Promoting influencer content on social channels is nothing new, but the way you go about that promotion can make all the difference when it comes to driving meaningful results. To enable you to reach the right consumers, at the right time, and in the right format. This blogpost will walk you through popular ad types on Instagram and how we use them to maximize performance when partnering with influencers.

🔥 It will take only a few mins of your time, but trust me in saying it will be worth it 🔥

1. A blueprint for scaling influencer ads on IG

Once you have your basic influencer ad marketing strategy in place, it’s time to think about scaling. There are several approaches to take when attempting to grow influencer campaigns on social media. Here are some ways you can go about scaling:

• Segment your audience based on engagement rate
• Meticulously test new look-a-like and interest audiences
• Change up your ad creative and visuals 👔 👗 👙 👘 💄
• Automatically increase or decrease the ad set budget based on performance

2. Test. Test again.

The key to any successful paid influencer ad campaign is to test meticulously and on a continuous basis. Social media ads are not a “set it and forget it” marketing activity by any means. Influencer Creative and the subsequent ads they're turned into require constant monitoring of performance and ad spend to maximize ROI. A number of different parameters exist for you to test the quality of your ads:

• 👑 Test your audiences: if you make changes to your audience parameters to find which audiences are best, be sure to carefully track the changes, when they were made and the outcomes.
• 🎩 Once you have managed to identify the right audience, continuously test ad creatives against the audience. Keep tweaking creative content of the influencer ads to determine which posts work best from a single metric perspective. If your campaign is meant to drive awareness, look at CPM's, if you're campaign is meant to drive clicks, look at CPC's, if you're campaign is meant to drive sales, look at Cost p/sale or RoAS.
• 📍 Test different ad placements: on Facebook, users can specify where they want their posts to appear. Be sure you take notice of where your ads will be located and test what happens if you switch it up. Facebook has well over 20 different ad placements which require different creative inputs, dimensions, formats and more. If you don't stick to these formats, your ads won't run on the places where you'd ultimately want to have them.

3. Explicit Content Usage Rights and Licenses

As a brand, one of the most critical 💰parts of running influencer ad campaigns is making sure that you have all of the proper permissions to use influencer content in your paid ads. Content usage terms must be crystal clear to both the creator and the brand to eliminate potential conflicts down the road. By ensuring that content usage is fully agreed upon and understood, you increase the likelihood of maintaining positive, long-term relationships with your bloggers, creators, and influencers. Maintaining influencer relationships opens the door for valuable evergreen ad campaigns.

The easiest way to handle content usage, as well as account permissions for Creator Powered Ads, is by using a software solution that has built-in contracting capabilities/features. A platform like The Cirqle provides 1-click account permissions and content usage rights that help brands stay connected and in compliance across all social networks. We’ll be speaking more about this further down this post.

Instagram

Option 1. Whitelisted Ads

Now this one is our (not so) secret weapon if you ask me. On a fundamental level, Instagram’s Whitelisted Ads allow marketers to boost content directly from the influencer’s account effectively leveraging the “Paid Partnership with ….” functionality on the influencers channel.

As such, influencers (creative) appear as authentic as the partnership genuinely is, while allowing us to syndicate a single piece of influencer content across multiple placements in the Facebook and Instagram ecosystem. All this while allowing us to use the right optimisation options for true business outcomes, such as Add to Cart, Subscribe to Newsletters, or Purchases.. This is what we specialise in at The Cirqle. In fact, a large majority of the bottom-funnel results across The Cirqle platform are achieved through influencer whitelisted ads.

That said, this approach is easier said than done. Chasing influencers for access to their accounts and managing breaks in that connection whenever a password is changed, platform update occurs can be a real headache. Without the proprietary technology we developed that automates this process through the Facebook/TikTok/Youtube API, you’d be going haywire. That’s why we created proprietary technology to circumvent commonly faced issues by automating the process of connecting influencers directly to the advertisers across most social networks.

In summary, through The Cirqle platform, brands/advertisers can:

• ⚡️ Access all influencers’ accounts and run whitelisted ads, at scale without any budget limits.
• 🏆 Consistently dedicate paid media spend behind the influencer’s creative, effectively turning it into an ad with unlimited reach and leveraging a full array of business conversions.
• 🌟 This also enables the influencer creative and channel to leverage the full array of objectives (e.g. conversion-based campaigns), ad formats and placements available.

"This is where it can turn into an absolute game-changer. Whitelisted Ads can be turned into conversion-driven campaigns that run parallel to the advertisers business as usual (BAU) strategies.

In fact, running both these strategies in unison typically means that they amplify each other and generates better performance for both efforts."

Option 2: Branded Content Ads

While Whitelisted Ads are an absolute powerhouse, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also champion Branded Content Ads (BCAs), the most predominantly used methods by advertisers today. When an influencer shares an In-feed post or Story (featuring the advertisers content) with their audience, they can provide the advertiser with the right permission(s) to turn that content into an ad. This is powerful as advertisers have the ability to turn more channels beyond their own handle into channels.

The process to setup your ads in the Facebook Business Manager

1. Go to Facebook Ads Manager and create an ad
2. Choose an objective for your Branded Content ad: Reach, Brand Awareness Objective (BAO), Video Views, Engagement, Traffic or Conversion.
3. Continue creating your ad: At the Audience step set your targeting and at the Placements step and select “Instagram Feed”
4. At the Ad level, your Branded Content will appear in the Use Existing Post section. Click into the Use Existing Post section then click on Select Post/Change Post in the Creative section. (Note: During initial setup, the Change Post will appear as Select Post.)
5. In the Select Post window navigate to the Branded Content tab and click. You’ll see the list of the branded content posts that a creator has given you permission to promote. Choose the branded content post that you want to promote on Instagram.
6. You’ll see a preview of your ad. If everything looks good, finish creating your ad and click Confirm.

If you'd love to scale your efforts cross-channel and you'd love to leverage a platform to help you execute, feel free to schedule time with us here.