Keeping the Creativity in Performance Based Marketing for Maximum Impact

One of the biggest complaints marketers have when it comes to all things digital marketing is that it is so hard to make your brand stick out above the noise and get noticed with all the clutter that has overtaken social media and the internet. Does that resonate with you? Because every marketing relationship needs to be strong and every campaign needs to spill over with creativity, performance based marketing programs can’t simply send out emails with unique links and leave it up to influencers to do the rest. A story, a creative angle, a challenge, product immersion, etc should be the focus of a campaign instead of the focus being on simple links and numbers. It’s up to you as the marketer to make sure that your always equipping influencers and marketing partners with the right assets and ideas so that when they write about your new product they have gorgeous visual assets to use and a story about how the product works in their own lives.

Get a Grip on Your Promotional Assets

Promotional assets are things that you need to be equipping your influencers with that make their posts more interesting and thus creates more engagement from their audiences aka your new customers. It’s up to your team and editorial calendar to always think ahead to make sure that you always have new assets to share.

High quality product images
New brand and product updates
Product and brand verbiage
Pre written social posts
Email them what other influencers in the campaign are doing for ideas
Something unique or special for their network like a giveaway or special discount code

Develop a Solid Communication Plan

The reason why affiliate marketing is quickly becoming influencer marketing’s best friend is because these strategies feed off of each other and power each other. This type of marketing is strengthened by ongoing relationships, nurtured marketing partnerships and making them feel like part of the brand. A plan to keep the relationships strong and to communicate with your partners to share good ideas is crucial to keeping your influencers a part of your brand and thus invested in their word of mouth recommendations. A good rule of thumb so you don’t email too much and annoy your influencers is to send something out once a month.

Free coupon or product
Exclusive brand updates
CTA that asks for their ideas and input (remember the whole brand inclusion point I like to make?)
Surveys (to later create interesting studies or white papers)
Check in personalized emails

Creative Story Building Examples

The best way to bump up the amount of creativity in your marketing strategies is to look at examples of brands who are doing a great job with it. From there, you can analyze what you like, what made their example stand out and how you can do something similar for your company. People love to know where their food comes from and McDonalds made a great video tackling this topic and distributed it to their network to share. What sort of videos could you make that your influencers would enjoy sharing? https://youtu.be/zBnqg_KTSIc prAna challenged their influencers to wear the same pants for 7 days to show off how versatile they are. They also positioned the bloggers to compete against eachother to see who got the most traffic to the site and they gave away prizes. So many levels of engagement and creativity in one campaign!