Over the past decade, Influencer marketing has evolved far beyond PR strategies of sending products to someone with loads of followers and hoping for the best.
Gone are also the days of transactional relationships of paying a creator to post one video featuring your product with a not-so-subtle and manufactured sales pitch.
If you’re still stuck executing like this, it’s time to wake the hell up.
Today’s most effective influencer strategies work like a well-orchestrated campaign that guides potential customers through every stage of their journey, from “who are you?” to “take my money!” – and most importantly, the strategies are not siloed to just organic social.
That’s full-funnel influencer marketing in a nutshell.
But if you’re wondering what that actually looks like in practice, how it differs from old-school influencer campaigns, and why brands are suddenly obsessed with it, you’re in the right place.
Let’s break down what full-funnel really means, and how it’s changing the way smart brands think about influence.
First, let’s look at the current media landscape. In short, it’s insanely fragmented and increasingly niche. People’s attention is scattered across hundreds of different channels, and they have millions of content creators from around the world vying for their attention. What this means for influencer marketing is that brands are no longer competing with each other in the safety of the main social feeds and relying on a handful of big-name creators to mention their product in a singular post. A guaranteed collective shared experience used to be the norm. Now, the playing field is wider, noisier, and far more competitive than ever before.
Once you recognise the reality of today’s digital ecosystem, it seems almost ridiculous to silo influencer campaigns to just organic social. Why limit your reach when creators are already influencing across platforms, formats, and touch-points far beyond a single feed?
So, how do you truly influence across this chaotic, fragmented ocean of media? This is where full-funnel thinking comes into play and influencer campaigns become cohesive ecosystems where creators are strategically amplified across everything from paid, owned, and earned channels, allowing their impact to compound across the full marketing mix.
What does this look like in action?
The most obvious and common initial step is to embed and amplify influencer content within your paid media strategy – whether it’s partnership ads on META, whitelisting on YouTube or Spark Ads on TikTok. This allows you to significantly boost the reach of your campaigns within social environments, whilst leveraging precise audience targeting.
At Charlie Oscar, we’ve been running paid media campaigns through influencers’ own channels or using influencers as hero talent within ad creative for years, and the ROI does not lie – we see these ads perform 30-60% more effectively than BAU ads, and VTR (view through rates) that blow standard benchmarks out of the water.
But applying the above strategy should now only be considered as a “baby step” when it comes to full-funnel influencer marketing. It’s a foundational basic.
When you start thinking bigger about where this content lives across more upper-funnel owned and earned channels, you step into the space where the real pros are playing.
It means integrating influencers across the entire marketing mix – from out-of-home and TV, to experiential and PR.
To put this into context, a gold-standard example of this is CeraVe’s genius campaign with Michael Cera.
It’s a masterclass in how influencer collaborations can evolve beyond traditional boundaries to create a cohesive and powerful marketing ecosystem.
The campaign unfolded in three acts over four weeks, all building momentum toward a show-stopping Super Bowl TV ad:
- Creating a fake news campaign (Social and PR): It all started with recruiting niche influencers (from conspiracy creators to beauty influencers) to create fake posts about “spotting” Michael Cera signing CeraVe bottles in retail stores. This was then strategically followed by “leaked” paparazzi photos that hit the front page of Reddit and the Daily Mail. Ultimately, passive users on social platforms also joined in and created hundreds of earned pieces of content reacting to the conspiracy.
- Creating public conflict (Social and Podcasts): The storyline escalated with Michael Cera sending out bootlegged PR boxes to hundreds of influencers and walking off a podcast interview with influencer Bobbi Althoff, all while rumours continued to spread across social platforms like TikTok, Threads, and Instagram.
- The final Super Bowl reveal (Social, Website, Paid, TV and PR): When the world debated the conspiracy, CeraVe set the record straight during their surprise Super Bowl commercial.
One celebrity ambassador. One seamless story. Told masterfully across the entire media-verse. And by committing to the bit, the project earned over 15 billion in media impressions, leading to a 25% increase in sales.
Sure, you could argue that even if this campaign was siloed to organic social, it still would have had an incredible impact given the nature of celebrity, but by leveraging the entire media mix, every channel worked harder together.
When executing full-funnel strategies even on a small scale, the uplifts we see across our clients are clear when you look at the change in wider channel performance:
- Paid search campaigns show 15%-20% stronger CTR and significantly softened diminishing returns impacts with influencer support.
- Brand searches increase up to 30% with strong influencer reach.
Inspired? You should be.
It’s time to ditch old-school thinking and stop treating influencers as a siloed channel.
Full-funnel is the future, and as media gets even more fragmented, that future is only going to get bigger and bolder.
