Influencers don’t all offer equal content creation services. When selecting content creators to partner with, be choosy about who and their quality.
Examine their engagement rate, tone of voice and content to assess if they’re suitable partners for your brand. Avoid forced partnerships which appear unnatural and might compromise your campaign efforts.
1. Don’t Ask for Money
Brands often make the mistake of failing to compensate their influencer partners adequately for their work, which can be disastrous. Influencers depend on money for living expenses just like anyone else – if you fail to offer an influencer compensation for producing content for you or offering sponsorship posts and advertisements without offering compensation you risk losing their partnership altogether.
As well as compensation, when working with influencers you should also explore other means to maximize return on your investment. Repurposing content they create for your campaign might include reposting it to your website or cross-posting to other platforms; alternatively creating new pieces tailored towards different audience segments could also work well.
When communicating with influencers, it’s crucial that your goals and measures of success during and after a campaign can be clearly communicated to ensure they understand exactly what type of content is desired for inclusion within their overall vision.
Before selecting an influencer, take time to research their platform and content produced. Take note of any past sponsored posts to see if your brand would fit well among their audience and request metrics and engagement reports to make sure your campaign will be successful.
Personalizing outreach messages is another small yet significant way of setting yourself apart from competitors.
Influencers often have preferred communication channels listed in their bio or an email address dedicated to brand inquiries. When reaching out, use this channel rather than blasting multiple influencers simultaneously with spam emails or direct messages (DMs).
2. Don’t Ask for Followers
Engaging with influencers requires more than asking about their followers; doing so could appear impersonal and rude. Instead, focus on providing value in return for their posts instead of just looking at their number of followers; keeping up with engagement requires full-time work from influencers who must also manage social media, manage engagement with fans, as well as work on various projects while trying to build their brand.
Reaching out to influencers should always follow their preferences – typically DMs or an email address they dedicate for brand inquiries. Furthermore, make sure your messages are personalized as anything less may look like spam and turn them away completely.
Be sure to outline the goals of your campaign clearly from the outset, in order to set appropriate expectations and ensure you achieve your desired objectives without spending money on ineffective efforts.
Before entering into any partnership with an influencer, make sure that their content and engagement rates meet your standards and that their audience trusts their recommendations and opinions. A forced partnership could appear fake to their followers and diminish your brand’s credibility.
Once you’ve partnered with an influencer, provide them with a brief outlining your expectations for their project. Include all the essential details like deliverables, timing, usage rights and how you will measure success – as well as giving enough creative freedom so they can produce posts which reflect their personal style and expresses who they are as an individual.
3. Don’t Ask for a Review
Influencer marketing can have a powerful effect on how prospective customers perceive your business. When working with influencers, it is crucial to treat it like any other business partnership – this means setting clear goals, communication channels and compensation structures in advance. When seeking reviews via public posts (or emails) such as comments sections or email inboxes – any reviews asked for through these means may become public knowledge quickly and take away from its original purpose while potentially breaching regulatory compliance obligations imposed upon influencers themselves.
Once you have set clear goals, a comprehensive background check of any influencers you intend to work with should also take place. This includes reviewing their interactions, content and voice to ensure it fits within the image of your brand and audience demographics to ensure you’re reaching targeted individuals.
At the outset, it is crucial to set an ideal atmosphere and expectations with your influencers in order to avoid any miscommunication and awkward moments during your campaign. Being courteous by using their first names (which usually works) as well as providing enough time for them to become acquainted with your product can all help.
Make sure that if your goal is driving traffic or conversions, this goal is clear to them at the outset of any influencer-based social campaigns.
4. Don’t Ask for a Giveaway
Before reaching out to influencers for campaign collaborations, it’s essential that you establish what your goals are. For instance, if increasing brand recognition is your aim, success could be measured through new followers or sales made via unique discount codes. Doing this will allow you to narrow down potential influencers while setting clear deliverables that can be discussed during outreach messages.
While tools such as Sprout Social make filtering for specific criteria easier, it is also crucial that you review the content and audience of any influencers you’re interested in working with. This will give you a feel for their creative style and whether or not it would complement your brand well. Influencers tend to partner with brands they can trust with audiences they share; giving some creative freedom can allow better results and more authentic content creation from them.
Influencers will quickly sense if you ask them to promote something outside their area of expertise or interest, so ideally find influencers with an existing interest or niche that aligns with what you are selling. Without care for their cause or products they promote, audiences quickly lose interest and content won’t be successful.
When approaching influencers about collaborations, be mindful that they may already be engaged with multiple campaigns at once. Your outreach message should be short and to-the-point to clearly state what your desired outcome is as well as why working together would benefit both of you. Furthermore, proofread your message for spelling or grammar errors prior to sending.
5. Don’t Ask for a Guest Post
Influencers have built their audiences by producing specific types of content; asking them to dramatically alter this style may come across as disingenuous and damage your campaign’s credibility. Allow influencers creative freedom so they can make your brand seem like an effortless fit for their style of creation.
An effective way to measure how authentic an influencer is is by looking at their past work with other brands. If an influencer has only promoted a few different products here and there, this may not pose too many problems; but if they consistently endorse competing brands then this might indicate that their commitment to their audience may not match up.
As well as considering authenticity, it’s also essential to assess an influencer’s aesthetic and see if it fits well with your brand. For instance, if your company utilizes hyper-saturated colors in its designs, it would make sense to find someone whose aesthetic echoes this one.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when working with influencers is bombarding them with messages on social media. For best results, reach out via private message or email instead of the comments section of an Instagram post; most influencers list how they prefer being reached out before approaching one directly.
Before embarking on any relationship with an influencer, it’s essential that clear campaign goals and timelines are established. Otherwise, your project could quickly come to an end by asking an influencer to produce large volumes of content within an unreasonably short amount of time – the best way to avoid this outcome is by clearly outlining all parameters associated with your partnership and working backwards from there.