How to Build a Strong Relationship with Influencers
Reading Time: ~3 Mins | Written By: Sydney Vardja
At Jelly Academy we are well aware of the power of working with influencers. Influencers play a crucial role in marketing strategies as they help businesses reach a wider audience, boost brand awareness and improve customer engagement. Contrary to popular belief, establishing a genuine relationship with influencers requires more than a transactional approach.
Let us explore the essential steps and tactics to building meaningful and long-standing relationships with influencers.
First Things First: Research
It’s essential to invest time in research to discover influencers who resonate with your brand. How to tell if someone resonates? You’ll want to look at a creator's values, content and audience and consider whether it is aligned with your company and its mission. You’ll also want to consider elements like relevance, engagement rates and authenticity. Does the influencer who’s infamous for her green thumb relate to jewelry? Does this influencer have 100k followers but rarely any comments on their posts? And when you ask yourself honestly if you could be influenced by this creator, what’s your answer?
Quality will always trump quantity in the land of influencer partnerships.
Keep it Personal
Always make an effort to ensure your influencer outreach is personal. Avoid generic messaging. Get the creator’s first name right. Show genuine interest in their work. It’s also important to understand their brand, content, and recent collaborations. To prove this, you can link to a piece of their content that you’re impressed by and particularly speaks to your brand.
You should also mention why you believe a collaboration would be of mutual benefit. Instead of “We’d love to work with you,” try “I understand that your content is fitness-focused and that your past collaborations include Lululemon and Alo Yoga. As a supplement company, our brand shares the same target audience as some of the brands you’ve previously worked with: those passionate about fitness, health, and wellness. As such, this would be a mutually beneficial partnership, as the content would appease your followers, who we are trying to reach, while also resulting in increased follower engagement with your account and increased brand awareness for us.”
Personalization signifies sincerity, which should never be lost in marketing.
Provide Value
We touched on this briefly, but we can’t let this point get lost in translation. Influencers are more willing to engage with brands that provide value to their audience. Instead of being tunnel-visioned on what a creator will do for your business, consider how you can help them. Offer unique opportunities, product samples, or event invitations that align with their interests and niche.
Stand out from competitors by showcasing the benefits of this partnership while also increasing the chance of it being long-lasting.
The Importance of Investing
If you want to build positive relationships with creators, it’s vital that you invest in the long-term rather than one-off campaigns. The more you work with a creator, the stronger your overall brand association, credibility and loyalty becomes. You will also develop a deeper understanding of the creator’s audience and how their content performs, which can result in refined and improved messaging. You can also consider offering loyal creators exclusive product deals or the opportunity to participate in an ambassador program.
Building a strong relationship with influencers is everything but a transactional exchange! It requires a genuine understanding of their values, personalized efforts, mutual value and long-term investing. Always remember, influencer marketing is most effective as a mutually beneficial partnership where both parties can thrive.
Don’t forget to stay tuned into our blogs. We’ve written numerous insightful articles like ‘How to Start a Social Media Career in 2023’ and ‘5 Important Strategies to Ignite your Media Presence.’
