How do you build relationships with influencers?
A successful collaboration always rests on mutual respect. To succeed, you need more than just skills matched to expectations and needs, or broad capabilities. It is sensitivity to the other person that can prove to be the source of a valuable influencer–brand collaboration. A creator will always be subject to judgement. The key here is trying to understand their work and the subjective nature of how their performance of the tasks entrusted to them is assessed.
Strategy or fashion?
When running influencer marketing campaigns, brands tend to make a strategic mistake. They bet on fashionable, seemingly effective solutions. They expect influencers to reference current trends, draw on them or communicate in step with them. Yet this is not always consistent with the image of the brand, the influencer and, above all, the spirit of the upcoming campaign. It is the campaign’s character that should always top the list of considerations defining the form of activity for a given advertising project.
A brand must prepare a well-considered strategy, and only then think about which current trends fit the campaign’s ideas. Trends are no guarantee of fortune and popularity, although they can of course speed up reaching a specific goal.
Values in partnership
A brand should be unwavering about the values it holds. That does not mean, however, that they rank higher than those guiding the influencer. Of course a collaboration may require compromises, but its nature must be in harmony with both the creator and the advertiser. The impact of the activities undertaken must not strike at either party’s most important, core values. Firmly rooted, they form a kind of anchored identity for each side.
Influencer marketing offers so many possibilities that, without major concessions, you can easily run a campaign with people who share your ideas. Shared views between business partners are an important bond between them. A campaign involving an influencer can bring huge gains for both the brand and the creator. Personal convictions, however, should not be compromised purely for financial gain.
Respect in joint advertising
Many elements go into good advertising. Before anything is “released” online, a lot of complex processes take place. The many layers of the collaboration and of one’s own work are hard to assess accurately enough. There is always an emotional element, personal preferences, how current one’s industry knowledge is, the lens of experience and one’s personal view of the project. Taking each of these components into account, it is clear that disputes and disagreements may arise.
Don’t give in to negative feelings, so as not to alienate the influencer. In many cases, nobody may be “properly” right. Only time (and appropriate, specialist tools) can verify that. By ending a collaboration abruptly, we deprive ourselves of the chance to take informed, rational steps backed by the results of the campaign.
Months of collaboration, quality of work
A collaboration that lasts longer than a single project or a brief one-off episode should by then be firmly established and, in a way, familiar to the business owner. In ongoing campaign partnerships, the predictability of the influencer’s activity naturally increases. It should not, however, lose quality – and, as a result, value. The shape of the collaboration should be modified and refreshed from time to time in line with the current demands of the social media market. Influencer marketing must constantly keep pace with the natural, dynamic needs of the online community.
Long collaborations come with greater trust in influencers and, as a result, often with greater freedom of action. Such freedom is not obligatory, but it is quite convenient from the point of view of ongoing campaign supervision. It pays to rely on common sense – don’t give the creator a completely free hand, but don’t rigidly dictate how they communicate either. Balance is the key to mutual satisfaction with the collaboration and to equally satisfying returns from it.
