Rebuilding long-term relationships with influencers helps brands foster trust and loyalty among audiences and culture; plus it enables deeper insight into creators’ audiences and long term professional goals.
Communicating regularly with creators is key to developing strong relationships. Staying top of mind by maintaining regular contact and showing that you care about them as individuals as well as business partners.
1. Make a connection
Influencers receive many messages from individuals like you vying for their attention. Stand out by personalizing your initial contact, such as by using their name and emphasizing why you admire their work. Share a bit about yourself, such as what brand or partnership opportunities you’re interested in. Be direct and honest in the way that you express yourself as influencers can easily detect any insincerity in what you say!
Before approaching your influencer of choice, take time to familiarize yourself with their content and audience. This will enable you to tailor your pitch so it meets their goals; for instance if they frequently promote products for those with food allergies then offer to create a customized social media post targeting this demographic instead.
Find out what events they are attending and join in – it will show that you care about their success and provide an opportunity for you both to develop personal bonds that will keep them interested in working together in the future.
Be sure to go beyond any expectations that are set forth in your contract by sending samples of products that could suit them better, or offering unique discounts on existing ones. Doing this will show your appreciation and encourage them to continue promoting you.
Remember that influencers are professionals just like you and must make their living through creating engaging content for their audiences. Although influencers are passionate about what they do, they still must put forth effort into producing it successfully for their followers. Therefore, setting clear guidelines with them on what type of posts and the frequency you expect them to produce can keep communication open while also preventing issues arising later on.
2. Create content together
As they work more closely with a brand, influencers gain more of an understanding of its offerings, values and target audience, which results in more authentic content that draws in audiences and builds trust with followers. When an influencer believes strongly in something they recommend to followers they’ll advocate more strongly for the brand they love – one way of incorporating authenticity is conducting thorough research to identify suitable influencers; look at engagement metrics, social media posts and follower demographics of prospective influencers to assess whether or not they fit with your brand.
Integrating authenticity requires creating clear guidelines so all influencers can create content in line with your brand’s message. To do this, consider creating a shared document or platform to address frequently asked questions from influencers – this helps save time and avoid potential confusion – something subscription box brand FabFitFun has done by creating an FAQ section which answers such inquiries from ambassadors so they can focus on creative aspects while keeping audiences up-to-date.
When working with multiple influencers on one project, it’s essential to establish clear goals and timelines for each asset produced. This helps alleviate stress for both parties involved while increasing accountability – leading to higher quality content overall. Furthermore, providing a rigorous review and approval process makes it easier to spot errors or discrepancies more quickly.
Do not over-manage the content creation process. Influencers have gained such an audience because they excel at what they do; micromanaging could stifle creativity and result in content that appears scripted and inauthentic; furthermore, this may alienate your influencer by making them feel like a bother.
3. Give them creative freedom
Though you may have an ideal vision of how influencers should promote your products, it’s essential that they have creative freedom so their content feels authentic and aligns with brand values. Playing it safe will only result in audiences seeing influencers as mere corporate puppets; allow them the space they need to craft something unique and exciting!
Establishing relationships with influencers makes reaching out easier when it’s time to reunite and collaborate again. Instead of sending an impersonal email, you’ll be able to write more personal notes that express how much you appreciate their work and demonstrate why you want them on board for the long run.
If one of your influencers is an avid sports fan, why not invite them to an upcoming match that you are attending or send tickets so that they can capture and share this momentous occasion with their followers? Doing this allows them to showcase their personality while building connections with their audience – both are essential parts of successful influencer marketing!
Your influencers will quickly learn your company’s offerings, values and target audience as they work closely with you to develop content that resonates with their followers – leading to increased loyalty from them and your audience alike.
Be mindful that influencers are people too and want to have fun! By developing genuine relationships with influencers, you will be able to tap into their creativity and find innovative ways of working together that go beyond simple campaigns.
Finally, don’t be intimidated to seek feedback from your influencers. Not only will this enable you to refine future campaigns but it’ll show them you value their opinion while welcoming constructive criticism – which will only strengthen the relationship and establish long-term partnerships.
Establishing long-term partnerships with influencers can be a complex undertaking for brands, requiring expertise in finding influencers based on their unique distinct style, negotiating individual long term contracts and monitoring qualitative and quantitative performance metrics. But the results can more than justify your effort by increasing brand recognition among audiences while building trust between businesses and audiences.
4. Ask for feedback
Influencer marketing can be an excellent way to gain product awareness; however, its ROI can be difficult to determine. Therefore, many marketers opt for a transactional approach when working with influencers; delegating influencer management tasks to specialized agencies who will select and negotiate influencers on a campaign basis before evaluating performance with objectively assessed metrics.
Short-term this may work; but to establish long-term relationships with an influencer, more than just a good ROI is required. Adopting the relationship-based approach requires special skills in finding influencers that fit your brand aesthetics, negotiating long-term contracts with each influencer and monitoring new quantitative and qualitative metrics that measure success over time.
At all times, keep lines of communication open with influencers. Even if they disagree with you, they should provide constructive criticism that helps you improve moving forward. And when they provide criticism that’s tough to accept, be sure to thank them sincerely for being honest; show your appreciation of their effort in giving their opinion.
Influencers want to know they’re making an impactful difference for their audiences. By giving feedback on how to make their content more impactful, you’ll help influencers build stronger bonds with those watching and listening to them.
Ask for feedback early and often when starting a new project. Doing this gives you the best chance of capturing opinions when they’re freshest; if you need help formulating questions, writing down specific areas where feedback would be useful can be an effective way to stay focused without asking too much information. Tools such as Lighthouse enable users to set next steps after every 1-on-1 discussion for easy reference; this way ideas and suggestions generated during discussions can be implemented effectively.