Influencer Whitelisting: How It Benefits Brands and Influencers

Influencer marketing is a popular way for brands or organizations to reach their target audience and build brand awareness. To optimize influencer marketing efforts and boost campaign performance, brands should incorporate whitelisting into their digital marketing strategy.

Influencer Whitelisting is when an influencer permits a brand to run paid ads directly from their social media handle.

Influencer whitelisting allows brands to run in-feed ads that appear as though they are coming from the influencer’s own accounts. Capitalizing on the organic reach of peer-to-peer campaigns and scaling to your exact target audiences. 

Influencers are selected for whitelisting partnerships based on factors such as their relevance to the brand’s industry or niche, their audience demographics, and their engagement rates. Once the influencer allows a brand to whitelist their content, they are solidifying the relationship between the brand and themselves, mutually benefiting both brands and influencers.

Brand Benefits 

There are several benefits that influencer whitelisting can offer brands, including:

1. Creative Optimizations: Generally our campaigns engage 100-300 creators over the course of a year, this amount of content allows us to continually optimize paid media performance with fresh content. These creative optimizations drive real results. 
2. Build Audience Trust: Whitelisting allows you to scale the authentic human content produced by microinfluencers. This is because the whitelisted post is run directly from the creators account, rather than the brand or organization. People trust messages—whether that be political, advocacy, or commercial—from people they know, whitelisting messages from trusted community members increases the impact and trust in the campaign.
3. Improved insight and analytics: Through influencer whitelisting, brands can access and analyze creator-specific performance metrics to gain insights on audience responsiveness to branded content. This allows you to directly attribute creator content to conversations and purchases. 

Creator Benefits 

Whitelisting is also beneficial for influencers. Here are some of the advantages:

1. Additional Work Opportunities: Whitelisting adds the influencer to a brand’s list of trusted content creators, increasing their chances of receiving additional work. 
2. Greater Exposure: Whitelisting also increases an influencer’s exposure and audience reach by pushing the content to new users directly from the creator’s account.
3. Improved Credibility: Whitelisting can improve an influencer’s credibility and reputation by indicating they are a trusted influencer that a brand invests in.

Whitelisting with People First

Over the last four years, People First has sourced over 25,000 creators for brands and organizations, running whitelisted microinfluencer ads for advocacy, political, and commercial campaigns. By whitelisting microinfluencers, People First gives everyday people a platform to elevate their personal narratives on issues that real people care about, bringing benefits to brands, creators, and audience members alike.