Looking to utilize influencers in your upcoming holiday campaigns?

Given the need to grab attention quickly, particularly with short-form video, and to understand key platform trends to maximize impact, it may well be worth collaborating with established creators, and utilizing their experience to refine and boost your marketing approach.

And if you are looking to partner with platform experts, then these tips might help – Meta has posted a range of tips from Instagram stars, as shared at its recent VidCon activation, which provide some valuable notes on how to ensure optimal benefit from influencer campaigns.

Here’s an overview of Meta’s key points:

Deploy a multi-pronged approach

Meta advises that brands should look to utilize various surfaces – Stories, Feed and Reels – to maximize their presence and reach. This obviously helps Meta, in that more content is better for its ecosystem, but it can also help to ensure your messaging is reiterated, improving both brand recognition and reach.  

Let creators share their story

A key part of working with influencers is selecting the right ones for your brand, in the creators that reflect the same ethos and approach that your brand does. And with that, you should also let your chosen influencers explore your promotions from their authentic perspective. If there’s a solid match, then you need to trust their creative capacity, at least to some degree.

Ensure a creator’s values align with your brand’s values

Similar to the previous note, in order to ensure that your partnership is authentic and relatable, you need to select the right influencers based on your brand and goals, in order to ensure that you can maximize connection with their audience and their content.

Leverage creators’ insights

Don’t jump at the creator with the biggest follower count - dig into the analytics, and ensure that their audience matches your target market, that their engagement per post is solid, and that people are actually responding to their content. Look deeper into the various elements to ensure that there’s a good match for your efforts.

You can dig into a creators’ analytics within the new Instagram Creator Marketplace or Facebook’s Brand Collabs Manager.

Connect with creators IRL and online

Some Instagram creators at VidCon noted that having a chance to meet with brand representatives face-to-face is a more valuable way to see if there’s a real connection and alignment there, and whether the collaboration makes sense. Brands should look to make personal contact, where possible, and meet with your potential creative partner to discuss the details of your proposed project, which could help enhance the experience.

Ask creators to pin branded content to the top of their grid

A handy point – with grid pinning now available on Instagram that enables influencers to add a little extra to their promotion by ensuring it’s up front for any profile visitors to see. It’s a small, but potentially effective way to eek out the most value from your partnerships.

Remember what businesses gain from working with creators

Meta says that brands ‘gain trust from creators’, which is an important element for both brands and influencers to keep in mind.

For brands, this means that they’re paying for that connection, and using the engagement and connection that influencers have built over time, which is highly valuable, and highly important to keep in mind. Creators, too, need to consider that they need to partner with the right brands to maintain that trust, which is why full analysis of the alignment, on both fronts, is key.

These are some handy points, and with more brands likely to be implementing influencer campaigns this year, as they seek to tap into the rise of short-form video, these could be very valuable in your holiday planning.

For more tips, Instagram has also posted several videos in its ‘We Create’ series, which looks at how creators can effectively collaborate with brands, businesses and agencies in the app.