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Human remains found Sunday inside a barrel at a national park near Las Vegas are believed to have been a victim who was killed decades ago, authorities said Tuesday.
A commission set up by seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton to increase the representation of Black people in U.K. motorsport has delivered its recommendations to bring about change in the industry.
You’ve likely heard the term “influencer” thrown around a lot the last few years. It generates mental images of YouTube stars promoting energy drinks and Instagram stars raving about weight loss supplements.
This is called influencer marketing, and it can be a very successful strategy if you execute your campaign correctly. Let’s find out if you should try this strategy yourself.
This doesn’t mean you need to be able to afford to pay Michael Jordan to promote your new athletic wear line.
In fact, many of the most successful influencer marketers are not extremely famous.
Take, for example, Murad and Nataly Osmann. There is a good chance you recognize the style of their photos:
One simple photograph of Nataly leading her boyfriend by the hand has morphed into a massive online following — and a branding empire.
According to Adweek, “They’re working with top marketers like Macy’s and Napa Valley Beringer Vineyards to create compelling ads, and they’re launching a platform to match brands with bloggers.”
The #Followmeto project has also morphed into TV and book deals. The couple hosts a 20-minute travel TV show on Channel One Russia that takes viewers behind the scenes of their online photos.”
Sometimes, the best influencers aren’t people at all. Toast, a well know dog, uses her Internet fame to promote a variety of brands, including coffee, bottled water, and even thigh chafing sticks.
Instagram isn’t the only place you can find influencers.
Lance Stewart, a well-known influencer, has more than 50 thousand followers on Facebook alone:
He is also active on Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter.
Finding influencers isn’t necessarily about finding the most famous person.
Instead, it’s about finding a person your audience trusts and leveraging that influence to promote your brand.
Outline the Goals of Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
I’ve discovered that influencer marketing works well for brands that don’t have much of a following.
You’re leveraging someone else’s platform for your own gain.
However, before you create the content, before you find an influencer, and before you do anything else, you need to outline the goals of your influencer campaign.
Why?
It’s simple: Every decision you make is informed by your goal.
The platform you choose, the influencer you partner with, the type of content they create; all of these factors come into play.
Let’s work from an example to make this easier to illustrate.
Say you’re working with a client (let’s call them Client A) in the gaming industry — specifically in the smartphone app gaming industry.
Mobile gaming is a pretty competitive industry. iTunes offers 18 categories of games and hundreds of popular puzzle games.
Company A has been in business for five years and has a solid portfolio of games of medium success, including one highly popular game that was downloaded 25 million times.
They have a new puzzle game coming out, and they want to leverage influencer marketing to get tons of downloads and create buzz around the new launch. Ideally, this buzz would extend to their brand and give their entire game portfolio a good boost.
How can you help them get the most out of influencer marketing?
First, let’s outline the goal.
The goal should have three parts:
find out the influencer’s demographic data
determine what the influencer will help you do
plan how the influencer will help you do it
Example Goal for Company A’s Influencer Marketing Campaign:
There are a plethora of formats to outline your goals. In this example, Company A has written the goals of the campaign in paragraph form:
This campaign will partner with a young, highly connected influencer with access to the tech-savvy millennial group. Ideally, they will be into technology and use an iPhone because downloads from the Apple Store exceed those on Android.
Through this campaign, we will exceed the download numbers of our last game by 45% in the first 30 days.
The campaign will include at least 1 video of 30+ seconds to showcase how the game is played, and two or three other social posts on Instagram and Snapchat where our demographic is most active.
This goal is detailed. It includes specific numbers and platforms. There is a chance that some of these factors will shift.
For example, you might find out that YouTube is a more effective platform for your video game company to use for influencer marketing.
Changing the details of your goal is fine, but the outline should serve as a starting point for all the other decisions.
This template will help you outline your goal:
Influencer marketing campaign goal plan
Who is the influencer?
Name:
Age range:
Popular on what platforms?
Campaign end goal:
Number of posts:
Which platform:
Special considerations:
Now that you have your goal outlined, it’s time to move on to finding your influencer.
How to Find Effective Influencers for Your Brand
Choosing the right influencer is vital to the success of a killer influencer marketing campaign, but it is far from easy. Ryan Schneider, Chief Brand Manager at Insomniac Games, says this:
[A] lot of leg work goes into finding the right influencer…If I were a PR person, and I was trying to find the right reporter at The Wall Street Journal, I could do that … probably within one Google search or two mouse clicks. Targeting the right influencers can be a lot more complex.
According to Tap Influence, there are four main ways to find influencers: searching manually, using databases, tapping networks, or exploring marketplaces.
Manual Searching
This method requires conducting individual searches, scanning web pages for information, and then adding the information to a spreadsheet. It’s extremely time-consuming and not very effective.
Start by creating a spreadsheet in Google Docs or Excel, then create a column for each piece of information you want to pull about each individual influencer.
Column names will likely include:
Name
Industry of influence, including the specific niche (for example, if a gaming influencer’s audience is mostly female, or under the age of 16)
Total followers (combination of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, or the top platforms your audience uses)
Facebook link
Instagram link
Twitter link
Snapchat link
Pros
Cons
Email/contact info
Special notes: Do you already have a relationship with them, or do they regularly post about topics closely related to your brand? Add any other information you want to include here.
Next, search Google and relevant social platforms for keywords, mentions of your brand, and related hashtags.
In a highly competitive industry like mobile gaming, you should go after high-tier influencers so you’ll have the most reach. Compile a list of these people.
The next step is to search on the most popular platform for our target audience. In this case, I head to YouTube.
The most effective strategy is to look at videos with the highest engagement, either from my brand or my competitors’, and then look at who shared or engaged with those posts.
From there, I would be able to find the top influencers.
I am using a fictitious example, so I can’t search for our brand.
Since we are in mobile gaming, I am going to search for Two Dots, a popular puzzle game. Based on a quick search of the brand name, I see a possible influencer:
The top video is old and won’t be a good fit for our gaming site.
The second video is from the actual brand Dots. It’s also not a good fit.
The third, from ZoeTwoDots, might represent a good fit. Her videos showcase strategies for different games, her channel is active, and the channel has more than 200,000 followers. Looks promising!
I would add her to the spreadsheet and keep going.
Keep in mind, all this research garnered me just one possible influencer to target.
Manual research is extremely labor intensive. However, for smaller brands looking for very niche influencers, this is likely the best choice.
Databases
These are tools that will do the site-scraping for you by pulling publicly available data. These can be good places to start, but vetting each influencer can prove time-consuming.
Basically, instead of manually doing the searches, databases do the heavy lifting. They’re less time-intensive than manually searching and are cheaper than other options.
Inpowered has a list of clients it has worked with in the past, including case studies:
For our mobile gaming company, this doesn’t seem to be a good fit. A more traditional brand might find this database useful.
Lean on Your Networks
This method of connecting with influencers sits in between databases and marketplaces. A network has built relationships with influencers, but you have to go through their profiles to reach out.
Networks tend to focus on specific genres, such as Dad bloggers, lifestyle influencers, or food enthusiasts. Examples of popular influencer networks include Activate.
After a little research, I come across a good fit for our mobile gaming company: MatchMade.
They make it super simple to search for exactly the type of influencer I want, including allowing me to sort my options based on reach, location, subscribers, and engagement.
Another benefit of networks is that they often offer more tracking and analytics. Matchmade offers a full dashboard:
There are a lot of pros to choosing a network — you are able to select exactly the type of influencer you want based on many different factors. Tracking is included, making it easy to see if you are reaching your goals.
However, this also tends to be the most expensive option.
Marketplaces
A marketplace offers the best features of a database by pulling in real-time information, but it allows you to avoid middle men. Marketplaces tend to offer less tracking, but they are also more affordable.
Examples of market places include Tribe, HYPR, and Brand Snob. Much like dating sites, marketplaces allow you to look at hundreds of profiles of different influencers.
Here is an example of an influencer profile on Tribe:
I can easily see her reach and an example of her work. This is much easier than sorting through thousands of Google search results.
Choosing the best method for finding an influencer that fits your needs can be complicated. Ultimately, you are looking for a partner, and just like any partnership, you need to take your time and consider all the options.
The final decision is likely going to be based on what resource you want to spend — time or money.
Getting the Most Out of Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
You have outlined your goals, chosen an influencer, and started to build a relationship with them.
Now it is time to create your actual campaign. Here are tips for getting the most out of your killer influencer marketing campaign.
First, be authentic. The reason traditional ads aren’t as effective today is that people crave authentic connections.
Even though you are paying for the influencer to talk about your brand, you must keep authenticity in mind to be effective.
Shannon Fure of Convince and Convert says it best:
If an influencer doesn’t fit a brand’s ethos, the authenticity factor is going to plummet. Choosing the right influencer is the first step toward maintaining authenticity.
Second, choose the platform you use carefully.
Pay attention not only to where your audience is most active but also what type of content performs best on each platform.
Take, for example, this video created by Harry’s Razors:
On Facebook, the video got three thousand views.
On Instagram, Harry’s chose to post a screenshot of the same video:
Even though Instagram supports video, they tend to perform better on Facebook.
According to Murray Newlands, “different platforms are used to reach different audiences and demographics, and the same goes for what product or service you’re marketing: beautiful photos of your product belong on Instagram, while eye-catching videos will perform better on Facebook.”
Take the time to build a real relationshipwith the influencer. This gives you and the influencer a chance to see if you are a good fit and increases authenticity.
Start slowly by following them on social media, sharing their content, commenting on their blogs, and engaging them in relevant conversations whenever possible. Establishing a relationship of mutual trust is the key to successfully engaging your market’s thought leaders as brand advocates.
Empower your influencer through information and access to your brand, but don’t take creative control. Ideally, you’ve chosen an influencer who is already engaged with your brand.
If not, make sure they truly understand your brand’s voice and what you stand for.
Invite them to your offices, offer tickets to your events, and share interesting stories about your brand and the people you help.
But remember, they are popular with your target audience for a reason. To keep the interaction authentic, you need to relinquish creative control.
Influencer Marketing Conclusion
Influencer marketing might seem like just another buzzword born of a generation obsessed with smartphones. However, the practice is nothing new.
Put simply, people trust people more than they trust brands. Influencer marketing allows you to leverage that trust to create goodwill towards your brand.
The steps I outlined above will help you find the best influencer and get the most out of your partnership.
Have you implemented an influencer marketing campaign? What were your results?
With over 660,000 restaurants operating in the U.S. alone, digital food advertisement is an incredibly competitive market.
To stand out, you need to combine humor, design, strategy, and user engagement, all while keeping your audience hungry.
What Makes Food Advertisements Unique?
Without creative marketing campaigns, the food industry could be pretty dull. Luckily, there are so many ways to bring food to life in digital food advertisements.
What makes food advertisements unique is their ability to turn the mundane into excitement.
A simple burger on a plate can become a narrative story about your favorite sports game.
In order to create unbeatable food advertisements, you need to focus on high-quality ingredients.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating a unique food advertisement:
Here are some of our top picks for digital food advertisements.
1. Jif Peanut Butter
Leveraging motion graphics in your digital food advertisement is a great way to catch the eye of your scrolling audience.
In this Jif Peanut Butter ad, a beating heart communicates the excitement and love that the world has come to feel for Jif. Branded in the signature Jif colors, it also delivers clear brand awareness and integrity. This is a big brand marketing lesson in a jar!
No Frills is a Canadian supermarket chain that has made its name in recent years with humorous social media advertising.
No Frills is most known for its meme-worthy content, taking inspiration from the internet’s latest trends and delivering them in dead-pan content across their social channels.
In this No Frills Facebook ad, No Frills takes advantage of the popular “expectation versus reality” meme while also advertising their in-house pancake batter brand.
The result? A resounding audience laugh, hundreds of likes and comments, and a food advertisement win for this growing brand.
4. Clevr
Sometimes, all you need to create a high-quality food advertisement is a bit of color and simple movement.
In this Clevr food advertisement, the brand displays its Matcha Chai Latte and Chai Super Latte drinks.
Simple design, calming music, and pastel colors give the viewer a relaxing feel that evokes tranquility and calm.
Not only is the ad visually appealing, but it also offers diverse advertising usage. Clevr could easily use this food advertisement on a number of channels, from Twitter to Instagram and more.
5. Panera Bread
This Panera Bread Facebook ad leverages the thing we love most about food advertisements: the food!
With an immediate appeal to our most natural human emotion (hunger), this food advertisement sets the stage for our cravings. From there, high-quality, macaroni-and-cheese imagery delights the senses.
It’s so delectable, you can almost taste it.
Another great thing about this food advertisement is that it uses a call-to-action at the end of the ad. In this way, Panera guides its audience directly to its desired end goal of purchasing some of their delicious macaroni.
6. Five Guys
Five Guys is one of those brands that always keeps it real. They do a few things really well, namely burgers, fries, and milkshakes.
With this kind of established brand identity, Five Guys can lean on the quality of their products more often.
In this ad, they are showcasing one of their best-loved products: the burger bun. The ad shows an image of the bun warming up, just waiting to be ordered.
They also use a creative call-to-action at the bottom, urging viewers to find their nearest Five Guys shop. This is a great tactic for brands who have a widespread presence and are looking to make sales in multiple locations.
Using a bit of humor, an appeal to emotion, and a simple yet effective image, this Instagram ad reminds customers that Five Guys knows what they’re good at, and they deliver it every time.
7. Burger King
Legacy fast-food chains have had to get creative in recent years in order to capture the hearts of millennial viewers.
Burger King knows millennials love nostalgia, and what better way to appeal to that emotion than by bringing back their legendary chicken fries.
In this Burger King Twitter ad, the brand relates its chicken fries to some of the most essential human traits. This appeal, although absurd, delivers the right dose of comedy to the ad.
In addition, the use of a custom graphic design is eye-catching and fun. The design ensures that any millennial scrolling down will stop and stare, remembering chicken fries from days past.
This campaign garnered features in HuffPost and Time magazine, alongside bringing 380 tweets per minute into the Burger King ecosystem. This is millennial marketing done right.
8. IHOP
There’s no doubt about it, IHOP is an American classic. When it was time for the brand to celebrate 60 years of successful business, they wanted to do it in style.
This IHOP Twitter ad uses music, design, and graphics to thank their loyal customers for 60 years of continued service.
The creative copy of the post offers comedic relief, stating that the brand has been operating “for 60 pancakin’ years.”
Also, they further entice viewers by hinting at a surprise announcement only available on a certain date. This use of a deadline to encourage conversions is a great way to maintain audience engagement over time.
For 60 pancakin’ years, we’ve been IHOP. Now, we’re flippin’ our name to IHOb. Find out what it could b on 6.11.18. #IHObpic.twitter.com/evSxKV3QmT
This food advertisement immediately piqued the attention of IHOP’s viewers, bringing in more than 43,000 retweets.
What was the big reveal? We’ll let you visit the IHOP Twitter page to find out.
9. Taco Bell
Emojis are part of the modern lexicon. Every day, the online world is full of these fun, little pictures that help us communicate over text.
Although emoji are always evolving, users often complain their favorite images aren’t available in emoji.
Taco Bell decided to flip this idea on its head and in 2015, they began petitioning for a taco emoji to be included in the emoji dictionary.
Not only did Taco Bell create a legendary advertising campaign, but they started a petition to lobby emoji creators, Unicode Consortium, for their cause.
The result? We now have a taco emoji.
This food advertisement campaign was one part passion and two parts humor, resulting in one of the most memorable creative marketing campaigns of the decade.
In this HelloFresh story ad, a human voice is heard listing off the benefits of the meal-delivery service in an honest and human way.
The quality of the video is less than what we would expect from a well-known company like HelloFresh, but it adds to the honest nature of the post.
By using social proof, HelloFresh manages to show its audience that its product is legitimate and trustworthy.
11. Publix
One of the easiest ways to appeal to audience emotion is to connect your product to a well-loved pastime.
Publix knows America loves football. They also know no football game is complete without friends, drinks, and food.
This Publix Facebook Ad ran in the Southern U.S. during football season. It targeted southern users who were known to enjoy football and were ages 21+.
If you were planning your weekend with a tailgate party and you saw this ad, it would immediately remind you to stock up on your favorite beer and snacks at your local Publix. This is emotional targeting at its finest.
12. Wendy’s
Another great paid advertising tactic is to offer a deal or use a coupon strategy.
In this Wendy’s Instagram ad, the brand uses a creative flatlay to promote their 4 for $4 summer deal.
This ad is effective because it creates a story for the viewer. Once you see this image, you can immediately picture yourself sitting poolside with a cheap meal, enjoying your best summertime life.
Wendy’s manages to promote their sale, appeal to emotion, and create a narrative, all with a few pieces of cardstock paper and a chicken burger. That’s impressive!
13. Dunkin’
When creating digital food advertisements, it’s important to leverage every tool available to you.
When you advertise using paid social, there are so many ways to get creative, encourage audience interaction, and show off your products at the same time.
Take this Dunkin’ food advertisement as an example. Dunkin’ is promoting their iconic donut fries.
To build hype around the release, they created an interactive Instagram story using the poll feature. This allowed their audience to vote on what they liked better: donuts or fries.
Not only was this a creative way to boost user engagement, but the brand gathered important data to inform their future campaigns.
14. Dr. Pepper
Beverages and food go hand in hand. There’s nothing like a cold Dr. Pepper alongside your favorite meal.
Dr. Pepper wanted to capitalize on the way their customers pair their drinks with other foods.
In this Diet Dr. Pepper advertisement, the brand uses fun motion graphics and design to show all of the different snack foods and meals that go well with the popular drink.
The use of music in the ad also adds a fun, youthful element to the viewing experience.
The end result? Viewers are both thirsty, hungry, and looking forward to cracking open their next Dr. Pepper.
15. Mochi Foods
Mochi Foods is a gluten-free, Hawaiian food maker that creates pancake mixes, breads, waffles, and more which use rice flour instead of wheat.
In this fun Mochi Foods social media ad, they show viewers what they can create with one pack of Mochi Food mix.
This ad is a great example of showcasing a product in action. Although a bag of Mochi Food mix might seem a bit boring, the product takes on new life once we see how it can be transformed into a delicious stack of fresh pancakes.
This ad can be used on a variety of platforms, which makes it diverse and multifaceted.
After watching it, you’re immediately hungry, which is the sign of an effective food advertisement.
Conclusion
To create successful digital food advertisements you need to come up with unique campaign ideas and maintain a cohesive brand image.
It’s also important to harness your social media marketing tactics across all channels, appeal to your audience’s emotions, leverage storytelling, and showcase your products in action are great ways to create food advertisements that stand out.
Because the food advertising marketing is so saturated, it may be hard to develop a paid ad strategy that actually gets you noticed. If you’re struggling to create or find success with your paid ads, our agency is here to help!
What tactics do you use when creating great food advertisements?
Overtime – Episode #384 (Originally aired 04/15/16) – Bill and his roundtable guests Arianna Huffington, Susan Sarandon, Amy Goodman, Mary Katherine Ham and Rick Tyler answer fan questions from the latest show.
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