The Future Of Marketing: Influencer Collaborations

When you think of marketing, you have the essentials: professional photographs of your product or service, a visually appealing and easily navigated website, Instagram, Facebook, and more. These are the essentials for a reason – every brand knows that you need these foundational components to get your business off the ground. But what is the next step in growing your marketing strategy, after you have the above covered?

For companies in the consumer goods industry, whose products have low COGs, influencer marketing yields all the desired results without the price tag.

Influencers are trying to make a career by growing their engagement and personal brand exposure, like every other business there is. Think of influencer marketing as a partnership. As a business owner, you can tap into their network thus growing your engagement and consumer audience. As an influencer, you get to provide your audience with new content. 

TYPES OF INFLUENCER PROGRAMS:

There are many types of influencer marketing programs, and depending on your brand’s size and target audience, you can utilize influencer relationships in many ways. Here are a few:

1. BLOGS, PR, AND PRESS FEATURES

Many influencers have their own blogs and have had their content featured in third party blogs. Exchanging complimentary product in return for an honest review on their blog is one medium for influencer marketing. 

Potential customers also get to learn more about your product from a different perspective. From a purchasing perspective, this review will have more weight, as blog writers are picky with the types of products they choose to feature in their content (they don’t talk about a lot of products). 

If you have a “PR” section on your website, or even on your social media, tag their page and their blog (adding all relevant links) to highlight just how popular your product is.

2. STOREPAGE FEATURES

Many influencers have their own Amazon Storepages. If you are selling on Amazon, this is a great option as an influencer features will link directly to your product listing. 

Think of an influencer storepage as a sort of “wish list.” Influencers will make categorized lists of their favorite products or products that they are interested in buying. These Amazon influencers have large followings, and they will typically be open to featuring your product on their storepage after they have already received complimentary product 

3. SOCIAL MEDIA FEATURES

The easiest way to work with influencers is to provide complimentary product in exchange for a static post, video, or story feature on social media. 

With these collaborations, it is important to set certain guidelines for the collaboration. Guidelines can include following and tagging your brand, using certain hashtags, and including or not including certain items or words in the image or caption. 

It is important to note that, for these types of collaborations, influencers are required to specify that their post is an advertisement – the simplest way to do this is to include #Ad at the end of their post. 

Additionally, if you want to repost their image and/or caption on your social media, you need to obtain permission from the influencer before you do so. This can also be a guideline for the collaboration. 

4. GIVEAWAYS

Giveaways are a great influencer marketing strategy to boost engagement. Like a social media feature, with these sorts of collaborations, influencers would receive complimentary product in exchange for a post on their social media channels.

To do a giveaway, there are two options: 

· Host it Yourself: You and an influencer will both post an image of your choice. This can be a brand image, or an image the influencer takes. When you host a giveaway yourself, you will pick a winner, communicate with the winner, and ship the product to the winner.

· Influencers Hosts: You and an influencer will both post an image of your choice, OR just the influencer can post (although it’s better that both parties do). When an influencer hosts a giveaway, they will pick a winner, and communicate with the winner, and the influencer will send the winner’s address to the brand for shipping purposes. This is a great option as there are fewer steps required from the brand

With giveaways, it is important to also have a set of entry requirements: 

· Following requirements: For giveaways, in the post caption, state that, to enter, both parties (influencer and brand) need to be followed.  

· Entry requirements: Typically, giveaways will have requirements like “must be 18+ to enter” or “giveaway only open to US residents” (or any location based on shipping restrictions). Include these requirements in the post caption on both ends. 

5. AFFILIATE MARKETING

One last example of influencer marketing is affiliate programs. Usually after a collaboration (one of the above), an influencer will ask if they can have a unique discount code to share with their followers. 

These codes are very easy to set up (ie: influencername20 for 20% off) and you can track how much sales are generated by an influencer. 

BENEFITS

Essentially, there are many benefits to influencer marketing:

1. YOU CAN DO IT ON YOUR OWN

There are ways to avoid working with those expensive branding company with their own influencer network. Simply reach out to influencers on social media or email (often, their emails are listed on their social media profiles). It is also easy to vet influencers: simply scroll through their pages, looking at like and follower counts.

2. THERE ARE INFLUENCERS FOR EVERY INDUSTRY

There are many types of influencers: lifestyle influencers, consumer goods influencers, travel influencers and more! To find your desired group of influencers, a simple hashtag or keyword search will do. 

3. FREE MARKETING CONTENT

If you specify in the post guidelines that you have access to reshare and repurpose the influencer’s content, you will gain several free assets that you can use on your own social media or marketing materials. This is a great feature of influencer marketing as it helps you cut back on marketing spend: simply providing complimentary product can help you save hundreds!

4. EASY TO GROW THE PROGRAM

After you have been reaching out to influencers yourself, you may notice that the number of collaborations you are completing may be dwindling down. Luckily, there are affordable and user-friendly platforms that exist to help you tap into new influencer markets. These platforms range from being $5/month to several hundred, depending on influencer accountability tracking, collaboration tracking, and analytics. 

If you are interested in learning more about influencer marketing, need assistance in determining your marketing strategy or executing on an existing strategy, please contact us! 

Helm & Stern Branding is here to help!