Does your brand want to reach a larger audience? Do you want to grow a loyal following, an audience with highly targeted and perfectly positioned prospects who are ready to buy from you?
Creating influencer marketing campaigns and working with influencers is a great way to get products or services in front of a whole new group of potential buyers. When executed right, an influencer outreach program can elevate your brand to the next level, increasing online and offline brand awareness.
That is, if the content created by these influencers is on target for your audience!
In this article, we will explore how to work with influencers to get the best possible video content for your next influencer campaign.
Finding the Right Influencers to Represent your Brand
In order to find influencers to represent your brand, a brand should first look to their avatars aka ideal clients as a means to find influencers. Current customers are ideally positioned to turn around and sell to their friends! Peer-to-peer influence is highly effective when used in marketing.
Next, look for content creators aka micro-influencers with small but highly engaged audiences. Specifically, look for social media influencers who specialize in video creation.
For example, if one of your avatars is a 30-something stay-at-home-mom-of-3-kids who drives a minivan, eats a vegan diet and loves to shop at Target, your influencer program should include people who fit this description and those who are already creating video content for their own social media channels.
How To Connect With Influencers
Once you understand who you are looking for to be part of your influencer campaign, the #1 place to look for people that fit this description is your current audience!
Yes, people who already love and use your products or services are a great fit for an influencer outreach program. You can find your ‘tribe’ of ready-made influencers in your Facebook community, on Instagram, on Twitter, or in any of your online communities.
These are called warm influencers: influencers who are authentic and excited to talk about your products or services because they are already familiar with your brand! They will have real-life experience with your product or service which will shine through in the stories you want them to tell and create.
If your audience does not include enough people to start an influencer program, does not support a large campaign, or you are in need of a new group of fresh influencers for a lack of existing audience, you might want to try reaching out to platform-specific influencers, depending on where you want to grow your audience.
Meaning, if you want to grow Instagram, reach out to Instagram influencers. If you want to grow Pinterest, reach out to Pinterest influencers. Makes sense, right?
Sealing the Influencer Deal
Once you’ve selected influencers to work with for your next campaign and they are enthusiastic about working with you as well, it’s important to have a written agreement with each influencer that details your expectations, as well as their compensation, in great detail.
I highly recommend you execute a contract with each influencer before money or product changes hands.
Once the contracts are signed, you are ready to work together to create some magic! Video marketing is exciting, fun and rewarding too!
Using Wave.video with Influencers
Using a tool like Wave.video makes working with influencers so much easier for both your marketing team and your influencers.
Two features Wave.video offers that allow for easy collaboration between brand and influencer:
- Video Templates to share with influencers.
- Intro and Outro templates to share with influencers.
Features Wave.video offers that allow for quick video editing to create branded influencer videos for your internal team:
- Folders to sort videos by campaign.
- Easy Captions tool to add captions as an after effect.
- Fun Stickers and Overlays.
- A Music library.
- Stock Video if needed.
- Brand Management tool to save brand assets.
When your strategy includes a lot of video from multiple sources, a tool like Wave.video will be a huge asset to your team!
3-Stages Video Checklist
How exciting! You are now ready to start the work. Communicate often to ensure a great outcome for this and all future influencer campaigns.
Start by checking off all applicable items on these 3 lists.
Stage 1 is what an influencer needs to know before the video shoot
Stage 2 is what an influencer needs to know as they are creating video content
Stage 3 is what an influencer needs to know during the editing process
Stage 1. Planning Out a Video Shoot
- Length of Video. It’s best to provide a range, in seconds. For example: “Your video should be between 60-90 seconds” or “Your video should be no less than 60 seconds and no longer than 90 seconds.” Be specific!
- Platform, Format, Style and Storyline. Tell your influencer where you’ll be using the video. Do you want landscape or vertical videos, or both? Are you looking for a video panning over a product? Are you looking for a review with a person in view? Do you want a how-to video? Maybe you prefer a talking-head video? Let your influencers know what you might want, without constricting their style too much.
- Target Audience. It’s important your influencer knows the audience you are trying to reach. They can directly address them “Hey moms” or “For all your teachers out there…”. It makes a video more personable.
- Tools. Give your influencer tips on what video or photo apps to use to get the right final product. Not everyone knows how to edit videos, but if your influencer wants to learn, it’s a great idea to share your preferred video tool!
- Product Features. Last but not least, address product features you want, or don’t want, highlighted. No matter what their personal experience is with your product, it makes sense to direct an influencer to talk about a product feature you want to promote!
Stage 2. Before The Video is Created: Ready to Shoot!
- Brand Assets. Colors, logo, style, font. All of these matter and it’s especially important that colors compliment the logo to be used! If you have an intro and outro you want your influencer to use, this is the time to send it to them. Using a tool like Wave.video makes this process seamless.
- Examples. Help your influencer out, share samples of great work from some of your former influencers. Share examples of videos that did well to inspire their creativity!
- What NOT To Do. Don’t forget to mention past blunders or no-nos. Clearly state what you don’t want in your videos. This could include certain phrases or words, actions, gestures, mentions of location, competitors, etc. It might seem overkill to have to spell this out, but it might save you and your influencers massive disappointment.
- Important Links. If you are asking an influencer to talk about a case study, a blog article, a sales page or a previously published video, it makes sense to provide the link.
- Storyline and Script Final Approval. Ask your influencer if they have a storyline (see above) and if you might have a quick look, or have a peek at their script. If they are a seasoned content creator, they won’t have a problem with this. If you are working with multiple influencers, this is a good time to ask them to submit their ‘format’ for approval, so that you end up with different style videos!
Stage 3. The Video Editing Process
- Timeline. If you have a timeline, make sure that the timeline is known to your influencer and that you have a communication system. There is nothing worse than waiting for a holiday video to get it two months late, too late to use this season for it to be of no use to you!
- Multiple Takes. You might want to ask for all “blurbs and outtakes” as well as multiple takes. If you are the one editing, ask for ALL material as this could be gold for B-roll.
- Multiple Formats. While you might have discussed your preferred format, don’t refuse multiple formats. A short vertical video can do great as a quick story. Don’t discount anything given to you.
- Video Final Approval. If your influencer is expected to submit edited videos as part of their contribution, someone has to sign off on those and a final approval and acceptance process has to be put in place.
- Captions. Last but not least, captions should be added to any and all videos where people can be heard talking. If a video is to be submitted as ready-to-publish by the influencer, captions should be embedded! If not, make it part of your final editing process.
Download the Checklist
Let Creatives Be Creative
One word of advice. While this checklist is great when working with micro-influencers and those new to content creation, don’t stifle experienced content creating influencers.
It’s best to gauge how much hand-holding an influencer needs right from the start. If they are fairly new to content creation, use this checklist to keep them (and yourself) on track!
Those who produce video content for a living will pretty much know the process and won’t need as much feedback, hand-holding, and guidance.
Let creatives be creative with video, as long as they are on-brand for your audience!
Best of luck to you and your next campaign(s)!
About the author: Dorien Morin-van Dam is a social media strategist, organic social media specialist, trainer, community manager, and keynote speaker. Dorien is also a Certified Social Media Professional and Agile Marketer.