6 Vital tips for building quality influencer partnerships

Do you want to reach more potential customers and build a community around your brand? If so, it may be time to think about partnering with influencers.

Influencers are internet personalities who typically operate through blogs and social media accounts. These individuals have a moderate to large social media following and know how to help brands promote their products or services.

This strategy works well because consumers spend a ton of time on social media and reading content online. An impressive 55% of people report using social media when they want to research new products to buy. Meanwhile, over 47% of shoppers read 3-5 blog posts about a product or brand before placing an order.

Working long-term with several different partners can help you build rapport with prospects, improve brand awareness, and boost sales.

The issue many marketers face when implementing this program is they don't know how to build quality partnerships with influencers. Today, I hope to resolve this issue for readers.

Below, you will find 6 vital tips you should remember if you want to form fruitful partnerships with online influencers.

Let's begin!

Find the Right Influencers for Your Business

You first need to determine the right type of influencers for your products or services. Every business is different, so it's important to consider your industry, buyer personas, and product selection before you start working with content creators.

Business owners and marketers should seek influencers with similar goals, values, and audiences. If you decide to partner with the first influential person you see, there's a chance they may not be a good fit for your audience.

For example, a company that sells gaming headphones probably wouldn't partner with a beauty influencer. The reason is there's too much of a gap between beauty supplies and gaming gear. You'd have to hope that a vast majority of the people watching need gaming equipment and skincare products, which is a stretch, to say the least.

The right thing to do in this situation would be to partner with an influential streamer that plays video games or a content creator focused on tech and computer equipment. The people interacting with this influencer are far more likely to need the product you want to promote.

I recommend creating influencer personas. In other words, figure out the qualities and traits you need from potential partners, and use this chart as your blueprint for finding the right type of influencers for your business.

Establish Clear Expectations, Goals, and Payment Terms

Next, let's discuss establishing clear expectations, goals, and payment terms.

When you partner with an influencer, tell them exactly what you expect and your goals. I also advise asking them to tell you what they would like to gain from the partnership.

Not only will this strategy help you draw up a contract and establish a blueprint for success, but it also aids in building trust between businesses and influencers.

When deciding on payment terms, you'll need to keep the influencer's reach in mind. It's not uncommon to pay $2,000 per piece of content if a creator has millions of followers.

If you find micro-influencers (people with over 10,000 subscribers but less than 100,000), they will often promote your product for much less. Believe it or not, micro-influencers can be even more effective for growth when compared to larger creators. Small influencers tend to be niche and, as a result, have a small but concentrated group of subscribers.

Aside from one-time payments, you can incentivize influencers by starting an affiliate program where each person earns a commission based on how many sales they drive to your site.

Give Them Creative Freedom

One mistake I've seen business owners is they try to dictate exactly what the influencer should say or do in their content. There's nothing wrong with general guidance, like asking creators to mention a certain feature or benefit, but you shouldn't micro-manage their work.

Ultimately, you need to give influencers the creative freedom that helped them find success in the first place. These people understand their audience and know how to communicate effectively.

If you try to hijack their personality and creativity, their content will not look authentic. Fans will quickly take notice and see your brand as intrusive instead of helpful.

We've all come across YouTube videos with an ad read that felt so scripted that it instantly turned us off from the product or service. You don't want to give people who have never heard of your brand this impression.

I suggest creating loose guidelines and letting the influencers do what they do best.

Turn to Your Existing Audience

There's an excellent chance you can find influential figures within your own audience. The best influencers know and use your product, so it makes sense to turn to your existing followers when you're looking for partnerships.

You can easily learn about your followers by using a social listening tool to find out who is talking about your brand. If you see someone praising your product with a high subscriber count, consider reaching out and asking if they'd like to work together.

Some social media tools allow you to organize your followers based on their subscriber count. Use this feature to find potential influencers, even if they've never directly mentioned your company.

Give Influencers Unique Coupon Codes

If you want to assess your influencer partnerships and track the progress of each creator, you should give them all unique coupon codes to provide their audience.

Giving partners the same code will make it very difficult to determine where each sale came from. As a result, it's hard to figure out how to evolve your program and where to focus your efforts.

Let's say you get 100 sales from your influencer program, and 90 come from one person. If everyone has the same code, you won't be able to determine who is successfully promoting your brand and who needs help.

Once you give everyone a custom promotion code, you can easily check your on-site analytics and determine which influencers drive traffic and sales.

Stay in Touch

Finally, you should always keep an open line of communication between your team and influencers. There's a good chance someone promoting your products may have questions about specific features, or they may want you to review their content before it goes live.

If you're not properly communicating with creators, they may decide to break the agreement or generally feel dissatisfied with their partnership.

Open up multiple ways to stay in touch, including business emails, phone numbers, and a way to live chat with someone from your team who can answer their questions.

Influencer partnerships, like many business partnerships, need strong communication, so this is one step you shouldn't skip.

Final Thoughts

Forming quality influencer partnerships is essential to a long-term growth strategy, especially on social media. The tips provided today will help you forge strong bonds with creators, which will help you build a strong influencer presence around your brand.