Under the Influence(r)

Solvd Director Toby Kheng has been digging for the truth of a great influencer campaign…

Hot on the heels of #LT22UK in early May, last week I hit up @PRWeek UK @Campaign Magazine UK #Influencer360 — because, you know, one conference a month just isn’t enough conference for my liking!

You might wonder what someone like myself (focused on learning and performance support) was doing at a PR and Marketing conference about influencer campaigns. But of course, when you break it down and think about it, an influencer is tasked with changing the behaviours of others in some way, shape, or form. It’s a pretty good fit with the behavioural change principles that we live by at Solvd Together.

In fact, internal influencer campaigns are a big part of what we do. So… it made a lot of sense for me to toddle off to Brighton and check out the latest best practice in the world of influencer campaigns.

Here are a select few highlights that you can take away and apply right off the bat.

Three truths

Throughout the day, three words kept being repeated: trust, authenticity, and participation. I’m 100% down with these being the guiding truths of any campaign (again, they feel very relevant to the world of learning).

Trust

Max Slack at Both & Apparel shared some excellent insights into running a successful Pride campaign and advised allowing creators autonomy over their work. This is a very valid and worthy piece of advice, and something I’ve come across in creating internal influencer campaigns in the past. Content creators are really good at exactly that — creating content. Their art is understanding what their audience loves, and capitalising on that with relevant and engaging content in that space. You cannot define the content in a mega strict brief. Share your aims and objectives, of course — but be brave enough to give your influencers the space to do their thing; after all, they’re the ones who know and understand your audience best.

Authenticity

Max also mentioned “getting your house in order” i.e., the authenticity and genuineness of the message is very important. This theme of authenticity was also covered in a great panel with Emily Thomas at Klarna and Kia Commodore of Pennies to Pounds podcast fame, with a focus on product influencers (transparency in gifting of products, clarity of affiliate links, making it clear when promotions are paid etc.). Kia mentioned that a lot of the products she (openly and clearly) promotes are also ones she believes in, as her mission is to educate and help empower people when it comes to their finances. In fact, she (and indeed a research paper conducted by Klarna) found this honesty and transparency generated increased rates of engagement due to increased audience feelings of authenticity and trust.

Going forward, that’s absolutely a learning I’m going to grow from — transparency is key not only to generate higher engagement levels, but, far more importantly, because being transparent is the right thing to do.

Participation

Lauren Ashling Hill of Activision Blizzard gave some very valuable insights into how important it is not to only focus on those who engage with content, but indeed those who create the content. A focus on nurturing healthy partnerships with influencers is key to only to a successful campaign today, but in the successful continuation of these very valuable partnerships. “We’re humans, and they’re humans” she rightly points out, “make friends with everybody”. She stressed the value of Community Nights and (voluntary!) influencer participation in such fun and collective events — not just paying content creators for their work but doing more to help them feel like they’re a valued part of a community. This was also stressed by James Day at Dovetail Games, who mentioned the importance of one-to-one engagement between “ambassadors” to help them learn and grow from each other.

Toby’s Final Thoughts

The thing that struck me most — and gave me the warm and fuzzies — was the focus on creating honest and real relationships between people:

Trust: trust your content creators to strut their stuff

Authenticity: honesty and transparency will power-up engagement

Participation: get your community of influencers involved and connected with a degree of pastoral care

Instead of just zeroing in on audience engagement, it’s crucial to remember that our communities of content creators are people. Whose job it is to connect with other people. When you keep people at the heart of what you do — their motivations, their wants, and needs — you’ll end up with authentic, stellar influencer content, driving genuine and positive behavioural change in your target audience.