Why you should stop doing one-off social collabs
Okay, so you have a little marketing money set aside, and you plan to engage in paid influencer posts. Great, but read this first!
When crafting an influencer strategy, the temptation can be to diversify and spread your budgetary eggs across as many influencer baskets as you can – to reach as wide an audience as possible.
Now, don’t get us wrong: this can work at the beginning of a campaign as an A-B-C test, to help you compare notes and see whose content hit the nail on the head, whose posts performed better, and who had more conversions.
It also works in a situation where ROI, sales conversions, and engagement are not a priority for you. Say, for example, if you are ONLY interested in getting the content and being able to repurpose it on your website, to say, ‘Look how many influencers love our brand!’. This might be a scenario where it’s the sheer volume of influencers you’re interested in, rather than whether their posts are actually working.
But that’s about where the effectiveness of one-off posting ends these days. As a long-term strategy, it’s just not working anymore – and it’s rarely going to be worth your spend. And for most small-to-medium-sized businesses, ROI is EVERYTHING. The quantity-over-quality play is great if you can afford it, but hello – we need to sell things, amirite?
If this is the case, it is often wiser to use your budget to settle on a few influencers that are a really great brand fit and lock them in for a multi-post campaign.
We can hear you from here:
“But why?! Isn’t that going to be more expensive, even though it’s the same audience I’m accessing each time? But they already saw us! So shouldn’t I be trying to reach new, unique audiences and capture new customers that way?”
We’ve broken it down for you.
Five reasons why you should stop doing one-off social collabs
1.THE ALGORITHM
The Instagram algorithm these days makes it far less likely that someone will see it if it only appears once. So if a huge chunk of someone’s audience never even saw your one-off post, you’re not getting your money’s worth.
2. THE BELIEVABILITY FACTOR
One-off posts scream #sponsored – it’s clear the influencer just grabbed a quick check if we never hear them utter that brand’s name again. It’s far more authentic and believable to see someone repeatedly talking about a brand or product or taking you on a journey with that product. While it still might be obvious there is money changing hands, it feels like there’s more of a genuine, long-term relationship between the brand and the influencer, enticing a loyal audience to act.
3. THE RELATIONSHIP
Multi-post campaigns build a better relationship with the influencer, who will be more inclined to invest time and effort into a long-term partnership and go the extra mile for you. One-off posts can tend to get ‘phoned in’.
4. LACK OF CONTENT VARIETY
One-off posts restrict you to one format. So, you tried an IGTV with one influencer, and it didn’t convert the way you hoped, but who’s to say a reel wouldn’t have sent engagement skyrocketing? You won’t know if you exhaust your budget on five other influencers! Multi-post campaigns allow you to try multiple formats with an influencer to get a sense of what their audience responds to and what works for your brand.
5. A WEAKER STORY
A one-off post with an influencer makes it harder to leverage your influencer collab into a PR story or marketing hook. It’s not much of a story that someone posted about you once. But if they take their audience on a four-week journey of their experience with your product or service? Now they’re virtually positioned as a brand advocate – this is much easier to sell in and repurpose into other PR and marketing opportunities.