4 Reasons Why You Should Book Influencer Ambassadors

We find that influencer ambassadors are crucial to brand marketing success and encourage you to seek out influencers who can serve as your trusted brand advocates.

1. Establish Continuity In Your Marketing

Ambassadorships form long-lasting relationships with influencers and develop marketing partnerships that can last months or even years. This allows you to integrate your brand into the influencer’s everyday life, telling a story through multiple rounds of posts and establishing brand familiarity with the influencer’s audience in the process. Continuity in marketing increases the likelihood of audiences purchasing a product, as the continued presence of the brand in an influencer’s content establishes trust and long-term loyalty.

2. Continue Relationships With Top-Performing Talent

If you are unsure of who to cast as your influencer ambassadors, look to top-performing talent from previous campaigns. Short-term partnerships are a great way to test the waters with different influencers, but once you have done so and have found the influencers who can effectively market your brand to their audience, you should prioritize working with them on a large-scale, long-term basis. These are your tried-and-true influencers. Booking them as ambassadors elevates the partnership and will likewise further elevate the content they produce.

3. Save Budgets With Cost-Efficient Package Deal

Long-term partnerships come with a larger upfront cost since they include several rounds of posts, but influencers will often offer multi-post partnerships at a discounted rate per post. For brands looking for the most cost-effective way to book influencers, we advise that it is more cost-efficient to book 10 influencers for 10 posts each than it is to book 100 influencers for 1 post each, and you will likely see better results in the long run, as well.

4. Experiment With New Platforms & Post Types

Multi-post partnerships allow you to experiment with different platforms and get creative with post types throughout the program. Leave room in your creative briefs and contracts to test out secondary social media platforms beyond your primary platforms and try out formats that stray from your typical marketing styles. You can lean on your influencers as creative collaborators, letting them brainstorm fun ideas that will make the content their own. With time and many posts to work with, you have the freedom to have some fun with the branded content your influencers put out.

7 Ways To Make Your Influencer Marketing Pop This Holiday Season

It’s officially time to map out your influencer marketing for the holiday season and begin booking influencers. With talks of inflation, which is expected to top 6% by Christmas according to the Pew Research Center, consumers are expected to spend less this year and be more mindful of purchases in general, which means your marketing campaigns must be expertly crafted and launched with plenty of time in advance to catch the attention of holiday shoppers.

There’s never been a better moment to lean heavily on influencer marketing, partnering with personality-driven creators who can demonstrate your brand’s key products and benefits through engaging and relatable content.

Strengthen your holiday campaigns by:

Planning ahead and launching early.

Holiday shopping starts earlier each year, with 31% of consumers in 2021 starting their holiday shopping before Halloween and 55% before Thanksgiving, according to a survey done by Jungle Scout. Expect that number to rise this year as consumers seek to avoid supply chain delays and seek out the best deals. With this in mind, you should plan to begin promoting holiday offerings in early October and ramp up in November to capture holiday consumers before they’ve checked off their shopping lists for the year. Even date-specific sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday should launch earlier than their traditional start so that you can advertise deals early.

Getting a head start on your holiday campaigns also means securing influencers before they become booked and locking them in before they charge a premium for last-minute holiday campaigns as well.

Partnering with strategically selected creators.

The creators you select for holiday influencer campaigns will be integral to the success of your marketing efforts, especially if you are seeking sales conversions. Creators who excel in short-form video content, have highly engaged audiences, and have a proven track record with sales conversions will be your key partners. Our extended network includes thousands of creators that we can match with your brand to ensure your goals are met.

Crafting creative that emphasizes value.

Consumers are inundated with a surplus of options these days, which is why emphasizing your brand’s benefits over the competition should be a focus of your campaign messaging. Provide influencer partners with unique discount codes to increase the campaign’s success and use influencer marketing to bring awareness to limited-time offers throughout the holiday season.

With consideration to the current economic landscape, consumers may be shopping for practical gifts, especially in the home and travel categories, while younger shoppers will likely still have trendy items on their wish lists. Take your brand’s target audiences into consideration when deciding what products to highlight for the holiday season and how influencers speak to your brand.

We can work with you to craft effective messaging that drives these points home and provide you with the right influencer partners to bring these messages to life through their content.

Activating Story content for limited-time offers and last-minute promotions.

Think of influencers as your valuable partners in informing consumers about important sales, back-in-stock items, and other informational content during the holiday season. Stories are a great way to highlight limited-time offers and time-sensitive information, like letting audiences know that a best-selling item is finally back in stock. This is why building up strong influencer relationships will give you a leg up during this busy season, as pre-existing business relationships will make it easier for you to add on last-minute campaign additions if needed.

Bringing company values to the forefront.

When faced with an overwhelming amount of choices on where to shop, consumers are mindful of supporting brands that have similar values. Showcase your charity partners and craft a campaign that features a charity component to bring your brand’s values to the forefront, using influencers with like-minded values to amplify your message.

Optimizing content.

Ad amplification is a necessary component of holiday marketing, but it is important to know that the digital ad space will become crowded as we near peak holiday shopping. Plan out your ad strategy in advance and monitor performance continually so you can make the best use of top-performing content and maximize your return on investment. Lytehouse’s team knows how to monitor and optimize ads across platforms, and can run your amplification program on your behalf.

Using the holiday season to jumpstart your 2023 ambassadorships.

Holiday is an important time for marketers, but don’t forget about a new year of marketing just beyond that! It is never too early to start thinking about your 2023 plans, and your holiday campaigns can be a great opportunity to test out influencer partners and assess potential 2023 ambassadors based on top-performing talent. With our team of influencer experts who can analyze campaign performance and provide key learnings for a new year of marketing, we can help you kick off your 2023 efforts on the best foot forward.

When To Gift Influencers

Since influencer marketing has surged in popularity, there’s been a healthy debate about whether influencer gifting is valuable. Some argue that gifting is an important way to spread brand awareness, while others would rather spend their marketing budgets on guaranteeing influencer posts, but the truth is there is a time and place for gifting influencers.

Here are the benefits and setbacks to influencer gifting campaigns so you can determine if gifting is the right move for your brand:

Pros of Gifted Campaigns

Less costly than a paid campaign: This is the most obvious benefit to gifting influencers. If your brand does not have a lot of budget to devote to influencer marketing, shipping out press packages is a less expensive option. Even if you splurge on fancy packaging, the cost of shipping and materials will be far less than contracting influencers to post.

Builds organic relationships: When influencers received gifted products without any expectations of posting, they’ll oftentimes feel more comfortable posting about said product. More importantly, gifting is a great way to allow influencers to test out the product and determine on their own if they like what they’ve received. This is incredibly beneficial for new beauty brands or anything that an individual can test out firsthand, because it gets the product directly into the hands of the influencer.

Cons of Gifted Campaigns

No guarantees: When gifting influencers, you are leaving a lot up to fate. Gifting rarely includes contracting influencers, and without any formal agreements in place, there are no promises that the influencers you are gifting will post about—or even use—your product.

Can’t control the narrative: With that being said, you also cannot control how an influencer may speak about your product. Whether they use the wrong hashtag, create subpar content, or even speak negatively about your product, once the item is sent, you have zero control over how it is talked about as no contract is required without payment. This is a large obstacle for luxury brands, especially, who want maximum control over how their brand is represented.

Hard to work with bigger influencers: Gifting is most effective when targeted toward micro influencers, who will be more appreciative of a free gift and likely to post. Influencers with larger followings, however, likely have more paid partnerships under their belt and are savvier to the intentions behind gifting, so odds are they’ll hold out for paid deals and won’t give away valuable tagging for free. However, if your brand features high-value items like designer clothing or furniture, or if the influencer in question is a natural fan, bigger influencers may be willing to give a shoutout.

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The bottom line: gifting is a more cost-effective option and a great way to build natural relationships with nano and micro influencers, but there are no guarantees regarding the quality of the content created, or even that gifted influencers will post at all.

CGI Influencers: Why They Became Successful And Why They Won’t Last

CGI. What is it? How do we use it? Why is it relevant in influencer marketing? Computer Generated Imagery has been around for decades. We all remember the Atari game Pong, or the mobile-friendly Snake which came preloaded on every early-aughts Nokia cell phone. Nowadays, CGI takes form in highly produced video like Avatar or Black Panther and has even extended its reach to social media. 

The popularity of CGI influencers is hard to miss. From Lil’ Miquela to the new-and-improved Colonel Sanders on KFC’s account (a genius move on Wieden + Kennedy’s part), they’re nearly ubiquitous.

The rise of CGI influencers comes from shock factor. We’re sixteen years into the business of influencers: Myspace and Wordpress launched in 2003. People became attached to influencers based on their personalities and their senses of style - it was fully original and every standout influencer was unique.

The days of original style of bloggers is long gone: Bryan Boy, Man Repeller, Fashion Toast, Karla’s Kloset, Sea of Shoes all had exceedingly unique points of view and carved out their own version of success due to their eye-catching style. Most started as bloggers, and as our digital attention spans decreased along with content length, so did their focus. From WordPress to Instagram to Twitter to Snapchat - content length was shortened and there’s no doubt we’ve been attracted to shorter-form digestible content in order to consume more.

Now that ‘influencer’ is a legitimate job description, you’ll find young, ambitious internet stars on every corner of SoHo shooting near-identical imagery to each other. Filters are ubiquitous, captions are short, personality is lacking. Authentic audiences are coming harder and harder to find because there’s not much unique or eye-catching about this new type of content.

Enter the CGI influencer. They’re unique, offer shock value, provide a sense of camaraderie for outsiders looking in. Companies like Brud, the one who produces Lil’ Miquela, have started developing entire rosters of animated influencers to drive shock value and awareness (a great PR move, frankly).

Just as with anything that shocks, the CGI influencer will remain an intriguing fad and will end there. The draw of real influencers will remain for personality, for something unique, for a fresh perspective. The standout new influencers who offer that (Officially Quigley, Jera Bean, Orion Vanessa) will win in the long run for offering something that CGI can’t: a human perspective, a connection with readers, and a compelling reason to seek them out, again and again, like a digital best friend with great advice.

Why Female Influencers Are Killing The Game

The wage gap is no secret. For every dollar that a man makes, in the US, a woman makes $0.85. That gap becomes deeper (and darker - literally and figuratively) when we take into account the woman’s race. Intersectional feminism has never been more quantified.

When it comes to influencer marketing, though, we have been able to turn that wage gap standard on its head. Women influencers are consistently more successful, make more money, and in higher demand than men. Why?

Our team tells our clients that women consume and shop differently than men. It’s commonly cited that women control 70-80% of household spending. They buy for themselves, their household, children, male partners, pets, and parents. By hitting multiple target markets via marketing to women only, a brand is maximizing their potential for ROI as they reach 3-4x the intended target market.

This is backed up by the evidence we see in our influencer campaigns. Women influencers get better reception amongst their female audiences than men do with male audiences - controlling for size, we see higher click through rates, engagements, and conversion rates across the board.

Influencer marketing is one of the few industries where women command more dollars than their male peers. A tangential industry, one that’s not to be ignored here, is modeling. Women models consistently make more than men in their prime years. When income is based on body & appearance, women become the breadwinners. Influencers are an example of this in that their appearance (and their content) is the moneymaker; The rise of plastic surgery among the Instagram crowd is a result.

Combine a heavy focus on appearance with an appeal to the people who control the expendable income of most of the US’s consumer market, and you’re bound to find cashflow for women. Not only are these influencers running small businesses as simultaneous models, salespeople, stylists, art directors, and writers, but they’re also pursuing a gap in the market that traditional advertising was never able to: controlling your own media on your own platform and tracking sales of consumer-facing products... Now that’s entrepreneurial genius.