Think about your favorite YouTube vlogger or Instagram account. Now imagine partnering with them to build your brand.
It would be pretty cool, right?
In our last article—The Creator Economy: What It Is and How You Can Benefit—we discussed what the creator economy is all about and how businesses can benefit from it. You can check it out to learn more about this growing online industry.
But today we’re going to dive a bit deeper and look specifically at how to partner with content creators to grow your brand and boost your business.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a catch-all term for working with online creators or influencers to support your business functions. It’s incorporating content creators into your marketing strategy, using their popularity, reach, and audience as a way to boost your brand and business.
A non-exhaustive list of creators includes:
- Social media influencers: Those who create content for their audience on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
- Educators: People who develop courses, coaching programs, or host training opportunities.
- Artists: Musicians, painters, digital artists, writers, and others who share their art with an audience.
Specific marketing activities with content creators includes:
- Sponsored posts.
- Advertisements.
- Contents and giveaways.
- Unboxings or reviews.
- Social media takeover.
- Affiliate marketing.
These marketing approaches can help you sell products or services, boost traffic to your website, or build brand recognition.
And, by mix-and-matching these two lists, there are endless opportunities to use influencer marketing for your business.
The main thing to consider is what the right strategy is for your company and your customers. We’ll get into how to develop an effective creator partnership below.
7 Ways to Partner with Content Creators and Influencers
While you can always just send out a bunch of DMs and hope for the best, we don’t recommend this strategy to partner with content creators.
The truth is that many online creators and influencers are inundated with partnership requests, so you need to approach them in the right way.
Beyond that, you need to work with people who align with your company and goals—not just randomly throw out content with a variety of influencers.
Here are 7 key steps to effectively partner with content creators to boost your business:
1. Determine your Target Audience
You’ve got to know who you’re influencing. If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, you’ll partner with the wrong people, making your efforts (and budget) moot.
Hone in on your target audience and define them clearly. Creating an avatar of your ideal client is a good place to start. Identify features like:
- Age
- Location
- Career
- Interests
- Hobbies
- Purchasing habits
When you have a clear picture of who you want to reach, you can find content creators that cater to that specific audience. This means your products and company are promoted to the exact right people.
2. Figure Out Your Budget
The next step is to know your budget and the resources available for influencer marketing. Because this is an emerging industry, there are few benchmarks and norms for typical costs.
The most popular influencers—i.e., celebrities and public figures—are likely out of reach for most small businesses.
That said, there are many smaller creators who can provide just as much value and will cost significantly less to work together.
So, just how much does influencer marketing cost? Hootsuite provides these insights as a starting point:
- Rates are typically determined by follower count and engagement rank.
- Expenses such as hair and make-up, renting space, or equipment should be included in the costs of influencer marketing.
- Prices vary significantly between different influencers and each new partnership should be negotiated directly with the creator.
Hootsuite provides a baseline formula to determine the cost of influencer marketing:
- Engagement rate per post + extras for the type of post (X the number of posts) + extra factors = total rate.
Using $100 per 10,000 followers as a rule of thumb, a single post with an influencer with 100,000 followers would start at $1,000.
Multiple posts, videos, and high-cost productions will increase the costs from this baseline.
Spend a bit of time developing a budget around this benchmark before reaching out to specific creators. Once you do, you can negotiate with them and formulate the budget.
3. Know the Rules
Another thing to do before reaching out to influencers is to ensure you understand the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) rules for influencer marketing.
The FTC’s guide to disclosures for social media influencers includes rules like:
- Influencers must identify sponsored posts.
- Video reviews must include written and verbal disclosures.
- Disclosures must be highly visible.
These rules are your responsibility to follow, so take some time to get familiar with them.
4. Shortlist Influencers in Your Niche
You’re now ready for the fun part—reaching out to potential partners.
Ideally, you’re already following creators and accounts in your industry and niche. And, even better, regularly engaging with their content.
If you’re not doing so, make a point to follow accounts that are relevant to your niche and start liking or commenting on their posts. This helps you familiarize yourself with their content to see if it’s a good fit, plus you lay the groundwork for future partnerships.
If you’re stuck on how to create a shortlist of influencers, try these strategies:
- Look at relevant hashtags.
- Use the algorithm to your advantage—the more you engage with specific content, the more it will show you that’s similar.
- Check out who your favorite influencers are following.
While creating your shortlist, you should also be looking at the engagement on their account. Do people like, comment, and re-post their stuff? If so, it’s a good indication they have a highly engaged audience who will also interact with your partnered content.
5. Reach Out… The Right Way
From your shortlist, it’s time to reach out. It’s essential that you do this the right way which is, basically, to make it personal and private. That means:
- No mass emails or DMs.
- No generic scripts.
- No excessive follow-up.
- No requesting free work.
Instead, craft personal emails or DMs that include a brief synopsis of who you are and why you think it would be a great partnership.
You should be able to reference their past work and how it will align with your brand. You should know their content and values well enough at this point to make the mutual benefits clear.
6. Partner to Create Content
When it comes time to actually create content, view it as a true partnership. You’re the product expert, but they’re the content expert.
Authentic and professional creators won’t take on a project that doesn’t align with their personal brand and audience.
So, learn from them and approach it from a collaborative place. You can provide guidelines on what you’re looking for, but let them get creative and run with it!
7. Measure Results
To calculate the ROI of working with content creators, you need to track the metrics of your post or campaign. This can include “vanity metrics” such as likes or comments, but those don’t speak to concrete results beyond engagement on the post.
To get a clear picture of the post’s conversions, consider these tools:
- UTM parameters: These are text codes that you can add to a link (URL) to track the performance of a webpage. If you attach it to a link to, say, book a tour of your facility, you can easily track metrics on a platform like Google Analytics.
- Facebook Business Manager: This tool gives you insights into all Facebook and Instagram campaigns.
- Affiliate links: Provide a unique link to your influencer partner that allows you to track online sales through their own social media channels or platform.
Influencer marketing has the potential to boost your brand awareness and increase sales. If you partner with the right creator, you tap into their dedicated audience who trusts their opinion and recommendations.
As the creator economy becomes more dominant, it’s an opportunity you don’t want to miss out on.
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