From our inception as an agency we’ve prided ourselves on our ability to create solutions that set the standard in the influencer marketing industry. One of those solutions is partnering brands with micro influencers for content creation. It’s easy to think that influencer marketing can only be done one way, pay for posts, but there are many ways that brands and influencers work together.

Many marketers who have traditionally used Influencers just to amplify or socialize initiatives turned to content creators during the Covid-19 pandemic as production solutions. Brands recognized that not only do influencers have sway over their audiences but they are uniquely skilled at independently conceiving, shooting and editing photo and video. 

While this format definitely saw an increase over the past few years in wake of the pandemic, this has always been an avenue that The Social Standard educates and guides our clients in. Today we’ll dive into why this is a successful model, its application across industries, and examples of execution with our clients.

Why micro influencers?

As the creator economy grows and more people see the viability of creating full time, we’re seeing an influx in the amount of talent that is available to us. Micro influencers are categorized as having 50,000 or less followers and are known for having a particular area of interest and very high engagement rates.

While micro influencers are the topic of conversation these days and brands are building full-scale influencer marketing campaigns around them, there are other ways that brands can utilize the unique skill set these creators have, content creation. 

Whether a brand wants to improve their owned social media channels, spice up their website images, or use content for paid media, working with micro influencers to create this content ensures that they are receiving high quality content and seasoned talent to execute. Over the years we have worked with multiple clients to source micro influencers to create content at scale, below we will detail a few of our favorites!

Some of our work

Hinge

As one of our long-time clients, Hinge has been a partnership where we have tested many strategies with a large amount of talent to find what worked best. From testing what piece of merch the creator wore, how to place the products, what types of shots worked best, and how best to instruct and inform the talent on what the brand wanted. 

Over time we found the strategy that worked the best and it became a turn-key process for us. Once we found the strategy that worked we built out the program working with 250 creators over 12 months to generate over 750 pieces of content. One of the most major pieces of this partnership was the quantity of content that was being produced for the brand that was then repurposed on social media. We found that this content was WAY out performing any of the brands internal content and thus solidified influencers as an invaluable source of content. Hinge’s willingness to test and desire to be an early adopter of white listing micro influencer’s content set this campaign on fire.

Adobe

Adobe is known for their suite of many products and services. As one of our long-time clients we’ve been lucky enough to work with them on campaigns for a few of those products. To advertise for Adobe Premiere Pro & Premier Rush (the brands video editing platforms) we enlisted seven micro creators to produce their own, respective content. Each creator produced between four to seven, 5-10 second, segments that were worked into the 60 second showpiece that ran across web and social. The remainder of the content that the creators produced was also leveraged for shorter-form cut-downs such as  gif’s and stills, which were also licensed for Adobe’s web portals. 

The theme of this campaign was a narrative around content creation and it’s important to note that creators are a huge part of Adobe’s consumer base, so who better to create content about their products than content creators themselves. Leveraging creators to custom create “UGC” enables content that is as customizable and “polished,” as most commercial production, but still feels authentic to how/where people are consuming it.

Ford

One of our favorite content creation projects to date was with Ford Canada. The brand came to us wanting to spice up their social media channels and inject some awesome content into their feeds. To execute this we partnered them with 4 instagram photographers. Each photographer scouted locations, hired models, staged, produced, and shot all of the content themselves, effectively acting as an entire and full scale production team. 

Each of the photographers shot in a different location across North America with each place representing a separate season. This then allowed for the brand to roll out the content on their social media channels throughout the entire year ensuring that it matched each season.

Why this works

User-generated content (UGC) is not a new concept by any means, but as the pandemic has forced more people online than ever before brands are starting to see that the authenticity shown in the influencer-produced content yields high engagement. Until recently most UGC has been produced for licensing purposes, and sold on libraries, which makes the content hard to customize on a brand-to-brand basis. 

Leveraging micro influencers to custom produce content solves a lot of problems. As native, digital entertainers, influencers know how to draw on the same authenticity that makes UGC so engaging. However more and more Creators can also customize content for “polish,” equal to most commercial production, and yet still seems native to where consumers are likely to view that content: social platforms.

The terms “influencer” and “creator” are used interchangeably these days, and for good reason. Great creators are aware that their influence over their audience is a distinguishing factor over traditional production. In turn creators will often promote their content on their accounts and channels for a fraction of what they might typically charge for a standard campaign, (something we’ve seen in practice, at The Social Standard). Combined with saved shooting costs, that promotion means twofold ROI, between production and awareness.

Let us help

We’ve been at this for a while and have perfected the process of working with micro influencers for content creation. If this is something that you are interested in testing reach out to us at partner@sostandard.com