Influencer marketing is a powerful way to reach your target audience, boost your brand awareness, and generate leads and sales. But how do you collaborate and co-create with influencers on projects and campaigns that deliver value for both parties? Here are some tips to help you build trust and credibility with influencers and create successful partnerships.
Before you reach out to any influencers, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your project or campaign. What are your key messages, target audience, budget, timeline, and metrics? How do you align your goals with the influencer's niche, audience, values, and style? Having a well-defined strategy will help you find the right influencers and communicate your expectations and requirements.
As you define your goals and objectives be open to be leaving them loosely defined so that you can engage the influencers in setting them with you. They bring a breadth of expertise to the process, especially with regards to their audience and how best to engage them. Same with your timeline, have a framework that you can lock in with the influencer. Some programs will require a longer tail than others depending on what it is and how you are going to activate it. One point to also emphasize that comes up frequently is style. Take time to review influencer presence, style and voice closely and ensure it’s a fit with your brand and your leaders. It’s so important that they are empowered to be themselves.
Once you have your goals and objectives, you need to find the influencers who can help you reach them. You can use various tools and platforms to search for influencers based on keywords, topics, location, reach, engagement, and relevance. You can also look at your own network, social media, and industry events to identify potential partners. When selecting your influencers, look beyond the numbers and focus on the quality of their content, their reputation, their relationship with their audience, and their fit with your brand.
A few great ways to find influencers Includes working with agencies that focus on influencer identification and selection. Also doing simple searches on google for top social media influencers for topic ABC and reviewing the lists that come up. Or searching a hashtag or key word on LinkedIn or another platform and reviewing the most prolific voices in the conversations. As you do your research look at who engages with their content, are they mass tagging people for engagement or truly generating authentic conversations. Are they responding to comments and sparking dialogue. Etc. Also consider your goals and the type of activities you want your influencer to do - more amplification or collaboration - or both.
Before you pitch your project or campaign idea to an influencer, you need to build rapport and trust with them. You can do this by following them on social media, liking, commenting, and sharing their posts, engaging with their stories and live sessions, and mentioning them in your own content. You can also send them a personalized message or email, introducing yourself, complimenting their work, and expressing your interest in collaborating with them. Be genuine, respectful, and transparent, and avoid being spammy or pushy.
Focus on influencer relationships, not transactions. Some tips: - Get to know their content and perspectives - build rapport - Re-share their content and add why you find it interesting - tag them! - Invest in the relationship, not the transaction. It will build trust.
In my experience your approach depends on the type of relationship you’re building. If it’s organic, absolutely nurture the relationship by engaging with their content and contributing, leading to two-way exchange and familiarity before you reach out. If it’s a paid strategy you’re pursuing you’ll go faster direct or via an agency. This doesn’t circumvent the focus on building a relationship however it will be more transactional on the onset and important that you focus on build that relationship along side the program you’re engaging them on.
Once you have established a connection with an influencer, you can propose your project or campaign idea and invite them to co-create with you. You can ask for their input, feedback, and suggestions on the concept, format, style, tone, and distribution of the content. You can also discuss the expectations, deliverables, timeline, budget, and compensation of the partnership. Be flexible, open-minded, and fair, and respect the influencer's creative freedom and expertise.
I agree but recommend that you actually brainstorm the project or campaign idea with the influencer rather than invite them for input and feedback. They may have ideas that will resonate with their audience that you may not think of. They also are quite experienced with timeline ideas as well and can help you be successful.
After you have agreed on the terms and details of the project or campaign, you need to support and promote the influencer and their content. You can provide them with any resources, information, or guidance they need to create the content. You can also share their content on your own channels, tag them, thank them, and encourage your audience to engage with them. You can also monitor the performance of the content, track the metrics, and report the results.
As you support and promote you need to focus on transparency and authenticity. Your audience needs to know that it’s influencer marketing. Typically a hashtag is used across all influencer content to let your community know and the influencer uses it to also let their community know. For rich support engage your influencers with your SMEs and your employees. Not only does this create much more reach and engagement, it helps your SMEs and employees build relationships with your influencers, and expand their communities in meaningful ways while equally empowering the influencers to build relationships across the organization. Plus if you have an employee advocacy program, consider launching an influencer pillar!
The collaboration and co-creation process does not end with the completion of the project or campaign. You need to maintain and nurture your relationship with the influencer and keep in touch with them. You can send them a follow-up message or email, expressing your gratitude, appreciation, and satisfaction. You can also ask for their feedback, testimonials, or referrals. You can also look for opportunities to work with them again in the future or to introduce them to other potential partners.