Over the past year we've seen more and more brands become interested in executing regional influencer marketing campaigns. Both national brands who want to just focus on a specific region or local or regional brands who want to focus on their area want in on the action. Is this doable? Yes - but you cannot simply grab an influencer who lives in your area and expect it to drive exceptional results. Let's dive into why this doesn't work.
It all starts with looking at the where the influencers audience is. You're not trying to influence the influencer, you're trying to influence the influencer's audience. We're able to look at the audience composition of our influencers and see what percentage of people live in certain areas. To help set your expectations, understand that you'll most likely never see even a 50% audience match of followers living in the same region as the influencer. It's going to be more like five percent or three percent or maybe ten percent and here's why. New York City is about six percent of the U.S. population. Just because your influencer lives in NYC, doesn't mean all of the people who live there follow them which is why you can't just look at the influencers location and assume the campaign is going to reach that same area.
That said, you should still hire a local influencer (with a high local audience composition) because their job is going to be to create locally relevant content. Their location gives you a huge advantage and opportunity to create content that will resonate with people in that region. For example, if you're in New York and have images on brownstone steps, people can relate. If you're in Dallas and have backyard grilling, people begin to actually feel like the content is targeted to them.
The next step in this strategy is where you'll see the most success. Once content is live, you'll need to identify which pieces of content are resonating with the audience best and begin boosting that content to your target region. Is boosting like this to a region harder? At times, yes, but you're risking maybe 95% waste if you just let the content go across the country when you're only interested in part of the country.
We've seen really good results with this strategy with multiple clients, including sales improvements in the regions where we're boosting against regions where the client did everything else the same but didn't include influencers. So it proves that there's a big opportunity for national brands to test what happens in a region versus the rest of the country.
Now your cost per-, your cost-per-impression, your cost-per-engagement, is likely to go up in this scenario. Anytime you narrow a target audience in any kind of marketing, the cost per- goes up but you're reaching people much more likely and even able to buy in the region you're targeting. So from and ROI standpoint, it is definitely worth it.
Those are some of the considerations to take into account when you're developing regional influencer marketing strategy. If you're looking for some inspiration, take a look at the some of our previous campaigns with Sabra, Tyson, and Till Vodka where we implemented this type of strategy. And we're always happy to set up a call to talk through a solution for your brand.