Influencer whitelisting is a process where the influencer or the content creator permits the brands to advertise on their social media accounts, allowing brands to optimize paid media behind influencer content. This strategy enables brands to work with influencers to create content aligned with the company’s voice and image. It is a win-win situation for both brands and influencers; businesses can amplify the content to reach a broader customer base while increasing the influencers’ reach and helping them gain new followers.
Compared to traditional influencer marketing, with influencer whitelisting, brands and marketers have greater control over the influencer content and can use it in any way, increasing the brand’s reach and improving the content’s performance. In this blog, let us discuss why influencer whitelisting has become an effective technique for brands and how they leverage it to their benefit.
Benefits for Brands
Brands spend big dollars on creating compelling content, shooting videos, and amplifying that content through all the popular advertising channels without the surety that the campaign will hit the right note and impact the intended audiences. However, influencer content has a much better chance of generating the desired engagement and reach across the target audience with a fraction of the investment and better results.
Dark Posts
Whitelisted posts have a far better reach compared to influencers’ organic reach. With dark posts, brands can reach their target audience effectively without cluttering the social media feed of the influencer they are working with. These ads appear as sponsored posts in front of the target audience and are unavailable to the followers of that particular content creator. Marketers generally run these dark posts on Instagram and Facebook, allowing them to run several variations of the same advertisement to appeal to different audiences.
Content Optimization
Influencer whitelisting allows flexibility for brands to optimize the influencer content for optimum performance through A/B testing. Marketers can track the ad’s success in real-time and take corrective measures if the result is not up to the mark. Since they have the option to tweak the content according to the audience they are targeting, brands can keep on trying various variations of the same content and continue to track which one is working best for them in order to improve the content and maximize return on ad spends. In addition, advertisers can experiment with different calls to action, content types, and content copy to check for their effectiveness and impact on the targeted customer.
Also Read: Top 4 ways to compensate your influencers effectively
Better Targeting
Running advertisements using influencer whitelisting enables brands to reach a highly targeted audience based on your creator’s followers. Leveraging influencer-generated content drastically improves the reach of the content and significantly boosts the performance of the ads delivering better conversions. Also, it enables brands to identify high-matching lookalike audiences based on the influencer’s following, creating a rippling effect.
Boosts ROI
As discussed earlier, repurposing the influencer-generated content for which the brand has already paid creates additional value for the organization as the creative team will not need to spend much time on content creation, and the requirement for videos, images and freelancers will drastically reduce, saving them a lot of time and resources. Brands can use instead boost their ROI by amplifying the influencer content. In a nutshell, influencer content amplification generates higher reach with less investment leading to a better ROI.
Influencer whitelisting has become one of the most critical aspects of influencer marketing which has shown brands how amplification of content adds value to their campaign and results in better ROI. And since there has been some drop in the organic reach of the influencer’s posts across all social media platforms, brands are looking to invest their resources and time on things that are helping them generate significant ROI and are beneficial for them. Although this method has certain challenges and drawbacks, it has proven to be a sound strategy gaining prominence with brand marketers.
