Influencer marketing is probably one of the best ways to amplify your social media and digital marketing efforts. Influencers will not only increase your brand awareness, but also help build customer trust.
Influencers share personal recommendations across multiple social platforms, blog posts, and other channels in a bid to change customer behavior and preference. However, rolling out an effective influencer marketing strategy is quite challenging, especially for startups.
As a business owner, it’s important to note that influencers are not your employees, but rather, they are strategic partners who market your products and services. As a result, you should focus on managing your influencer relationship just as your customer relationships. Below are some best practices to observe for a productive influencer relationship.
1. Only approach relevant influencers
Relevance is an important element in influencer marketing, as it determines the relationship between your brand and the influencer, along with affecting the success of your general influencer marketing campaign. You should partner with social media influencers who fit your niche.
Reputable influencers also often prioritize brands with products or services that suit their audience domains and demographics. This makes it easy to develop and implement an effective influencer marketing campaign for both parties.
2. Reach out warmly
Interestingly, most brands don’t know how to reach out and develop meaningful partnerships with potential influencers. Most businesses use cold outreach, which involves reaching out through generic emails. However, the chances of influencers responding to such emails with straightforward requests are very slim.
You should increase the odds of getting feedback from your target influencer by drafting a personalized message. To build fruitful relationships with influencers, you should begin by interacting with them on a personal level. For instance, start by following their social media posts, commenting on their blogs, and engaging with them online.
While doing this, ensure that you leave insightful comments that will make them notice you. You should then send a formal outreach message that meets the following key points;
- Include a creative subject line
- Appreciate their work
- Highlight the value of your brand
- Clear call to action
- Provide a reasonable compensation
3. Provide creative freedom
Most brands make the mistake of designing an influencer marketing strategy for their social media influencers to follow. While this can work, you should allow your influencer some creative freedom.
Even though your strategy might be extensive and market-oriented, influencers understand their audience better. They know their audience’s taste, purchase behavior, opinions, and preference.
As a result, they know which content will relate and engage with their audience better. Apart from creative freedom, you should also allow influencers enough time. Influencer marketing is a long-term strategy, and it requires adequate time to create relatable and engaging content.
Endnote
Creating a poor influencer relationship management strategy will impair your relationship with influencers, resulting in an ineffective influencer marketing campaign.
If influencers aren’t invested in your brand enough, they won’t succeed in building brand awareness and credibility. Fortunately, you can take advantage of influencer marketing CRM to strengthen your influencer relationship, enabling you to harness the maximum potential of your influencers.
