TJ Vasquez
Influencer collaborations have become a popular marketing option for brands aiming to reach new audiences. However, building meaningful influencer relationships calls for more than organizing transactional exchanges. A professional relationship requires trust, authenticity, and mutual benefits. This sort of partnership can result in long-term collaborative efforts that reach the brand’s target market and the influencer’s followers.
Understand Your Goals and Identify the Right Influencers
Before reaching out to influencers, it’s important to clearly and thoroughly define your goals. What are you trying to achieve with your influencer partnership? Are you looking to raise brand awareness, increase product sales, or engage with a specific audience segment? Defining these goals will help direct you during your influencer selection process.
Next, identify which influencers align with your brand’s values, mission, and audience. It’s important to look beyond the number of followers they have, as this hardly indicates the individual’s qualities. In some cases, a smaller influencer with a highly engaged community can be more valuable than one with millions of uninvolved followers.
Prioritize the following factors:
- Relevance: Does the influencer’s content align with your brand and message?
- Engagement: How engaged is their audience? Do their followers actively comment, like, and share their posts?
- Authenticity: Does the influencer come across as genuine, or do their posts feel overly promotional, fake, or otherwise unengaging?
- Reach: While not the only factor, reach still matters. Make sure the influencer’s followers align with your target demographic.
Tools like BuzzSumo, Traackr, and Upfluence can help identify influencers who meet your specific criteria.
Do Thorough Research
Once you’ve shortlisted potential influencers, take the time to get to know them. Follow them on social media, subscribe to their newsletters, and engage with their content. This will give you valuable insights into their tone, personality, and values. More importantly, it will help you assess whether they are a good fit for your brand. As mentioned, only classifying influencers by the number of followers they have is not recommended. You’ll want to make sure the individual’s message, behaviors, and overall identity mesh well with what you want your brand to represent.
Engaging with their content early on is also a great way to establish rapport before making a formal pitch. Like, comment, and share their posts to show that you’re genuinely interested in their work.
Personalize Your Outreach
One of the biggest mistakes brands make when reaching out to influencers is sending generic messages. Influencers, especially those in high demand, receive several partnership requests at any given time. If your contact attempt doesn’t stand out, it may very well be ignored.
To make a good impression, personalize your outreach by addressing the influencer by name, referencing specific posts or campaigns they’ve worked on, and explaining why you think they would be a great fit for your brand. Demonstrate that you’ve done your research and you did not simply grab a name out of a hat.
Here’s an example of a basic, yet personalized outreach message:
“Hi [Influencer’s Name], I’ve been following your content for a while, and I love the way you bring authenticity to everything you do, especially your recent collaboration with [Brand Name]. Your dedication to [specific passion, niche, or cause] aligns perfectly with our brand’s mission, and I think we could create something truly impactful together. I’d love to discuss how we can collaborate on [specific campaign or idea]. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!”
Offer Value Beyond Compensation
While financial compensation is important in influencer partnerships, building meaningful influencer relationships call for more than just an exchange of money. Influencers tend to be creative individuals who value mutually beneficial interactions that align with the goals they’ve set for themselves.
Consider ways to add value to the influencer beyond payment, such as:
- Exclusive Experiences: Offer them exclusive access to events, product launches, or behind-the-scenes opportunities.
- Co-Creation: Allow the influencer to have creative freedom and input on how they represent your brand. They know their audience best, and co-creating content can make the partnership more authentic.
- Networking Opportunities: Connect them with other industry leaders, influencers, or brands that can help them grow their personal brand.
By offering unique value, you show that you see the influencer as more than just a marketing tool. You see them as a partner and fellow human being.
Establish Clear Expectations and Open Communication
Once an influencer agrees to collaborate with your brand, it’s necessary to establish clear expectations. This includes going over deliverables, timelines, content guidelines, compensation, and performance metrics. Be clear on how many posts, stories, or videos your team expects and whether the influencer has creative control or if certain messaging needs to be included.
It’s also wise to keep communication open and frequent. This allows for greater flexibility and feedback. Encourage the influencer to share their thoughts and ideas on how the campaign can be more successful. In doing so, you’re creating a better sense of collaboration and making the influencer feel more invested in the success of the project.
Nurture Long-Term Influencer Relationships
One-time influencer campaigns can be very effective, but building long-term partnerships is where the real value lies. Repeated collaborations with the same influencer allow your audience to see consistency in your messaging. This helps build greater trust in both the influencer and your brand.
To nurture long-term influencer relationships:
Stay Connected
After the initial campaign, stay in touch with the influencer. Continue engaging with their content and checking in on how they’re doing. It’s also a good idea to regularly gauge the influencer’s online and offline behaviors (if any information is available).
While you can’t tell the future, you should at least try to stay up to speed on the latest in their lives. This way, should any situations or controversies develop that cast a negative shadow over your brand’s connection to the influencer, you can get ahead of it as early as possible. While influencer PR is not your brand’s responsibility, your own business interactions tend to impact your audience’s impressions.
Offer Ongoing Opportunities
Invite the influencer to be part of future campaigns, events, or product launches. Let them feel like they are a part of your brand’s growth.
Recognize Their Impact
Share results from the campaign with the influencer, so that you can show them how their contribution helped. Recognizing their value makes them more likely to want to continue working with you.
Monitor and Adjust Influencer Relationship Strategies
After the campaign is over, it’s important to analyze its effectiveness. Did it achieve the goals you set? Were there aspects that exceeded expectations or didn’t perform as well as anticipated?
Track metrics such as:
- Engagement: Likes, comments, shares, and overall interaction with the influencer’s content.
- Traffic: How much referral traffic did the influencer generate to your website?
- Conversions: Did the campaign lead to sales or sign-ups?
- Brand Sentiment: Did the influencer’s audience have a positive reaction to the collaboration?
By measuring these performance indicators, you can refine your approach for future collaborations.
Respect Their Personal Brand
Finally, respecting the influencer’s personal brand and creativity is a must. Influencers have spent years cultivating their online presence and building trust with their audience. They know what they’re doing, and many do not respond well to being micromanaged. Their creative process is their own, and pushing them to produce content that doesn’t align with their style can harm the relationship.
Instead, collaborate with them in a way that maintains their authenticity and voice while still achieving your brand’s objectives. A successful partnership is one that benefits both parties and feels organic to the influencer’s audience.
Building meaningful influencer relationships takes time, effort, and a focus on genuine collaboration efforts. By carefully planning and pursuing these endeavors, brands can create lasting connections that drive success. As the influencer marketing landscape continues to evolve, the brands that invest in authentic relationships will likely be the ones that thrive.
