Getting Creative: 3 Innovative Approaches to Influencer Marketing (with Examples)

The global influencer marketing market size increased by 152% from 2019 to 2022.

With more and more brands leveraging the authority and credibility of mini-celebrities and experts to reinforce their brand’s message, it is essential for growing companies to discover innovative ways to stand out from the competition.

Traditional approaches to influencer marketing are not only more expensive but also becoming less effective as audiences deem them inauthentic.

In this article, we’ll take a look at three innovative approaches to influencer marketing and how you can adopt them to increase your brand awareness.

1. Investing in ASMR content: Method and KFC

Influencer Gibi ASMR has nearly 5 million subscribers on YouTube. ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) content is rapidly growing in popularity as it delivers a calming and soothing experience to viewers.

Leading brands like KFC have begun collaborating with ASMRtists (ASMR content creators) to keep their viewers engaged while relaxing them:

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Similarly, Method, a company that produces cleaning products that are future-friendly and environmentally conscious, collaborated with ASMRtists to showcase how something as “boring” as cleaning can be fun, in an immersive way.

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The brand marketers at Method relied on Popular Pays, an all-in-one influencer marketing solution, to find relevant ASMR content creators in their niche and manage their campaigns to reach the right audience and make an impact.

Popular Pays helped Method save more than 50% of their time by simplifying time-consuming tasks like sourcing niche-relevant creators, creating contracts, and managing payments. Furthermore, tracking the performance of the campaign on a post-by-post basis became easier, which allowed Method to fine-tune their campaign along the way.

2. “Collaborating” with virtual influencers: Lil Miquela

Virtual influencers are digital characters that are slowly gaining popularity among brands for influencer marketing. They are cost-effective, have no physical or geographical limitations and will rarely misinterpret your guidelines. Moreover, one report reveals that virtual influencers have 3x higher engagement rates than real influencers.

Alexander McQueen, a luxury fashion and accessory brand, recently collaborated with virtual influencer Lil Miquela, who has over 2.5 million followers on Instagram.

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A challenge your team might face while collaborating with virtual influencers is creating realistic graphics that spotlight your product or service while retaining the influencer's image.

Midjourney, a text-to-image AI tool, can help you generate realistic images from descriptive prompts. This will also allow you to explore a wide range of creative ideas in a matter of minutes and proceed with the option you think is the best for your brand.

Apart from Midjourney, you can also explore other text-to-image generators like Picsart and DALL-E to determine which tool is the best for creating graphics for your influencer campaign.

3. Push your creative boundaries: Red Bull and GoPro

Sometimes you need to think out of the box to create content that is unexpected for your brand and niche. This approach is quite effective in getting the attention of your target audience and captivating them through your unique content to enhance brand awareness.

Red Bull, the iconic energy drink company, has successfully positioned itself as a lifestyle brand by investing in influencer marketing campaigns that constantly push its creative boundaries.

Recently, Red Bull collaborated with Lukasz Czepiela, a racing pilot and aerobat, to land a plane on the top of a building, a feat that has never been done before.

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Another brand that does extreme lifestyle content well is GoPro, a company that produces action cameras and accessories, by capturing adventurous sports from the athlete’s perspective to show the quality of their products. Recently they partnered with Anthony Walsh, a professional surfer:

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It’s also important for brands to present this type of content in an engaging way to help their viewers enjoy an immersive experience.

VEED, a video editing tool, allows you to easily create and share short and long-form videos of all kinds including trailers, promos, podcasts, etc. The browser-based tool can also generate and translate subtitles which will enable you to make your content accessible to a wider audience.

Summing up

With the increasing competition in the influencer marketing world, it is essential for businesses to adopt innovative approaches such as investing in ASMR content, collaborating with virtual influencers, and pushing creative boundaries to make their brand stand out.

At the same time, it is essential for SMBs to adopt the right tools like Popular Pays to find the right influencers, Midjourney to generate aesthetic graphics and VEED to edit videos that will help them effectively implement these approaches.