Product Requirements

An influencer campaign is ideal for tracking the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts with influencers. The campaigns are suited for individual partnerships or more general efforts across specific influencer channels, such as Instagram or YouTube. In either approach, the campaign presents a more tailored message to the visitor based on their interaction with the influencer's content in an effort to convert the visitor into a subscriber, customer, etc.

What is influencer marketing? Influencer marketing employs content creators to improve brand awareness, increase traffic, and drive your brand’s message to your target audience. The selected content creators already market to your ideal audience across different channels, allowing you to expand your reach across your ideal customer profiles.

Why is it effective? Influencer marketing works because it closely emulates the social proof provided by word-of-mouth marketing. Customers trust their peers, friends, and people they admire, such as influencers, more than the companies selling the products and services they buy and use.

Individual vs. General campaigns

Before you begin, you need to decide between the "individual" or the "general" campaign approach. A brief description, along with the pro and cons for each, is listed below:

Individual: This approach requires the creation of a campaign that clearly relates to a specific influencer. This approach leverages the visitor's relationship with the influencer and creates a more personal journey for them as they move from the influencer's content to your site. It also makes it very easy to determine which partnerships drive the most value, as each campaign is reported separately. That said, it requires more upfront work and management as you must create and manage more campaigns than a more general approach.
General: This approach requires creating a campaign related to broader partnerships, such as influencers on a specific platform. This approach benefits from less upfront work and maintenance but lacks the obvious personal connection that an individual campaign offers. Its non-specific shareability also means that all influencers' performance is bucketed together. Any individual performance will be more difficult to determine unless you ask the visitor to provide that information during signup.

Decide on your shareable URL

The campaign shown to visitors is based on the URL they interact with before landing on your site. For individual influencer campaigns, the easiest approach is to combine the desired landing page with the influencer's name, channel, etc. See the example below:

https://wicked-wicks-candle-co.myshopify.com/?janedoe

Meanwhile, the typical format for a general influencer campaign is a combination of the desired landing page and the influencer's platform or format. See the example below:

https://wicked-wicks-candle-co.myshopify.com/?instagraminfluencer

Ultimately, your version of the shareable URL is what you'll use for targeting in your campaign and what your influencer will share with their audience to drive traffic to your site.

Create and launch the campaign

To create the campaign:

Navigate to All Campaigns > Convert and click the New campaign button.
On the Plays dashboard, select the Build your own option, provide an internal name, and then click the Create Campaign button.
In the Create step of the campaign builder, select the desired Form fields and Validations for the campaign. A single email field is recommended.

Next, select the Add a display option. A popup or flyout is recommended. A flyout is especially useful for partnerships with social media influencers as the majority of that traffic arrives on mobile devices, and flyouts are mobile responsive by default.
Use the campaign designer to configure the campaign to your liking and select the Save option at the upper right when you are done with your changes. An "individual" example is shown below:

After saving, a new Design section will be available under the Create step. It's best practice to use a thank-you page after signup action.

If the campaign offers a discount, make sure to select a coupon in the Coupon codes section and include the {{ signup.coupon_code }} merge tag in the thank-you page. To edit the default thank-you page, select the Thank You Page Design card in the Create step.

Target the right audience

To ensure the campaign appears to the correct audience, move to the Target step of the campaign builder and review the following settings:

Set the When to Show setting to the Immediately option and Save.
Set the Who to Show It To setting to Current URL contains and then past the name, channel, grouping, etc., that you included in your shareable URL (e.g., janedoe) into the Value field. Save.
If the campaign has a predetermined expiration date, set the How Long To Show It setting to the desired date. If you make any changes, please select Save.
The Notifications setting allows you to enable or disable real-time notifications for your users. These notifications will alert the user of new campaign signups immediately. If there's no form, then this option will not appear. If you make any changes, please select Save.

Follow-up the campaign

To sync the campaign's signups to another service or send a follow-up message to the customers that submitted the campaign, move to the Follow-up step, and review the following optional options:

Enable and customize the default after signup email to send an email to the individuals that decided to sign up for the campaign.
Select the Send welcome series option to send additional after signup emails.
Select the Sync signups option to sync the signups to a list in a linked account. If you're not using Privy Email, this setting is critical as it ensures the contact information (e.g., Email address) is available in the third-party provider.
Select the Send text message option to send an after signup text message to the individuals that decided to sign up for the campaign.

Note: The text message option requires a Privy Text subscription. Additionally, a customer is only eligible to receive texts if their phone number was collected via a Privy campaign using the phone field, they checked the text opt-in checkbox, and they answered "YES" to the double opt-in message sent to their number.

Launch the campaign

Once the campaign has been created, the target audience selected, and any desired follow-up messages configured, select the Publish button at the upper right of the campaign builder and confirm your decision in the prompt.

The campaign is now active, and your influencer can start sharing the appropriate shareable URL via their content. It will appear to visitors that qualify like this:

What's next?

Consider reaching out to contacts that signup via an influencer campaign with tailored email content using a "By Campaign" custom segment for a newsletter.