20+ Influencers Share “What NOT To Do” in Brand-Influencer Collaborations

a quick important announcements first:

This Spring, were driving dozens of influencers to differing product campaigns across 5 specific niches.

It provides direct exposure to hundreds of thousands of their followers and is catered only to brands that fit 1 of the 5 niches/demographics (beauty, food/beverage, wellness, apparel, electronics).

Book a strategy call HERE if this you

Now, let's dive in.

Brand-influencer partnerships are nothing like paid ads because their success is - —in large part—due to the nature of relationships between influencer and brand.

I decided to interview over 20 influencers to learn more about the specifics of what they expect, campaign failures, and lessons that brands could learn from.?

You can watch some of the interviews HERE .

If you want the CliffsNotes, I’ve outlined a few of the recurring lessons from the influencers interviewed below.

1. Reconsider partnering with influencers who already have 3+ active brand deals

According to Araceli Velazquez , also known as @thatgirlceli on Instagram, limiting your collaborations to influencers with 1 to 3 brand deals is the “sweet spot.”?

This is because influencers who have multiple collaborations at the same time are constantly promoting multiple brands and selling constantly.?

This naturally loses an influencer’s audience trust and becomes a lose-lose for both the influencer and the brand.

2. Stop Giving Influencers Scripts

One of the most common misconceptions is that ‘influencers are paid actors.’ And while User Generated Creators (UGC) can absolutely be considered as paid actors, influencers promoting products or services on their own page are not.

If an influencer truly has ‘influence,’ it means that their audience trusts them deeply. Forcing them to abide by a particular script is like asking your friend to use a script when they’re speaking to their family about X product— weird.

It comes across as inauthentic and disingenuous.?

Hannah Chan , a TikTok influencer with nearly 400,000 followers suggests that brands do something different:

“Instead of giving the influencer a script of exactly what to say, give the influencer the goal that you’re trying to use with the ad, and then let the influencer use their creative freedom to meet that goal for you”.

This allows the influencer to speak to their audience naturally, while also meeting the outcome goal of your brand.

3. Stop Doing Mass Outreach Without ANY Personalization

While outreach isn’t necessarily ‘bad’ at all, mass outreach without any segmentation or personalized touch absolutely is.

Here’s why: it’s dead obvious.

It comes across as cold, repetitive, and blending in with the rest of the same emails that an influencer receives on a daily basis.

Trinity Jackson , a fitness influencer both on TikTok and Instagram explains her typical experience:

“Every day I’m getting emails from brands that are sending me the same email with the same subject line and I can’t even engage anymore, and this happens to me on a daily basis”

Jackson further added that even the email copy is nearly identical across differing brands:

“They email me telling me they love my content. I know they don’t love my content because if they knew what I was actually about, they wouldn’t have ever approached the conversation in the way that they did”.

Mass outreach can break a potential relationship before it even starts, so it’s important to truly personalize.

Below is an example of how InfluencerNexus personalizes outreach to influencers:

4. Give an Influencer’s Audience Time To Respond

While influencers have a proven track record of beating traditional advertising time and time again, they need more than one CTA and 1-3 hours for their results to come to their full fruition.

Chase Chewning , the host of Everforwardradio , a podcast with over 2 million downloads has had an interesting experience in this arena.

He partnered with a new brand on a one-year contract, and was given a hard time hours after releasing his first episode:

“No B.S. here, but after releasing the first episode promoting their product, I got an email from this brand maybe 3 hours later, and they wanted to pull out of the contract because they weren’t seeing a flood of leads.”

Chewning further explained:

a)the episode hadn’t yet even been released to every country where the show was aired in the appropriate time zones, and

b) the brand hadn’t given even enough time for 90% of the listeners to hear the episode, since it was released first thing in the morning before listeners had a chance to download the episode.

Brand responses like this happen all of the time, and they ruin very powerful relationships that could have yielded thousands of leads, had they given it enough time.

Don’t be that brand.

Allow the influencer to prove their results within an appropriate timeline agreed upon by both the brand and the influencer.

Wrapping up

Here are the core lessons:

1. Opt for influencers with a moderate number of brand deals to maintain authenticity and audience trust.

2. Allow influencers creative freedom instead of rigid scripts to foster genuine engagement.

3. Personalize outreach efforts to stand out and establish meaningful connections.

4. Give influencer-driven campaigns time to yield results, avoiding premature assessments that can damage relationships.

By heeding these lessons, brands can navigate influencer partnerships more effectively, fostering genuine connections and driving successful campaigns.