Best Practices For Working With Influencers
Working with influencers can be an exciting opportunity for marketers. It can help to create credibility for your brand and extend reach beyond your existing followers.
Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to start with an influencer strategy, or how to make the most of the content that is being created by the influencers you work with. Below are some of the top tips we have for making the most of your influencer partnerships.
Do a (social) background check!
When selecting influencers to work with, there are several things to take note of:
Aligning with your brand’s values: This is probably the most important item on the list. When considering an influencer, be sure to look into their recent posts and see what they talk about outside of their sponsored content. Check all of their social pages to look for any potential “red flag” material that could get you in hot water for working with them. If they have posted questionable content in the past, you may want to find another creator who is less risky to work with.
Competitors/Exclusivity: One of the reasons we tap into influencers is to gain credibility, and by working with brands, influencers are essentially telling their followers that they have an affinity for your brand/message. Followers of your influencers see their posts on a regular basis, and you don’t want to have a Sponsored Content post right on the heels of your competitor from the same influencer. Ensure that the influencers you select haven’t worked with a direct competitor recently, and work to negotiate a period of exclusivity to ensure that they won’t work with your competitors (depending on the level of the agreement, this could be in the last 2 weeks or up to a year or more).
Checking followers vs. Engagement: While an influencer may have hundreds of thousands of followers, it’s important to vet their engagement numbers to ensure that their followers are actually engaging with their content. We live in a world where the number of followers an influencer has is in question (Fake Famous pointed out how contentious this point is), and doing a quick check to make sure that there is real engagement is crucial to ensure that the partnership has a better chance of being successful and effective.
Brief them the way that you would brief an internal creative team:
We’ve all been guilty of giving a creative team or influencers a watered down explanation of what we’re looking to get out of a partnership with them. While we know that we want to tap into their content creation skills and dedicated followings, we sometimes forget to let them in on the bigger picture strategy – what you are ultimatley trying to achieve with this campaign. Rather than asking for 1-2 videos from an influencer to showcase your product/campaign, provide context around the business challenges or the strategy/insights that brought your campaign to life. Explain the reason that you want to partner with them, and the message you are trying to convey. While it’s important to give context, on the flip side, giving too strict guidelines or prescriptive direction can limit their creativity and result in less exciting content that doesn’t resonate with them, their followers, or your audience. This can also result in several rounds of feedback/revisions, which neither party wants to go through!
Keep It Authentic – for them!
Most brands have set tonal/visual guidelines, and those are great to keep in mind for owned content. However, one of the reasons you’ve tapped into influencers is because they have generated a healthy following that has responded to their tone/style of content. To ensure that your sponsored post doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb in their Instagram grid, ensure that the creators are given flexibility to express your campaign’s message in their own authentic way. They can speak to your product/brand in a way that will resonate with their followers. Be sure to provide flexibility to your influencers to allow them to bring your message to life in a way that is authentic to themselves.
Bonus: Extend The Reach Of Their Posts Even More
While influencers can extend the reach of your campaign to their followers, there is an opportunity to extend the reach of their content even further by whitelisting their account. Whitelisting allows you to promote their posts as paid ads to whichever audiences you would like to target in social channels. You could target your previously set audiences, or even use this as an opportunity to see if your campaign/product resonates with a new audience when leveraging a different look/tone than what you are using in your owned channels.
