How to Build an Organic Influencer Strategy

[Originally published on the Dash Hudson blog.]

Engage real brand fans and increase brand advocacy beyond your wildest dreams.

The influencer strategy you take depends on your goals. Your campaign objectives should inform how you develop your strategy, who you decide to work with, for how long, and the KPIs you use to measure success. If you’re after mass-reach, you might go for a macro-influencer with a gigantic following. Or maybe a few micro-influencers who have more niche and focused followers are a better fit for what you’re trying to achieve. (Want to know what’s up with macro v micro-influencers? Click here.) Then again, maybe there’s an organic influencer you can leverage.

What’s an Organic Influencer?

An organic influencer is someone who already buys and uses your products. They might have 3,000 followers, they might have 500 followers. The point here is less the size of their following, and more that they are authentic fans. Chances are they’re already @mentioning you in posts but you’re missing it because, notifications.

How to Find Organic Influencers

It’s really, really, hard to keep up with your notifications and user-generated content when you’re running social media for a brand that people love talking about. Sometimes users don’t want to tag their pics, so they’ll just mention your brand in the caption. Luckily, Dash Hudson has a nifty way of pulling in all of your @mentions and photo tags into one big lovely dashboard of fandom. Want to know more? Here you go.

How to Choose the Right Content

All the UGC in the world can’t help you if it’s not the right fit or quality for the feed. When Dash Hudson’s visual marketing platform pulls in UGC, it organizes all of it by highest reach so you get the best-performing content right away. Et voila!

If you want to take it a step further, you should take a look at Vision, our visual AI. It predicts the performance of an image before it even goes live. Sounds cool, right? (And yes, the predictions are based on the potential performance on your feed with your audience, not the person who posted it.) It’s like you have your audience right there in the room with you while you’re agonizing over what to post from 15 similar images.

How to Re-purpose with Purpose

Rule #1: Keep it real. Do not — we repeat — do NOT edit your UGC. Re-post it exactly as the user intended it to be seen. Can you imagine getting called out for photoshopping results for a skincare treatment? Not cool.

Drunk Elephant has one of the best UGC strategies out there — they’re real and they’re honest. Quoting the original caption is also a lovely touch, especially if your fans are experiencing real benefits from your products.

This way you effectively let your fans do the promoting for you, and as we’ve said before, word-of-mouth is golden. ✨

If your feed is highly curated and polished, and some UGC isn’t the right aesthetic but you still want to share it, use your stories. The ephemeral BTS feel allows for an on-the-fly approach. Stories is a great place to start experimenting with UGC if you’ve never posted it before.

The Quest for Authenticity

Communicating in an authentic way is one of the biggest challenges brands face in the hyper-connected social world we live in. Consumers’ expectations are high, and brand managers are busy. When you engage with organic brand fans, the whole issue of authenticity disappears because it’s already the real deal.

So there you have it. A simple yet effective way to engage with people who actually care. Now get out there and reap the ROI without the macro influencer price tag.

Header image: @karissasparke

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