Guides + Reports

Welcome to the wonderful world of our deep-diving, stat-slinging, aggressively detailed resource center full of books on influencer marketing. This page has our ebooks, but make sure to also check out our hefty catalog of blog posts. They’re equally as wonderful.

The 2023 Guide to Always-On Influencer Marketing!

For 2023, we thought it would be very cool to offer a full year of campaign strategies for all the big pulse periods and holidays brands typically build their campaigns around. We’re seeing more and more of our brand clients request year-long, always-on influencer marketing pushes. So, it only makes sense that we’d create a playbook of our own, packed with ground-breakin’, career-making strategies that’ll put a smile on the face of any CMO.

How to Hire an Influencer Marketing Agency for Your Brand

Now that you’ve decided to add influencer campaigns to your marketing stack, you need a plan for figuring out which potential agency partner will be the best fit. Well, this guide is loaded with great advice and good questions that will help you pick the influencer agency that will complement your in-house team.

How to Get Buy-In (and Budget) for an Influencer Campaign

Higher-ups still on the fence about influencer marketing? We’ll tell you exactly what to say to get buy-in and budget for your influencer campaign.

Choosing the Right Channels for Your Influencer Campaign

This year, 8 in 10 marketers are planning to run influencer campaigns on Instagram, but your audience isn’t always on Instagram. In fact, Instagrammers are the most likely group of social media users to also be active on other social media platforms – platforms that may be better at introducing your brand, selling your value, and drumming up clicks.

Instagram Reels vs. Tiktok

What value will yet another content platform actually bring to your campaigns? In the case of Instagram Reels, you may be surprised by the kind of reach this platform will get for your videos. Read on to get the goods.

How to Audit Your Influencer Agency

The average influencer campaign returns $5+ for every $1 spent. But 25% of the campaigns that go live DON’T RETURN A DIME. 😮 If your influencer campaigns aren’t delivering on guaranteed metrics, you need this book. Find out the 4 mistakes influencer agencies make that can cause a cascade of inefficiencies in your campaign and end up costing you millions in missed revenue.

Pinterest x Influencer Marketing

85% of pinners go to Pinterest when they’re about to start a new project.  Can you say purchase intent? We’ve been studying this platform and learning all we can. And as a solid to you, we’re actually publishing the internal deck our marketing team used to show us all the Pinterest features your competitors are still sleeping on.

How to Market Your Way Through This Global Crisis

Even the most nimble companies are having to re-evaluate how they market in a time when the whole world seems to be in crisis. This guide will show you, step-by-step how to build influencer marketing campaigns that not only keep you tuned in to the needs of your customers in real-time, but provides you with a blueprint for sharing messages that convert.

How to Set Goals for Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns

The effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaign is directly impacted by the way in which your team (or your influencer marketing agency) structures the campaign to reach specific outcomes. In this guide, we explain the three types of influencer campaigns and which goals you can reach using each campaign type. Then we provide a bird’s eye view of how to structure each type of campaign to get those desired outcomes. #yourewelcome

How to Boost Your SEO with Strategic Influencer Marketing

Influencer campaigns, when managed correctly, fit neatly within the context of your overall digital marketing strategy. And that includes your keyword strategy. You can extend the life of your influencer marketing campaigns far beyond the actual campaign activation period just by being smart about optimizing #sponcon for search. 🚀

Blogger Outreach Checklist

We created a Blogger Outreach Checklist to help streamline the process of finding, 🔎 approaching, and wooing 💕 creative partners for your next influencer campaign. 

An Influencer Strategy That Will Make Your Brand Recession-Proof

The current environment is forcing brands to dismantle their tried-and-true digital marketing strategies. Traditional ad campaigns are being paused indefinitely and brands are finding out that the straightest path to their customers may be through influencers.

How to Reuse Influencer Content

18 minutes in-feed and 3% reach are your best-case scenarios for branded content. Not great, right? Well, The Shelf Strategy Team produced a guide for repurposing content that we use internally. We rely on this sucker to walk us (and to walk our clients) through the what, the why, the how, and the when for getting the most, highest, best, most transcendent use out of your #sponcon. 

REPORT: The State of Influencer Marketing After the Events of 2020

The pandemic brought with it a slew of changes to which brands and marketers spent much of 2020 adapting to those shifts. Now, on the heels of an unprecedented year, we took a look back at the events of 2020 that took influencers from being internet celebrities to being bona fide thought leaders. 

9 Questions to Answer Before Launching

Every company starts off in influencer marketing the same way – with a notepad full of questions and a desire to connect with experts who will be straight shooters about building an effective influencer campaign. We created this short ebook to highlight the 9 commonly asked questions that will help marketing teams build successful influencer marketing campaigns.