September 6, 2022
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways for agencies and studios to speak directly to the audiences they want to reach.
Influencers are more than just intermediaries for brands, though.
They are creative people who have worked extremely hard to build engaged audiences; audiences they communicate with on a daily basis.
As such, they are very unlikely to want to sour that relationship with their fans for a quick payday. Influencers want more than that when entering partnerships with brands.
83% of influencers, for instance, want more creative control when working with brands. It’s actually their number-one priority, according to a whitepaper from The Drum.
Similarly, 54% of influencers say they want to work with brands who respect them, while 57.5% said they became influencers so they could ‘make an impact’ or ‘effect change’.
As the medium has grown, a lot of top influencers are evolving their output, realising that creativity and style of voice is as crucial to their longevity and growth as income is.
That can be something of a worry for some brands and studios, though.
They sometimes worry that allowing the influencer control over aspects of a campaign could dilute the message they want to promote or impact on the quality of the overall creative.
We don’t believe that.
Through working with talented influencers ourselves, we believe delegating creative control to influencers is one of the best things you can do to build strong relationships, and build successful influencer marketing campaigns with highly-visible returns on investment.
Why you should give influencers creative control
One of TAKEOFF’s core services is talent management.
Our global agencies have worked for years to build strong relationships with influencers who have solid connections with their audiences across a wide range of verticals.
That includes Hollywood A-listers, including action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme, who starred as a fighter pilot, training his troops for our Lilith Games WARPATH campaign.
It wasn’t a one-off campaign, either, as the martial arts legend has signed up to become a brand ambassador for WARPATH. Find out how you can do it yourself here.
TAKEOFF has also recently worked with French influencer Nota Bene on live-action campaigns for WARPATH, too.
Nota Bene himself is a wonderful comedian as well as an avid gamer, and is also something of a history buff. TAKEOFF and the client were therefore more than happy for Nota Bene to introduce his thoughts and ideas to the project.
His input was key to reaching out to new audiences and Nota Bene was a pleasure to work with – it was a similar story when working with French YouTube gaming sensation Joueur du Grenier for our Rise of Kingdoms campaign.
Thanks to their input, the campaigns look and felt a lot more organic; in-line with the content they themselves produce on their channels and share with their fans.
As such, their own audiences were extremely receptive to the campaigns and shared them around.
On a relationship-building level, too, a collaborative approach is a fantastic one for campaign longevity.
It allows influencers to create their own content further down the line for their channels and create something unique and abstract from their own experiences on campaigns.
More than anything, it also allows campaigns to cross channels and gives the influencer a broader media profile – something both themselves and their audience will be extremely appreciative of.
Good influencer marketing is a two-way street, and shouldn’t be something a brand or agency looks to ‘take advantage of’ to appeal to certain demographics.
Working with an agency experienced in working with talented influencers the world over can help you to bridge that gap between your brand, popular creators and new audiences.