Establishing Relationships With Social Media Influencers
As the old adage suggests, oftentimes success isn’t simply about your knowledge base, it’s about your network. While this can seem like an invitation to start reaching out to anyone with a certain amount of followers or notoriety in our respective industries, it most certainly is not. Online advertising methods, whether it's a direct sale of a product, or of your brand, are often not as direct as in-person sales methods.
Do Your Research
It’s extraordinarily important to do the necessary research on any and every influencer that seems appealing in terms of partnering or forging a relationship. Their brand should align with your own, as well as their principles and possibly even demographic associations. It is also important to find out whatever you can about how their customers and viewers are actually engaging with their content. Be creative in every aspect and never be timid regarding exploration. Making sure that you are adding some type of value to your chosen influencer’s brand is just as important as adding value to your customers and viewers. Free giveaway items, trips, promotion codes, etc… are all easy and effective ways to grab and hold the attention that you are seeking from influencers.
Get Their Attention
In order to build relationships with influencers, it’ll be important to make sure that you and your offer stand out against the rest that are vying for that person’s attention. Ask yourself how your offer is different from others, how your website stacks up against your competitors, and setting clear boundaries and expectations when you start working with them. You want to build a strong, transparent, and mutually beneficial relationship with influencers.
Establish Rapport
A good third step and a quality head start in this process is establishing some rapport and trust between you and the influencers and brands with whom they have decided to work. Interacting with them through social media, commenting on their posts and tagging them in posts that you think are relevant is a good step. It’s also a great way to get them to notice you before reaching out to them directly on a business level. Following these short tips can help popularize your site and even draw attention for Instagram advertising campaigns and will certainly give you an amazing leg up, especially if you haven’t been using these simple hints already.
Sharing is Caring
Through all of this, we’ve hinted on making sure that you are on their radar by sharing and caring about what they post. Influencers definitely know that they have value, whether they are macro-influencers or micro-influencers, they know that what they offer to their audience is important to them and that those products and services are going to have an impact on their followers. You can always offer to help support their causes, tag them in your own posts, and share the same hashtags that they use (which, inadvertently, will help you gain more followers of your own).
Goals & KPIs
Once you have partnered with an influencer or two, or more, make sure that you set up goals and KPIs that you both can adhere to. Just because they are promoting your product or service doesn’t mean that you’re going to get the windfall of the century. You’ll want to make sure that you both set attainable goals and mark what KPIs you want to track. Is it sale volume, leads, website traffic? Pick no more than 3 KPIs and have regular interactions with that influencer to review how your campaigns are coming along. Keep your campaigns fresh, too. Figure out what your seasonality is and stick to that so that your campaigns are always highly relevant. One thing that we like to do with our clients when creating campaigns and content calendars is to have fun with national days like National Waffle Day or National Cream Pie Day. It’s a fun way to create inventive campaigns that can have a really positive impact.
In all, when working with influencers, keep these things in mind
- Relevance between their audience and yours
- Relevance between their likes and what they support with your products
- Establishing a strong relationship
- Setting goals & KPIs
- Creating relevant content and campaigns