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.

Managing Long-Term Influencer Partnerships

Long-term partnerships between brands and influencers are the way to maximize the potential of influencer marketing.

As a brand, you’re able to establish a long-lasting relationship with both influencer partners and their audience. Now is the perfect moment to start securing influencers for brand ambassadors for 2022 programs, and we have a few tips for you so your upcoming influencer programs can break through.

Our tips for planning your upcoming influencer ambassador programs:

Select performance-based influencers: Long-term ambassadorships are an investment, and you’ll want to prioritize influencers who can deliver on the KPIs you are after.

Test creators with short-term partnerships first: Before you commit to working with influencers for a year, try working with them for a shorter period of time to test their content’s performance and ensure that their audience is aligned with your target audience. You can even use upcoming holiday programs as the trial run.

Look for organic brand supporters: Sponsored content fatigue is real. Audiences will be able to tell right away if a sponsored post is a poor fit for an influencer. Avoid this by partnering with influencers who are preexisting brand fans or whose content and style align with that of your brand.

Understand audience demographics: Not only will you want your influencer partner to align with your brand, but you’ll also want to check that their audience demographics make sense as well. When you hire influencers to promote your brand, you’re really looking to market to their following, so ask for their audience insights ahead of time so you know the content will be reaching your target audience.

Mix up posting types throughout the program: One way to keep a long-term campaign exciting is by switching up the post types throughout the program’s duration. Instagram Posts and Stories are always popular, but try out an IGTV video, blog post, live video, or another content type to see how various posts perform. We also encourage you to activate across different platforms such as TikTok, Clubhouse, or YouTube, as cross-platform campaign strategies extend the reach of the branded content to additional audiences.

Offer incentives to influencers to encourage above-and-beyond content: Ambassadorships are about relationship building, not just between your brand and the influencer’s audience, but between you and the influencer. Incentives like a commission system, gifting, and VIP experiences will strengthen your partnership and encourage the influencer to go above and beyond with their content creation. We recommend providing each influencer with a personalized discount code to provide with their audience, as it incentivizes the audience to purchase directly from the influencer’s content while at the same time providing your brand a way to track performance and sales conversion. 

Be okay with adjusting your strategy: Even the best-laid plans can go awry, which is why it’s important to know when to take a step back and recalibrate if a campaign isn’t performing as expected. Instead of continuing with content that doesn’t work, alter your strategy for the remainder of the program. Just know that such alterations may require contract edits and rate negotiations with the influencer

Planning Long Term Influencer Partnerships

The new year is the perfect time to start your influencer marketing strategy on the right note and partner with influencers for the year. Long term partnerships are mutually beneficial for brands and influencers. Brands are able to build long-lasting relationships with their influencer partners, and influencers are able to maintain trust with their audience because they promote the same brand over a long period of time.

Before you start a new long term partnership, however, you will want to take several key factors into account to ensure the program’s success.

Set Clear Goals & Requirements Ahead of Time

The more you plan ahead of launching the yearlong partnership, the smoother things will run. Take time to structure the program, from how many influencers you’ll be activating to how many posts they’ll be creating and what your key performance indicators are.

Be clear and upfront from the get go about how many social posts you are looking for, as well as the cadence of posts. No one likes to be blindsided with changing requirements, so the more clear you can be upfront about your expectations, the better.

Partner With Influencers Who Have Proven Track Records

If you are working with influencers for a whole year, you will want to work with creators who can help you meet your marketing and sales goals. Use analytical tools to measure engagement and reach metrics, and follow the influencers to see firsthand how engaged their community is.

Should sales be the primary objective of your campaign, you can request case studies or conversion metrics from potential influencer partners.

Need some more assistance deciding what type or types of influencer to work with? Check out our guide on influencer selection.

Know When To Switch Gears

As much as you should try to stick to your original game plan, goals may change over the course of the partnership. In that case—or in the case that an influencer’s content is not performing as well as you had hoped—it is okay to consider experimenting and changing tactics.

Perhaps it’s switching an Instagram post requirement to a set of Instagram Stories since an influencer’s audience engages more with stories, or changing the creative direction for a post. Within reason, it is completely acceptable to have a conversation with the influencer about changing the plan. If you are asking to add more deliverables, extend the timeline, or any other major changes, however, you may need to pay an additional fee to the influencer.

Work With an Agency Who Will Do the Heavy Lifting

Whether activating 1 influencer or 100, a long term campaign features many moving pieces. Partnering with an agency like Lytehouse can help take a lot of the work off your plate and allow you to focus on big picture initiatives. From casting influencers to coordinating posts to campaign reporting, agencies are there to help with large partnerships and can offer unparalleled expertise on best practices.