In a world where consumers shy away from traditional advertising, sponsored posts feel less in-your-face and give your message the human touch it needs to be heard.
In this on-demand webinar, learn how to maximize the impact of your sponsored content campaigns. Start by identifying your audience through data and research to understand better who you want to reach.
Identify Your Audience
Whether you’re an influencer looking to increase your brand awareness or a business trying to drive conversions, setting goals and selecting metrics to measure the success of your campaign is crucial. These will impact how you choose and collaborate with influencers and help you assess your return on investment at the end of the campaign.
Identifying your audience helps you create sponsored content that will resonate with them. Consider their unique pain points, values, interests, and how they consume content on your target platforms. This information will help you tailor your content messaging and visuals to their needs.
It’s also important to be transparent with your audience about your sponsorship. Ensure you disclose any sponsored content in posts and videos to avoid losing trust and tarnishing your credibility. Additionally, A/B testing your content is a great way to learn what does and doesn’t work for your audience. Try changing one element at a time — for example, headlines or images — and analyzing how each performs on specific metrics to improve your content.
Create a Unique Campaign
When it comes to social media advertising, you must work hard to stand out. After all, people constantly scroll past ads, and 74% think they’re too many.
Sponsored posts, also known as paid content promotions or boosted posts, offer one way for brands to break through this ad fatigue and get noticed on platforms. They look like native content, blending with organic posts on the platform’s feed and appearing as part of the community. However, they must be clearly labeled as sponsored for the audience, which is required by law in some areas. Click here to learn more about how sponsored posts can help.
When crafted effectively, sponsored posts can help you increase visibility and engagement on social channels while maintaining authenticity. They can even drive more specific actions, such as new account sign-ups. The key is to know your audience and then create content that will resonate with them. To do this, you need a creative strategy that leverages the best features of each platform.
Incorporate Influencers
Influencers bring reach and credibility to sponsored content that brands cannot compete with. They also help brands establish a unique style and connect with their audiences personally.
Sponsored posts that feature influencers have a more natural feel than traditional ads. They also make consumers feel the product recommendations come from a friend rather than a brand. This is why 61% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations over a brand’s.
When collaborating with influencers, brands should ensure that they incentivize the content creators to share sponsored posts on their social media channels. Additionally, they should create creative that aligns with the brand’s voice and aesthetic. For example, suppose a fashion company wants an influencer to promote their clothing in a specific outfit. In that case, the influencer should showcase that outfit on their Instagram feed so that viewers know what the post is about.
Measure Your Success
As social media becomes increasingly crowded, marketers must be more strategic with their ads to avoid becoming “just another ad” that people scroll past. Sponsored posts are one way to accomplish this by providing businesses with more control over the message and audience they’re reaching.
Ultimately, the goal of a sponsored content article should be to create stickiness for your brand as an expert source in your space. Research shows that brand recall is 59% higher for folks who read a sponsored content piece than those who view a traditional display ad.
Tracking the performance of your campaign can be as easy as choosing the right metrics to focus on and communicating them clearly to influencers. To find the best metrics to measure, consider your overall business goals and how they align with your content marketing strategy. You can also optimize your campaign by measuring how deep into your article folks get using UTM parameters or Google Tag Manager.
