From Advertorial to Authentic: Create Branded Content That Feels Organic

Here’s the scenario: After a long and careful selection process, you find an influencer whose style you love and they love your brand.  Your brand firmly understands the importance of influencer marketing and you believe you’ve found authentic influencers who can tell your brand story. Their stats look great on paper and everyone is excited to partner…but then the content falls flat.

So what went wrong? 

If you’re like many brands who are passionate about their products and services, required messaging might be to blame. Typically, this setback is a combination of too many messaging points and the influencer using those bullets verbatim instead of using their own words. And when this happens, you get the dreaded advertorial post that can be spotted a mile away.

It’s All About Authenticity in Influencer Marketing

The word “authentic” gets thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean? When looking at your campaign, there’s two main parts: the influencers themselves and the messaging. When you put these two things together, you have an influencer who looks and sounds natural talking about your brand. And that’s what’s going to get followers to pay attention!

In order to achieve this harmony, let’s first look at authentic influencers. The idea here is that your brand is so well aligned with the type of products or services they already use, that your sponsored content feels organic. In other words, even if you weren’t paying them, you could see them posting about your brand anyway.

Finding Authentic Influencers To Help Market Your Brand

There are many tools out there to help you find influencers, like SproutSocial or IZEA, but what matters most is knowing what to look for:

• Authenticity Score – This metric will let you know what percentage of followers are real vs. bots or fake accounts. Anything over 70% is acceptable, with over 80% preferred.
• Engagement Rate – This number represents how many people like, comment, share, or save a post, signaling how influential an influencer actually is. And when content feels authentic, this number goes up! For Instagram, look for 1.5% or higher and for TikTok, look for 4% or higher.
• Organic vs Sponsored Content – Make sure that at least 50% of an influencer’s content is organic. Any more than that means you’re competing too much against other paid content and it’s unlikely the influencer is a true brand fan of everything they’re promoting!
• Competitor Posts – Look back 3-6 months to see if the influencer has posted about a competitor, either in a paid or organic capacity. If someone is a vocal advocate for a competitor, then it might feel inauthentic to post about your product or service.
• Brand Alignment – This is more of an art than a science, but scroll through an influencer’s feed and look to see how on-brand they are, both visually and from a brand voice perspective. 

How to Keep Your Messaging Authentic

Now that you know how to find authentic influencers, let’s delve into how to create authentic messaging. Influencers should be speaking in their own voice, translating corporate bullets into conversational statements. It should feel like they’re talking to a friend and not presenting at a conference!

To set yourself up for success, it’s important to look at not just what influencers are saying, but also how they’re saying it.

Main Message Points: The “What”

With an awareness or consideration objective at stake, brands are often anxious to have influences spell out every last detail of a product or promotion. But this is the crux of what makes content advertorial, if not boring. 

Instead, ask yourself, “what messaging do we need to pique viewers’ interest?” With influencers, you really don’t need to do more than that. Ultimately, consumers will need to go elsewhere to make a purchase, so that’s where additional details and answers to their questions should live. 

If you can generate excitement (awareness) or drive them to point of purchase (consideration), then you’ve done your job, and a few short and sweet main messaging points to spark intrigue is really all you need to do to accomplish this.

Main Message Points: The “How”

Now that we’ve dialed back the messaging points, it’s important to find the right delivery so that it resonates with an influencer’s followers. While influencers know their audience better than anyone, sometimes they are eager to please the brand and will thus incorporate all the messaging exactly as it appears in the brief, abandoning their typical style and approach. 

And when this happens, viewers know right away that it’s sponsored content and they keep scrolling. To combat this, we’ll now explore what to look for and how to correct things if they are moving in the wrong direction.

Identifying Authenticity: Concept Stage

With the What and How in mind, take a critical eye to the concept stage to get in front of any potential challenges. Things to look for:

• Talking Head – Is the whole concept just the influencer talking to the camera? If this is not their typical style, then this is a red flag!
• Verbatim Phrases – If they’ve shared a script or soundbites with you and you see phrases exactly as they appear in the brief, encourage them to rewrite those in their own voice.
• Storytelling – Is the whole concept just main message points or is there another storyline or hook that pulls it all together? If it’s the former, help them find a way to make your brand weave into another story angle that followers are used to seeing.

How To Fix It!

If you feel your influencer is going down the ad campaign path, take a few minutes to go through their feed. Take note of styles or themes that work well and think about how one of those could apply to your piece of content in a natural and authentic way.

Next, pitch it to them! Creators are typically thrilled when you take this step to understand their style and walk them off the brand-speak ledge. It might even inspire them with additional creative ideas to make your content stand out.

Here are some examples of popular approaches often seen in organic content that can also be applied to sponsored content to grab your audience’s attention:

• GRWM – This approach doesn’t have to be just about getting ready to go out. It could be getting ready to make a sandwich. Getting ready to go back to school shopping. Getting ready to surprise a friend. There are many ways to slice and dice this popular theme in a way that feels natural to a variety of brands.
• Skits – These are becoming more and more popular as a tool to have a dialogue around a product or service in a scroll-stopping sort of way. Whether it’s comical or not, the characters draw you in and can have a conversation that brings features and benefits to life.
• Transitions or Editing – From “movie magic” finger snaps to pointing at words on a floating box, clever editing techniques are a great way to make content pop. The visual is what keeps viewers to the end, and transitions and editing are a great way to continue the excitement throughout the full post.

Identifying Authenticity: Content Development

Once you feel confident about the concept, the creator has the green light to produce content. While the concept stage should set a strong foundation, the content review is where you can really see how the messaging comes across and if your authenticity goals are being met.

Here’s a few questions to ask yourself:

• Tone – When the influencer is sharing messaging points, is it in the same tone and cadence as the rest of their voiceover? Or does their voice tense up or sound robotic? Ensure when they’re talking about your brand, that it’s the exact same style and flow as the rest of their narrative to achieve optimal authenticity.
• Pace – Do the messaging points slow down the pace of the video or disrupt the flow? If you find yourself getting bored or anxious to get through the talking points, then it’s time to pare down the messaging! 
• Necessity – Are all spoken messaging points necessary or with the text overlay and caption, are there some redundancies? Saying the same thing multiple times in different places only reinforces this is an ad, so remove any duplicative mentions to ensure the authenticity stays intact.

There are many factors that contribute to a piece of content feeling authentic and earning those views and engagements your brands deserves. The important thing to keep in mind is that achieving authentic content doesn’t rest solely on the brand or the influencer; both parties need a voice and to be accountable. Through ongoing conversation and the guidance of a leading influencer marketing agency like Socialfly, you can ensure the proper checks and balances are in place to build and amplify authentic content that gets results.

Written by: Netanya Trimboli, Director of Influencer Marketing