Influencer marketing is a smart marketing strategy used by businesses to spread the word about their products through influencers. Influencers are either popular celebrities, bloggers, athletes, or public figures with a large number of followers on social media. These followers represent the scope of their influence, which businesses use to reach their own target audiences.
According to a survey by The Nielsen Analytics Company, 92% of consumers believe in the recommendations by the influencers they follow more than other types of advertising. Their influence is the main reason why it’s important for businesses to build and maintain meaningful relationships with them, and below are some ways to nurture these relationships.
Get to Know Them
To make your partnership with influencers meaningful, you have to invest in your work together by taking the time to really get to know them. Make them feel valuable and unique. Forget email templates — send personalized messages to each one of them, especially when inviting them to special events or casting calls for your various campaigns.
A South China Morning Post feature on today’s top influencers can give you an idea about the right influencer for you. For example, if you run a food business, you might want to get to know Daniel Food Diary through his posts before sending him a personalized message. Knowing his brand well can help you learn how to get his attention and trust.
Match Their Objectives and Audience
Another way to make influencers feel valuable is to focus on what they want more than what you want. Work around their goals and show how you can help them reach those goals. Show an authentic interest in their work, which you can even get ideas from for your next campaign. Good proposals are not just about what’s appealing to you, but more about truly understanding their brand and how you can help it grow. After all, this investment you’re making is more about what’s in it for them first rather than what’s in it for you.
A CNA Lifestyle article on major adjustments influencers had to make during the lockdowns shows how their goals and their work had to change. Many of them no longer rely on sponsorships because of advertisers holding back marketing efforts during the pandemic. You can treat this as an opportunity to earn their trust and make them rely on what you can offer in their present goal changes.
Compensate Them Properly
Though influencer marketing has become a common industry strategy, it’s still hard to gauge how much you should be paying your influencers. There are a couple of factors that affect their rates, one of which is the size of their following.
An article on Petal Card explains that micro influencers—social media figures who have a following of 6,000 to 10,000—get paid an average of 88USD per post. Meanwhile, influencers with 50,000 to 80,000 followers get around 200USD per post. It gets better at 670USD per post for those with a following of 250,000 to 500,000. And once an influencer hits 1 million followers, the sky’s the limit for what they can charge.
Paying them fairly not only keeps them happy; it keeps you happy as well, because as their influence over consumers grows, your business grows with it.
Help Them Grow
Helping them expand their network can strengthen your partnership. Refer them to non-competing businesses in your network that they might be interested to work with as well. Introduce them to your media contacts. Ask them how else you can help them in their career growth and offer LinkedIn introductions relevant to their needs.
The Bottom Line
In order to build and keep strong and meaningful partnerships with influencers, get to know them and give them special treatment that’s more personal and goes beyond email templates. Focus on what they want and what they can get in partnering with you. Compensate them fairly and give them what they deserve, or even more. Help them grow by expanding their network as they expand yours. All the effort will be worth it and will surely earn you a positive ROI in the end.