Finding the Right Strategy To Power Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Over the past decade, influencer marketing has proven to be one of the highest-performing types of content on — and recently off — social media, driving nearly every brand to pursue an influencer strategy.

Linqia, one of DV’s most recent partners, is a full-service, tech-enabled platform that is well-equipped to handle a variety of campaigns — from influencer selection to creative strategy to scale — for the world’s leading brands. The company was founded in the days of blogging, even before Facebook bought Instagram, which revolutionized the influencer industry. Linqia’s goal was, and continues to be, to create the best-performing content for brands while democratizing advertising so that every influencer can pursue their greatest passion as a full-time job.

We recently sat down with Linqia CEO Nader Alizadeh to chat about the company, DV’s integration with the platform and how they’re helping leading brands power their influencer marketing campaigns.

Can you briefly describe Linqia for those who are not familiar with the company?

Linqia’s tagline — “Calm in the Chaos” — is more fitting now than ever. The influencer industry changes quickly and most brands feel overwhelmed about constructing an influencer strategy, picking the right influencers and partners and measuring performance accurately and effectively. That’s where Linqia steps in.

What are some of the challenges influencer marketers face in today’s complex digital landscape?

I would say there are four key challenges influencer marketers face today:

• Measuring the impact of influencer investments
• Finding the right influencers for your brand
• Managing the complexity of executing scaled influencer marketing campaigns
• Staying up-to-date on the highly dynamic social media landscape as platforms make news every week with new creator features and social trends

How is Linqia poised to combat these challenges?

Our measurement framework enables full-funnel performance tracking, from upper funnel awareness to lower funnel sales, and our AI-powered Resonate platform uses Google Vision AI to ensure the influencers we find match the brand’s target persona and have an affinity to the brand and category.

What factors are considered when determining which social platforms are best suited for influencer marketing campaigns?

Great influencer campaigns stem from existing customer needs and insights, which are identified by observing and understanding the social conversation via social listening. Each social platform has a unique user experience, so once that overarching creative concept is constructed based on the consumer need, the individual platforms are integrated based on how they support the broader strategy.

Styles of content are also a big part of the equation. Reels, TikToks and Shorts all have similarities under the umbrella of short-form video, while Stories, In-Feed posts, and Pins serve very different purposes for users. Strong influencer briefs understand these nuances and focus on content formats that will deliver on the core objectives of the campaign.

As our Linqia data shows, Instagram and TikTok are the most popular influencer channels tapped primarily for short-form video and high-quality static imagery. YouTube is third and leveraged primarily for long-form full-screen content, with Shorts starting to see growth with influencers.

A balanced portfolio of diverse influencer content ultimately delivers the best results for brands. By capturing high-quality static imagery, authentic story testimonials and entertaining short-form videos, a brand can populate a major portion of their content pipeline with creators.

How do you work with customers to improve their influencer marketing campaigns and ultimately deliver the results and KPIs they’re hoping to achieve?

There are three key pillars to most influencer campaigns:

• Working with influential voices who can effectively bring your brand message to their highly engaged communities
• Creating high-quality, performant content that can be used across digital channels (influencer content continues to outperform brand content)
• Maximizing reach and the impact of influencer content in paid media, with performance measured against existing paid social benchmarks

Linqia delivers results against these pillars by first using its Resonate platform to find the right influencers based on their demographic and psychographic profile. We then customize the brief to ensure we produce the right content with proper usage rights, as well as multivariate test content in paid media to ensure we are maximizing reach and effectiveness, while minimizing waste.

Linqia recently partnered with DV to provide customers with access to our suite of media quality solutions. How have our solutions enhanced your customers’ overall effectiveness across social?

Linqia recently partnered with a major CPG brand on an influencer campaign that included both organic content creation and paid media amplification. We integrated DV’s viewability technology into our Resonate platform to measure media impressions quality, only counting quality views by real human beings.

DV’s integration ensures that all of Linqia’s influencer media viewability impressions are in accordance with standards set by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The IAB states that an ad impression is counted as viewable on social platforms when 50 percent of the pixels are on screen for at least one second for static imagery and two seconds for videos.

This viewability data enables Linqia to optimize influencer media placements in real time, maximizing effectiveness and minimizing waste. Linqia partners are assured that their reported paid media impressions are accurate and viewed by real people.

By combining DV viewability data with Linqia’s multivariate testing process, Linqia can further understand what types of content and ad units are capturing the greatest consumer attention in terms of watch/stop and look rates. This helps inform creative direction for future activations, while ensuring the best performance in any given campaign.

What advice would you give to those who aspire to be an influencer?

Despite common misconceptions, being an influencer is an incredibly difficult job that requires a breadth of skills, dedication and entrepreneurship. It’s the most sought-after career for younger generations, and the key advice Linqia would give to those budding influencers is this:

• Make sure you are incredibly passionate about the content category you are going to create for because it will be an integral part of your life.
• Make content like no one is watching. Some posts will have many likes, some will have little to none — just keep creating.
• Understand the data and how brands judge success. Influencer marketing is a combination of art and science — don’t forget the science part.

What’s in store for Linqia in the coming year? Any new features or products that you’re excited about?

We are launching some very exciting AI integrations to optimize how we identify the right influencers for our brand partners, use social trends and content performance data to enhance our influencer briefs, and measure full-funnel results for influencer campaigns.

We already announced new AI features like Ideate, which analyzes the most effective creative elements of content on social platforms to inform future creatives, and Contextual Search, which uses AI to produce the largest list of all relevant influencers for a specific campaign. And that is only the beginning of our AI roadmap.

We will also be making exciting announcements around beauty and pharma influencer networks that will enable brands to work with pre-vetted industry professionals who are not only thought leaders but actual professionals working full-time in the trade. This is just a teaser of some of the things to come.

Contact DV to learn more about how our solutions can help your business.