Influencers are vital for brands on social media. They add authenticity, boost visibility and build strong connections with audiences, fostering brand loyalty within your market.
Working with social media influencers and ambassadors is one of the biggest trends in marketing. Many brands are interested in collaborating with influencers to promote their product or brand but don’t quite understand how to form effective relationships to achieve this.
In this blog we will be covering how to collaborate with influencers to benefit your brand.
Understanding Influencer Collaboration
Typically, a brand will renumerate a social media influencer, this could be a financial incentive or paid in product gifting to promote its goods or services on their personal social media accounts. They may post a review, a video, image or story series depending on what has been agreed.
How do brands connect with influencers?
There are many ways to connect with and get in touch with potential influencers. You may find someone organically on your social media channels who fits in well with your brand, or someone may contact you asking to represent you. In some cases, it may be someone who has used your product or service and is already promoting your brand in a positive light – this is a great way to authentically get an ambassador on board.
The benefits of collaborating with Influencers
Professional as well as personal brands can benefit hugely from influencer collaborations beyond just hoping to increase sales. When you get an influencer on board, some examples of benefits your brand may receive are:
- Improving credibility and trust: collaborations can boost your credibility by piggybacking off the reliability the influencers have already established with their audience. Most people trust the influencers they follow, so will trust your brand if they are being recommended by that influencer.
- Increasing brand visibility: working with influencers gives you immediate access to their followers. Any post your influencers publish will go out to their thousands or millions of followers, getting your brand in front of potential new customers.
- Driving traffic to your own social media pages: collaborations see an increase in traffic to a brand’s own social media pages, as well as websites. Follower numbers and engagement will usually increase as a result.
How to collaborate with an influencer
Starting off your first interaction with an influencer can sound overwhelming, but really it comes down to following a few simple steps and customising the process to be unique to your brand.
- Find the influencers you want to work with
Do your research on each potential influencer. You can find them by searching social media manually or searching targeted hashtags that related to your brand niche.
- Start a conversation and propose a collaboration
Personalise your communication, whether this be via Direct Message or email. Make sure your message is engaging and encourage the influencer to reach out with any questions. Demonstrate that you have taken the time to understand the influencer’s content, audience and highlight why you think the partnership could be mutually beneficial. Here you will want to clearly outline the end goal of your collaboration, what you would expect from the influencer and what they could expect from you in return, whether this be a financial or product-based incentive.
- Agree on terms and conditions
This can often be the hardest bit to manage, you will have to agree on the expectations and responsibilities and whether these are achievable by the influencer or not. Within this conversation, you’ll have to agree on payment and when this would be made, if appropriate.
- Monitor the results
There is no point doing all this leg work if you aren’t going to follow it up with a post collaboration analysis! This ensures that you can work out if the campaign was worth it. You can work this out by watching key performance indicators like engagement, website traffic, sales and new conversations for example.
Can you collaborate with influencers for free?
Yes absolutely! You don’t always have to pay for influencer collaborations, in fact many brands successfully work with influencers by gifting free products or services in exchange for promotion. So long as you are providing something of value to the influencer and that they are comfortable with this arrangement in exchange for promoting your brands, everyone benefits.
The importance of building long-term relationships with influencers
In a lot of instances, a long-term relationship with the same influencer is far more impactful than a one-off campaign with an influencer. Ongoing relationships turn influencers into well-known and recognisable brand faces or names. Nurturing long term relationships by sticking to agreements, indicating an enthusiasm to work together in the future and staying in contact with the influencers is great way to ensure that a solid team is building around your brand.
If all of this sounds a little overwhelming, don’t stress, because here at Coate PR we specialise in streamlining the process of partnering with a potential influencer in order to boost your brand’s visibility and engagement.
We start off by identifying relevant brand ambassadors or influencers for you to work with. We handle the outreach, the contracts and all the negotiating, so that you don’t have to. We coordinate content collaborations, manage the campaign execution, evaluate the performance, and provide insights so that you can see how well the collaboration has worked with your brand. And finally, we always make sure we maintain a great relationship with between the client and our influencers or ambassadors so that we can work with them in the future.
Some examples of influencer partnerships we have facilitated and helped to manage:
Keeping Britain’s Horses Healthy – Equine Flu Awareness Week campaign
- Riding with Rhi
- Miri Hackett
- Anna Robinson
Blenheim Palace International Horse Trials
- Harlow White
- ThisEsme
- Sara Cox
- William Fox-Pitt
- Emily King
- Will Rawlin
- Riding with Rhi
- Alanna Clarke
- Flo Carter
The Game Fair
- Bizza Walters
- Sara Miles
- Hannah Russell
- Mathew Priddy
Petplan Equine
- Niki Baxter
- Anna Robinson
- Lauren Lanik
Find out more about our services here.