Creating Content With Influencer Marketing

A Constant Need For Content

You hear it all the time as it's now an unavoidable fact of marketing: content is number one. It's crucial to have a wealth of content for all your digital marketing efforts. You want to be posting often and consistently.

Not only do you need to be posting content regularly, it needs to be good! This of course sounds obvious but specifically, your content needs to be high quality images and speak to current trends of the time and season. How then do you solve the problem of constant content? In this blog post, Hollywood Branded examines how brands can use influencer marketing for a content creation strategy.

Time Is On Your Side If You Plan For It

Having a hard time keeping your need for content? It's tough! You want to be posting often and consistently in order to maintain your following. We know that apps like Instagram have algorithms which prioritize accounts posting consistently and that people need to engage with your content often for it to appear in their feed. Facebook and Twitter have similar rules as well. What does that mean for you? If you're not staying on top of your content with a social strategy, you'll lose visibility on these platforms!

So the first issue this creates for your digital marketing is the fact that you'll need to have a content calendar mapped out weeks in advance if possible. To be fair, you'll also want to leave flexibility in your content so you're able to jump on an overnight trend if something relevant to your brand pops up. Social media is all about trending moments and you want to make sure you're capitalizing on every moment that's relevant to your brand. A best practice is to download a social media holiday calendar that lists out a social media holidays so you can prepare your content around the ones that fit your brand. For instance, if you run a fast casual eatery that sells hotdogs and burgers, you'll definitely want to have content ready for #nationalhotdogday and #nationalcheeseburgerday. From my previous life as a social media manager, I promise you these are both real!

Quality Is Everything

The first hurdle to overcome having a strong content strategy is planning it out in advance. You're probably wondering -what's the second one? Quality! There's no point in curating a calendar of content if it doesn't resonate with your audience. It would be like inviting all your friends over for a party and then providing any snacks - you have to give people something to sink their teeth into.

You want your content to fit perfectly within the medium you've posted to and ideally start a conversation. The odds are that all your competitors have social channels with curated feeds, so you're competing both with them but also with literally everyone else on the app. What this means is you want content that will resonate with your followers. What photo and video content can you create that will stand out and make people engage with it? You want your content catch attention and make people want to comment on it.

The problem is that this can get very time consuming and expensive. If you want high quality photos and videos with strong production quality, how do you give yourself enough time and resources to come up with content that is visually appealing? Of course you'll want to set up time to do photography shoots of your product but you also don't want it to look like all your posts are from the same shoot. This can feel visually redundant and lose attention quickly. 

Making Influencer Marketing Work For You

If you've made it this far in this blog post and any of these issues resonate, you may feel stressed at this point, but fear not! The answer to all of these issues is simple: influencer marketing.

With the right program, you can work with influencers to have tons of content created for you and all of it can be visually appealing. Not only that, you will get the benefit of having content supplied to you by content creator who will all put their own spin on it and ensure that your feed is full of content that is high resolution and artfully crafted.

In fact, if your product is appealing enough that influencers really want to work with you, some brands find success with in-trade gifting campaigns. In this instance, all you have to do is send the product to them and they'll create content for you. Realistically, most influencers will expect to be paid, but it's absolutely worth it. You're not just paying for them to create aesthetically pleasing content but for the overall reach of their following on that platform. $100 might seem steep to pay an influencer with 10,000 followers but here's what you're getting: content created for you and visibility to their entire audience. You can even provide your influencers with discount codes to put in their caption and track to see which influencers bring you the most sales. We recommend always doing this so that you can assess which influencers make the best partners.

Think of influencer content like a billboard: if you see it once, you might remember it. And if you see it five times, you are five times more likely to remember seeing it. If you're a new brand getting your bearings, influencer marketing is the perfect way to address the issue of content creation and brand awareness. 

We recently partnered with a brand for content creation and it made a huge difference in their social presence. Partnering them with 17 influencers that created over 40 pieces of content in total, helped them achieve content that was perfect for their feed and it grew their following in the hundreds.

We've also run influencer marketing campaigns for our friends at PassionRoses, sending deliveries of flower bouquets in exchange for high-quality content for the brand to share across their page. This proved particularly useful for the brand during COVID-19, when they were unable to create their own social content due to the pandemic. Influencer marketing allowed them to maintain a fresh calendar of effective content that kept their branding strong during an extremely difficult time for not just their business but the entire floral industry.

The Next Steps

Want to learn more about the power of influencer marketing and how your brand can seize its power? Check out these other blog posts we've written on influencer marketing!

• Marketing From An Influencer's Perspective
• 7 Ways To Work With Celebrity Influencers
• 5 Examples Of Influencer Marketing Gone Wrong
• Successful Influencer Marketing On A Small Budget
• How Influencers Buy Fake Followers...And Why Brands Care

If you haven't worked with influencers before, it can be tricky determining what you should be paying them and realistically what your budget should be. We've made it easy for you with this influencer marketing calculator! Check it out! It's free!