How to Collaborate with Influencers for Maximum Brand Impact

April 20, 2021
11:00 am

Posted by DMA Solutions Team

The aim of Influencer Marketing is to identify the influencers in your niche and make them work for you by promoting your brand.

Source: Influencer Marketing Hub

Influencer collaborations today are proving to be effective when brands approach the opportunity in a strategic way. In this post, we elevate ways to leverage influencer partners for your brand through our proven process.

Ways to Collaborate with Influencers

Pick Out-of-the-Box Partners

Just because we’re focused food & beverage in our industry doesn’t mean your partners have to be celebrity food bloggers, like Minimalist Baker and The Pioneer Woman. Consider working with influencers that speak to your audience that are affordable such as:

Micro-Influencers
Micro-influencers have fewer than 100,000 followers meaning they have a more “micro” reach. However, this also means they’re much more accessible than larger influencers. Meaning you can get similar results to a much higher priced tag influencer —at a much lower price.

Lifestyle Influencers
Lifestyle influencers are influencers who dedicate themselves to posting a variety of content, ranging from food to fashion, to upcoming vacation plans. They are simply documenting their daily lives, be it a trip to Disney with their kids, a new diet they’re trying out, or the challenges of juggling a busy professional life.

Niche Influencers

Niche influencers focus on one topic or theme and create hyper-focused content that caters to a specific audience. For example: teacher influencers create content that is of interest to teachers, and some parents.

Think Beyond the Instagram Grid

Influencer content can be more than just a static, Instagram image. With all the new types of content options, consider the outcome you desire when communicating your influencer content specifications.

Consider finding an influencer who excels on a “out-of-the-box” platform – like Pinterest or TikTok. While most will still utilize their Instagram platform, finding a partner who also specializes on a platform like TikTok or Instagram Reels could be a real benefit for your brand. We recently partnered with an influencer who noticed her “Instagram Reels” were performing exceptionally well – so to grow her own platform, she’s including Instagram Reels free of charge for our clients.

Since our team analyzes results on a monthly basis for the brands that we manage, we know that people engage with content beyond the Instagram grid. Content presented in the form of videos, carousel posts, stories and Reels are just examples of ways you might embrace an influencer to aid you with producing new and creative ways to present content.

Challenge Traditional Partnerships

Traditionally, we’ve expected influencers to create a recipe and share it on their blog and social media channels. Sound familiar? There are significantly more ways to partner with influencers than how you’ve done it before and now is a great time to push the limitations and explore what’s possible with eager brand influencers.

Long Term Partners

If you’re looking for consistent engagement for your brand’s influencer marketing investment, long-term relationships are an excellent choice. A long-term partnership allows influencers to create continuous content for the brand. Influencers’ constant promotion of the brand can build stronger brand recognition and exposure to their audiences that can lead to purchases. A brand becomes more credible when viewers see it often as part of the influencer’s daily life. Lengthy partnerships versus one-off posts yield better results for the brand over time.

Giveaways

Giveaways are one of the easiest ways to capture leads for your brand. 91% of Instagram posts with over 1,000 comments are contests, according to Tailwind. On average, you could see a 79% increase in your giveaway’s performance if you utilize partners. Typically this looks like the influencer partner posting a picture related to the giveaway and giving users the opportunity to enter to win by liking the post and following the influencer and the brand. If you make the giveaway easy to enter, you’ll be able to grow your following, your email list, or both!

Recently, Good Foods partnered with 2 influencers to host Instagram giveaways. The partnerships resulted in a combined total of 2,500 new Instagram followers and over 23,000 social media engagements.

Influencer Mailers

If you’re not ready for a long-term influencer partnership, a great alternative is an influencer mailer, which consists of your brand’s product along with fun, unique and branded items. No contracts or agreements needed! This type of strategy is meant for getting your products into the influencers hands. If your brand is looking to reach broader audiences on Instagram and increase brand awareness through authentic product placement, this is a great option.

We live in a world where everyone is unboxing their packages on social media, so this strategy really plays into that. Influencers share not only what they received from the brand, but also authentically showcase the product in their content on Instagram. The catch here is making your box something they would want to unbox on their Instagram. Meaning, the swag you put in the box needs to impress. The classic “tradeshow” items of a stress ball and pen won’t cut it for a lifestyle influencer. Think of products that highlight your brand and that the influencer would want to showcase. We’ve seen great success with any personalized item – who doesn’t love to receive a present in the mail with your name on it?

This is also a great way to test various influencers to see if you’d like to work with them long-term! If you love the way they communicated and showcased your product, you have a lead for a long-term partner.

Reflect Your Followers

At DMA, we work with our brands to find partners who reflect their consumer base. This includes racial diversity down to gender and religious beliefs. As we work to become a more inclusive society, and reflect that in brand positioning and messaging, aligning and supporting diverse partners is a step towards progress.

Diversity incorporates all of the elements that make individuals unique from one another, including but not limited to sexual orientation, ethnicity, skin color, gender, body type, socioeconomic status, physical abilities, religious beliefs and more. – Forbes

For more, download our presentation or watch the webinar! If you’re looking for more ideas or want to get started, contact us. We’d be happy to help create a plan for influencer marketing.