilitates the combined reporting of both paid and organic performance will go a long way in showcasing your efforts, highlighting success, and gaining insight that informs your future campaign strategy.
As the influencer marketing space continues to grow, integrated paid media campaigns will grow with it. Having the right knowledge and tools to execute your paid media strategy efficiently will set you apart from the pack.
Want to learn how CreatorIQ’s paid media capabilities can help you scale a high-impact paid strategy for your influencer content?
Download this PDF with one click, and reach out to sales@creatoriq.com to schedule a demo today.