Nearly 63% of top brand marketers have reported working with ten or more influencers at one time. Further making proper communication and collaboration paramount to your success. Every business should already understand the value of appropriate communication and take steps to learn how to do so for each goal and department of their organization, especially when it comes to marketing and communicating to your target audience.
Here are six tips to establishing proper communication with any influencer:
Keep Communication Type Consistent
If your influencer works mostly through e-mail, keep all the conversations there. However, if you work with several influencers, try to find one platform to keep everything organized. For example, you don’t want to talk to one influencer through Instagram directly while talking to another on Facebook directly.
Eventually, it will get too unorganized as you continue to add influencers to your team. Imagine if you had ten influencers on your team, each using a different channel or software to communicate. Over time this can get confusing and disorganized, easily providing an opportunity for missed information. Not a sustainable relationship for anyone.
Provide a Clear Plan or Roadmap
Tell the influencer exactly what you need and how their content can benefit your company. Highlight your goals and the metrics you are hoping to gain from the partnership. Be as clear as possible, ask questions and always follow up to ensure they know what the plan is or provide the influencer an opportunity to ask questions or offer suggestions.
Keep Communication Open
Allow space for your influencer to provide their opinion and be open to new ideas. The one thing that makes influencer marketing so great is its unique content. They also understand their audience and how they will react to certain information better than you would. They want to see success just as much as you. If they don’t produce the results needed, they will be without a contract or revenue.
Form an Authentic Relationship
Just because it is business does not mean you can’t form genuine and strong relationships with influencers—the more authentic the connection, the better the content. If you truly care about each other, you won’t have any problems working together and getting the results you both need. So start engaging with their content and following all their social media pages. Like and comment on their posts and treat them just like any other friend or customer. Not only will the influencer appreciate it, but their audience will too.
Schedule Content Creation Time Together
Important Questions to Ask Before You Work with An Influencer
Brainstorm new ideas or content to use for the campaign together. Be open to creativity and innovation. The influencer is here to create content, so be sure they are involved during this process.
While you need certain information to be shared with their audience, this doesn’t mean it has to be a sales pitch or read from a script. The influencer knows how their audience digests information so let them do the bulk of the content creation. Just be sure to provide them any supporting materials and information they need. You need to guide them and educate them on your products and services, not micromanage them.
Create Personalized Incentives or Gifts
Send products or create unique promotion codes personalized to each influencer. The more you treat your influencer as an individual with their own feelings and thought processes, the better the relationship altogether. Don’t treat them like a corporation and dehumanize them.
Overall, taking the necessary steps to communicate with your influencer properly is vital to your campaign and collaboration success. Use these important tips the next time you reach out to an influencer.