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Here’s how you can empower your influencers to go the distance in driving new customers to your financial institution.

1. Is our marketing funnel airtight?
2. Can we leverage the success of our influencers to amplify results even further?
3. Is any of the qualitative feedback from the influencer’s audience helpful beyond marketing?
4. Are there any other metrics we can provide to our influencer partners that could enhance their success or motivate them further?
5. What kind of payment models are we using?

Influencer marketing offers financial companies an opportunity to reach new audiences – switched-on customers, engaged, loyal, and looking for guidance from respected content creators and thought leaders. In other words, precisely the sort of customers modern businesses need to thrive.

The proof, as ever, is in the data. Financial brands who understand influencer marketing can expect impressive earned media returns, with the industry set to grow to more than $16bn this year. Understandably, those firms already benefitting from targeted influencer campaigns are looking at innovative ways to maximize ROI and scale the success to the next level.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself and your marketing team if you want to amplify your influencer campaign success:

1. Is our marketing funnel airtight?

Before you even start partnering with influencers, you need to ensure your marketing funnel is working -and in the best way. Everyone on the team should have a clear idea of the content and offers that draw people in and channel them towards a specific action. It’s also crucial to examine why and where customers dropped off. Use relevant data to assess the current state of your funnel and if there’s space for improvements.

Evaluate how your firm makes sure customers stay loyal to you and how you’re regularly re-engaging audiences, whether through ongoing and new partnerships with influencers, or other marketing means, such as time-limited offers or special rates.

To ensure your marketing funnel is airtight, consider how your existing channels are helping cultivate relationships (with customers and influencers). Are they offering enough for your target market, or do they crave more?

2. Can the success of influencers be leveraged to amplify results even further?

It’s possible to replicate the success of your influencer partners – and you don’t need to stay bound to the influencer’s chosen (or most successful) platform.

Think content. Content. Content. The internet has a never-ending appetite for content, so one of the best ways to leverage an influencer’s success is to re-use content across your other channels. Try to maintain engagement from social media sites to emails (and even direct marketing). For example, your influencer partner’s YouTube explainer could be cut into Insta-friendly Reels or converted into a Medium blog. Side note: be sure to include white-labeling agreements in contracts with influencer partners, so you have the right to re-use their likeness and that content.

Pepsi’s #SayItWithPepsi campaign offers a great insight into how companies can reiterate and re-use content to maximize reach. First, the soda-maker asked influencers to create authentic Pepsi-focused content across various platforms and mediums. Then the company went further, analyzing and identifying the high-performing content, and shared it with 40 other secondary influencers to increase hits. As a result, the campaign received 46 million impressions and 50,000 engagements -and 26,000 clicks came from content shared by those secondary influencers.

It’s often a great way to get in front of more eyes without expending too many resources or doubling up on work, especially if you’re using lookalike audiences to target customers similar to the influencer’s core market.

3. Is any qualitative feedback from the influencer’s audience helpful beyond marketing?

Feedback is essential: it’s how we develop and grow products and the business. Effectively, it’s actionable data and worth reaping it wherever you can.

For example, online comment sections can be an untapped goldmine of intel from highly engaged customers. They’ll have ideas about the product or the partnership itself; in most cases, they are forthright in presenting those thoughts. Collect them. Not every ounce of feedback will be helpful, but this below-the-line, coal-face research can often shine a light on what’s working and what needs work.

The result can be a more robust product and a more natural partnership with influencers and their fans.

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4. Can we provide other metrics to our influencer partners to enhance their success or motivate them further?

Influencer partnerships work on a give-and-take, quid-pro-quo rationale. Often, during a successful campaign, you’ll uncover excellent insights and data points that can help inform the future direction of an influencer’s content. For example, explore ways to help influencers more accurately calculate their earnings-per-click – both as a motivator (social media is a competition, after all) and to offer transparency, a good basis for any professional relationship.But go beyond complex numbers. Think content strategy.

This is an excellent opportunity to give something back to influencers to strengthen a long-term partnership. By saying, ‘We’ve seen that when you do A, we get 1XX conversions and when you do B, we get 1XXX conversions,’ you’re effectively helping influencers produce stronger content that’s more in tune with your market and their fans, helping boost their standing in the community and increasing the overall value of your influencer partnership.

Content strategies aside, it’s worth exploring ways to help influencers more accurately calculate their earnings-per-click – and not just because transparency is a good basis for any professional relationship.

5. What kind of payment models are we using?

When embarking on an influencer marketing campaign, you’ll find two main payment models – flat fee and cost-per-action.

Flat fee payment is a good model when choosing an up-and-coming influencer. Without many followers or within a niche market, cost-per-action payments wouldn’t earn either party enough to make the partnership worthwhile. With total control over budget, flat fee payments can also prove that influencer marketing is the right choice for your business.

High-performing influencers and experienced companies usually prefer a cost-per-action (CPA) payment model. This type of agreement best suits ongoing, long-term influencer partnerships, where you’ll pay each time a follower converts or clicks a link.

Choosing the right payment model according to the influencers you’re working with, the results they’ll yield, the campaign you’re running, and your budget is critical.

Let’s go the extra mile

The key to making influencer marketing campaigns go the extra mile is to build up long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with respected content creators who intuitively understand how to connect with the audience you’re trying to reach.

Using and sharing data is vital, allowing you, your team, and your influencer partners to continue reiterating and refining the content audiences want to engage with. But it’s worth assessing your current marketing funnel first; this ensures precious customers won’t slip through the net after all the hard work you put into making your influencer partnerships a success.

Looking for better ways to manage your influencer campaigns? Discover how you can grow, scale and manage your influencer and affiliate marketing campaigns to take your customer acquisition to the next level.