Partnership Series: Influencer Marketing Success with impact.com & Activate by impact.com

With the deprecation of third-party cookies changing the face of digital marketing, brands are facing a future where audience-centric strategies will be key. Consumers now demand authentic buying experiences that rely on their personal sense of trust. Brands need to create and bolster that trust with their target audiences, instead of making consumers feel like advertising is intrusive. That’s where both traditional affiliate marketing and influencer marketing come into play. They provide the power to authentically speak to customers, while also lending full-funnel marketing support. 

First things first, let’s start with some definitions: 

• Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing model where a brand partners with a third party and compensates them for driving sales or leads. For example, to sell more of your new product, you can partner with a third party to advertise that product on their website banner ads. 
• Influencer marketing is similar to affiliate marketing in that brands partner with third parties — in this case, content creators — to publish content that promotes the brand's product or service to their social media followers. (FYI: Younger audiences, like Gen Z, are increasingly turning to influencers to make their purchasing decisions.)

So, how do you properly capitalize on the advantages that influencer marketing has to offer? Find the right affiliate network partner! 

At Rise, we’re proud to work with impact.com, a leading partnership management platform that offers a fully-integrated suite of products for affiliate marketing approaches. Recently, impact.com acquired Activate, a sophisticated influencer marketing program boasting over 85,000 opted-in creators, who publish collaborative content for brand partners. 

How Activate by impact.com Helps

Successful influencer marketing is much more than finding a creator to tell a story. When it comes to optimizing the way your brand approaches influencer marketing, you need a network partner that will help streamline and aggregate everything from creator discovery to payments and reporting. Who is the creator’s audience? What’s the best way to plan the campaign and its goals? How did the post perform?

Activate by impact.com works to automate and scale answers to all of those questions across the entire influencer marketing lifecycle. For Rise clients that leverage the platform for influencer and affiliate marketing, all of the reporting is available in one dashboard for a more holistic performance view. 

Their suite of capabilities provides marketers with the ability to: 

• Discover and recruit influencers from the largest global opt-in network 
• Deploy surveys to capture valuable information on influencers
• Define your campaign briefs with specific expectations for collaborations
• Provide end-to-end management, including hiring workflows and casting decks, that allow for more efficient communication with creators
• Report on brand awareness metrics to gain a greater understanding of the value of each influencer 
• Grow your influencer network with the Influencer Relationship Management tool (IRM)

Activate by impact.com equips us to execute influencer campaigns effectively, and enables us to identify the measurable impact they have on overall brand goals and bottom line for our clients. 

Make It Even More Social

Rise has proven that influencer marketing creates a strong halo effect onto the performance of other channels. Additional ads can be strategically placed lower in the funnel to leverage that halo effect and push consumers to conversions.

Marketers can also further connect creator content to other paid media channels by boosting their influencer ads across social media accounts. At Rise, we recommend our clients and the creator of the content to test into promoting on both the creator’s profile and the brand’s. With two different audiences, this will extend the reach of the campaign while also providing unique audience insights for future cross-channel targeting. 

Influencing Your Reach with the Power of Influencer Marketing 

Tapping into the power of influencer marketing means your brand will be able to drive growth through authentic connections that build trust with your target audience. Choosing the right partner, like Activate by impact.com, evolves your influencer approach to recruit, plan, deploy, and measure all of the data you need to continuously optimize. It not only establishes long-term success, but also maximizes your budget and keeps your brand cutting edge. 

Want to take your influencer marketing strategies to the next level? Contact us today!