In today’s fast-paced world of social media, getting your brand in front of potential customers on platforms such as Instagram or TikTok is a crucial part of any successful marketing campaign. When you’re looking to extend your reach on social media, there are few better methods than working with influencers.
The key is the name: influencers are enormously influential when it comes to persuading followers to try out a new product or service. As real people who are trusted by their followers, an influencer promoting your brand can generate social proof quickly and easily. On top of this, influencer marketing is inexpensive, meaning that it often has a good return on investment.
However, designing and implementing a successful influencer marketing campaign requires a well-thought-out set of strategies. In this article, we’ll explain how you can effectively increase brand awareness and conversion rate through influencer collaboration.
What Is Influencer Collaboration Marketing?
When most people think of influencers, they imagine a glamorous, jet-setting celebrity with millions of followers. While this sort of influencer marketing is certainly prominent, smaller companies can still benefit hugely from partnerships with more niche social media personalities. This means that any brand can effectively use influencer collaboration marketing.
Let’s say that you have a new AI SMS service that you want to promote – you might choose to pay a popular business YouTuber to use that service on a video. In order for influencers to promote your brand, you’ll need to craft a deal with the influencer.
There are two main types of deal. Firstly, you could use a brand deal: this is a flat rate for each post that promotes your products or services. The cost of this deal will depend on the size of the influencer’s following.
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Alternatively, you could use a purchase gateway deal. This is when the influencer is paid to post a link – every time a customer makes a purchase through that gateway, the influencer earns a small commission.
As well as this, it’s important to remember that influencer marketing isn’t limited to a single social media platform. Instead, popular social media personalities can be found on a range of different channels, including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. This will let you tailor your content for your audience: influencer marketing on Instagram, for instance, is popular with more niche accounts.
Benefits Of Influencer Collaboration Marketing
There’s a reason why more and more companies are starting to integrate influencer collaboration into their marketing campaigns – it’s incredibly effective. Here are the main benefits of using influencer collaboration marketing:
Increased Brand Awareness
The most obvious benefit of influencer collaboration marketing is the increased level of brand awareness. When influencers start to post content about your products or services, their followers will soon start to become more and more interested and aware of your brand.
This means that newer companies in particular can benefit from using influencer marketing: if you don’t already have an engaged audience, you can use an influencer’s followers to rapidly expand brand awareness.
Similarly, influencer marketing can be a great way to build hype around a product launch – even if you’re an established brand, new products or services can always benefit from a quick burst of brand recognition.
Higher Social Media Followings
As well as simply improving your brand awareness, influencer marketing can be a great way to directly increase your social media following. Once an influencer posts about you, it’s highly likely that many of their followers will choose to follow you as well – especially if they promote a giveaway competition for new followers, for instance.
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This can help you find your target audience on social media, as you’ll be able to choose influencers that are followed by your main target demographics.
This will pay off in the long-term, as you’ll have an engaged following who will directly see your posts and content on their social media platforms – meaning that you’ll have to spend less on outreach marketing.
Enhanced Levels Of Credibility
Social media has long been a great way to develop brand credibility – by directly connecting with your audience in an often friendly and informal way, you can easily build trust with your customers.
This credibility building is especially relevant when it comes to influencer collaboration marketing. That’s because influencers are implicitly trusted by their audience, while their success depends on appearing relatable and friendly to their followers.
Therefore, when an influencer promotes your products or services potentially thousands of followers will be seeing a trusted individual endorse your brand. If the influencer is well-established in your industry, this will have an even bigger impact on your levels of credibility with your target audience.
Improved Conversion Rates
Influencer marketing isn’t just about making sure that your brand gets in front of more potential customers. Instead, it can also have a direct impact on conversion rates. As you work with specific influencers who are chosen because they align with your niche and values, you’ll be advertising to a more loyal audience.
This means that influencer collaboration often leads to higher quality leads than other forms of online marketing, as the influencer’s followers should be truly interested in your company and your products.
These leads will therefore be more likely to click through to your website and make a purchase, while they’ll also even be more likely to be repeat customers – especially if you continue your partnership with the influencer.
8 Influencer Collaboration Strategies
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Now that you know what influencer collaboration can do for your company, it’s time to think about how you can implement this key marketing technique. Here are 8 of the best influencer marketing strategies:
Influencer Gifting
When you’re an up-and-coming brand, it can be difficult to know where to start in the world of influencer collaboration. After all, you might not have a huge budget to spend on brand deals with influencers with large followings. That’s why simply sending your products to influencers for free can be a great way to establish your brand’s credibility.
Start by searching for smaller, more niche influencers who operate in your target market and then send products to the most suitable influencers. It’s important that this is done with no strings attached – this will ensure that influencer reviews are authentic and trustworthy.
If an influencer does choose to review or promote your product, this will suddenly increase your exposure for little expenditure. As well as this, you’ll have established a relationship with a number of influencers. From this point, you’ll be able to extend your partnerships with commission or brand deals.
Sponsored Posts
If you’re looking for a one-off deal that will help to build social proof, you can partner with an influencer to upload a sponsored post. This is fairly straightforward: you might ask a business blogger to post about contact center integrations and link to your website for a small fee, for instance.
During a product launch, you could partner with various different influencers at the same time using the sponsored post method. This will give your product a larger reach, while also ensuring that you’re not just limited to one social media channel.
In order for this process to be as simple as possible, you should prepare a clear contract that you can use with multiple influencers – be clear about your expectations around content guidelines and compensation.
Giveaways
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If boosting followers is your main goal, influencer giveaways can be a great strategy to try. Influencers will ask their followers to complete an action – such as following your account or tagging a friend in the comments – to enter a contest with free products as the prize.
This is such a widely used strategy because it leads to many of the influencer’s followers also following your accounts, while it also helps to build social trust and brand awareness. To measure the effectiveness of this approach, you should use influencer analytics metrics – this will tell you which influencers led to the biggest increase in followers, for instance.
Brand Ambassador Program
The strategies that we’ve discussed so far have largely been one-off strategies. However, long-term collaboration can be a great way to consolidate your brand’s credibility with a target audience. You could use an influencer as a brand ambassador: a long-term partner who is consistently and regularly promoting your brand.
In order for this to be successful, you’ll want to choose an influencer with whom you’ve already worked effectively. You’ll also want to make sure that they have a genuine affection for your product and that they align with your brand values, as they’ll be linked with your brand in the eyes of many customers.
Depending on your relationship with your brand ambassadors, you could turn this collaboration into a deeper partnership: use automated emails to keep them up to date with your insider information, offer regular product updates, and use them for various roles beyond social media posts such as appearing at events.
Account Takeovers
Account takeovers are a creative way of collaborating with influencers that have been growing in popularity over recent years. You’ll use an influencer to post content directly on your brand’s social media account, perhaps “taking over” your account for a day.
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This is engaging for your existing social media following, while it also encourages the influencer’s followers to follow your account for updates on their favorite social media personality. It will also build credibility, as customers will increasingly associate your brand with the influencer.
In order for this strategy to be effective, you should work with the influencer in advance to decide on the format of the takeover and the details of the content that will be posted on your account – you don’t want to genuinely hand over your social media account to someone with no idea of what they’re going to post!
Product Collaboration
If you’ve got a significant budget and an existing large target audience, you could co-create a product or design a product launch alongside an influencer. This is something that has been used in marketing before the rise of influencers – think about Nike Jordans, for instance.
You’ll need to be well-established in order for influencers to partner with you in this way on a new product, as this is a more cost-intensive strategy than other collaboration strategies. You’ll also want to choose your influencers carefully, as they should have a genuine creative lead in the product or product launch.
Of course, this is a much more detailed and intense campaign than simply using sponsored posts. However, it can pay off – influencers will be truly engaged in promoting your brand, while their followers will be more likely to make a purchase if they see the product as something created by the influencer themselves.
Commercials
While social media marketing is obviously the most important channel for influencer collaboration, you can also use influencers in more traditional marketing techniques. Larger budgets could produce traditional advertisements – such as commercials – with famous influencers.
When creating commercials in partnerships with influencers on different platforms, it’s essential to pay attention to any guidelines such as X Ad specs if you’re publishing on X. This will ensure your content aligns perfectly with their guidelines.
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Not only will this associate your brand with an influencer who has a large and dedicated following, but it’s also a great way to link traditional advertisements with social media marketing: the influencer will follow up the commercial with a post about it on social media. This means that influencer collaboration in commercials can double or triple the reach of the commercial.
Hosted Events
Events can be a great way to increase your brand awareness – whether you’re hosting a seminar on medicare marketing ideas or using a fashion show to launch your new range of menswear, nothing builds excitement like an event.
Influencers are a great way to increase the reach of these events. Simply inviting influencers can ensure that the event makes an impact on social media, while you might want to collaborate with influencers to provide discount codes to draw in more attendees.
Influencer Collaboration Strategies – Final Thoughts
Utilizing influencers is a no-brainer in today’s social media-obsessed world. It’s a great way to increase brand awareness and conversions, while also generating credibility.
By following our 8 key strategies, you’ll be able to make the most out of influencer collaboration, regardless of the size of your company or your budget – sponsored posts or giveaways, for instance, work for almost any type of company. Start using influencer marketing today!