Tips for Getting Influencers to Collaborate with Your Brand

Up-and-coming brands use these tips to successfully collaborate with influencers. Learn how you can do too with these Tips for Getting Influencers to Collaborate with Your Brand.

As a business owner, you have to get cracking to gain traction and visibility. However, this is easier said than done. That’s why many of your competitors have chosen to work with brand influencers to create content that resonates well with your target market.

After all, setting your brand apart in today’s digital environment will leave you at your wit’s end.

However, simply working with influencers won’t guarantee success for your business. As with anything you try to do online, you’ll need to have a solid brand strategy for it.

In this article, you’ll learn how to strategically network with industry influencers so that you can maximize this incredibly popular social media marketing trend.

Table of Contents

How do You Find an Influencer?

The process of choosing the right influencer begins as you define your brand’s goals and objectives to align it with the influencer you’re looking for. Then, conduct research on industry influencers by following them on their main social media platforms.

In addition to following brand influencers on their home social media platforms, the following research strategies can help you find the best influencers to work with:

1. Use Influencer Research Tools

Influencer research tools identify the different content authors with a high level of authority in their specific industry. From vloggers and podcast creators to talented artists, these tools give you insight that’s way beyond the vanity metrics to discover the true influential leaders.

Some tools you should consider using are:

BuzzSumo – BuzzSumo is a research tool that not only allows you to find top-performing influencers on their Twitter pages but also discovers popular content made by your competitors. This means you can create the best possible content for your brand with an influencer to help you out.
Awario – This is a social media and web monitoring tool that allows you to know which influencers mention your brand and niche. With these results, you’ll know which influencers you can approach to help you further your brand awareness.
BuzzStream – This is a browser extension that allows you to discover and message blog/video influencers. Additionally, BuzzStream also tracks your contact efforts to see how effective your conversations are with influencers. This means you get to see how well you are communicating with potential marketing partners.
Hunter – This search tool allows you to discover the professional email address of your ideal influencer. By using this tool, you’ll know how to message your ideal influencer easily, increasing your chances of contacting them for a collaboration.
Followerwonk – Followerwonk is a free research tool that allows you to connect with the best possible Twitter influencers. With this tool, you’ll easily discover the right people on Twitter that will work well with your brand’s goals.

2. Find Out Who Your Audiences are Following Online

Working with your audience’s favourite influencers is another way for you to give them value. While researching, keep in mind that these influencers must match your brand’s interests and values.

3. Take a Look at Your Competitors’ Influencers

There’s nothing wrong with checking out the influencers who are promoting your competitors’ brands. However, this doesn’t mean you should run off with their brand influencers, but instead, try to find someone similar to these influencers.

4. Conduct Social Listening

Social listening is the process where you use words and phrases to see what people are talking about on social media. Once you undergo this process, try to identify the pain points of your audiences and find who are the social media influencers they look to for help and advice.

There are a number of ways you can conduct a social listening strategy but remember that this is a customer-centric approach that prioritizes what your audience says to make a great impact on how you do your campaigns.

Getting Their Attention

Once your eyes are set on the ideal industry influencers, it is time to draw their attention to your brand.

To do this, you should use the following actionable tips:

1. Actively Engage With Your Target Influencers

Like any strong relationship, long-lasting connections with your influencers are done through consistent engagement.

Some engagement practices you can do include:

Commenting on their posts
Congratulating them on their personal achievements
Featuring their content on your own social platforms.

With the internet being an emotionally volatile place, it’s nice for the influencers to know that they’re seen as people too, not just a business opportunity. This is even more powerful and important for them especially since you’re a brand.

2. Invite Them to Collaborate With Your Brand

Getting the attention of your target social media influencers is a bit tricky, isn’t it? With so much on their plate, noticing your offer for a partnership will be challenging.

However, if you choose to contact them directly, whether through direct messaging or their business contact info, like email or phone numbers, you better the odds for them to notice you. The process will be challenging, but it will be worth it.

3. Ask For the Influencer’s Rate

As you have a meeting with your favourite influencer, be sure to ask them about their rates. This signals that you are a brand that means business since you have an idea of their cost per content posted and brand mentions.

Asking an influencer’s rate allows you to know if this partnership is sustainable for your business. The point is to do marketing without breaking the bank.

Do’s and Don’ts of Working With Digital Influencers

Once you’ve gotten the attention of influencers, here are a few things you need to know while you’re working with them:

Do’s:

Create a contract that outlines the expectations and deliverables for both parties.

Before the partnership even begins, make sure the right compensation and workload are already agreed upon. This ensures that the collaboration will run smoothly and won’t lead to the process ending due to creative and financial differences.

Give the influencer creative freedom to produce content that aligns with their personal style.

After all, it’s their creative flair and personality that allowed them to rack up a large number of followers. All of whom could potentially be your customers. So remember to give the influencers some breathing room during the creative process.

Set clear expectations on what kind of content you’re looking for.

The creative process for the influencers will be next to impossible when you’re vague on your content instructions. As such, you need to take the time to create an outline detailing everything you want for your influencer-made content.

Place your values at the centre of your content.

In the social media landscape, not only are people in-love with content, they also want authentic content. As such, brand influencers love it when companies are authentic with their values, especially if your company shares the same values as the influences.

Don’ts:

Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Be realistic about what you can offer in exchange for their promotion of your brand. If not then you’ll be wasting the influencer’s time with promises you don’t intend to make.

Don’t allow the content creation process to be one-sided.

Being a collaborative process, you and the influencer need to have a voice in the project. For your end, you want to ensure that the influencer continuously follows your brand’s guidelines. After all, the content is made to help you make conversions.

Meanwhile, the influencer must also be allowed to have their creative voice during their process. Remember: it’s their magnetic personality and creativity that made you want them to help you attract customers in the first place.

Conclusion

The competition is tough to get the attention of the best industry influencers that resonate with your brand’s values. But you can always be tougher than any competition by remembering these key takeaways:

Don’t just rely on the number of followers. Look at personal values if they are aligned with your brand goals and objectives such as the industry they belong to and their personality.
Conduct background checks on your target influencers. Always look more into your brand influencers. It can save you a lot of time, money, and effort if you have the right influencer.
Strive for active engagement with your followers. Your brand influencer may just be among your followers, so ensure that you like or comment on your followers’ posts. Not every follower may be an influencer, but it helps to positively establish that your brand actively engages with its most loyal followers or customers.
If you think this is not the right time to work with macro-influencers or more established ones, you can alternatively consider working with micro-influencers. Finding micro-influencers for your brand should be more accessible, depending on how much time & resources you want to allocate

Which of these tips on getting influencers to collaborate with you will you use first? Tell us about your insights in the comments section below.

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Author Bio
Gary Viray is the founder and CEO of Propelrr, a data-informed digital marketing agency operating both in the United States and the Philippines. Gary’s insights are founded on decades worth of experience in various digital marketing principles, with particular expertise in conversion rate optimization (CRO), and marketing experimentation. He usually writes for HubSpot, AWR, SEJ, Rappler, e27, and more.