I wanted to also say thank you to everyone who had donated last week to our family’s GoFundMe to help people in India get through COVID. Everyone’s donations really added up, even just the $2 ones. I’m extremely grateful for all of you who’ve donated, and the money is already making an impact there. This is the last time I’ll ask, so if you can spare $1 or $2, please donate to the GoFundMe. $1 or $2 from the thousands of people who read this can make a huge difference.
Some exciting news from Sharma Brands: we are hiring a growth marketer to join the team. If you or someone you know is looking to get hands-on with some of the greatest brands, please apply here. Secondly, we are going to be releasing a template for building extremely high-converting landing pages for Shopify stores in the coming weeks. If you’d like to be one of the first to test it out before we launch it, please let me know here.
I am going to be putting all of my old emails in written form on my website this week, in addition to some other content that I’ve written out, based on feedback I get from Twitter or just things you all have told me you liked hearing about. Today’s email is an example of what one of those articles will look like. In my brand launch deck, one of the slides was about influencer outreach, and many of you have asked me to go deeper on it. In the articles, I also got direct input from various people who you could consider the “experts”. I am going to be putting all of my old emails in written form on my website this week, in addition to some other content that I’ve written out, based on feedback I get from Twitter or just things you all have told me you liked hearing about. Today’s email is an example of what one of those articles will look like. In my brand launch deck, one of the slides was about influencer outreach, and many of you have asked me to go deeper on it. In the articles, I also got direct input from various people who you could consider the “experts”.
Let me know what you think of it — I am relying on your honest feedback! Without further ado:
Influencer Partnerships: How to Form Meaningful Partnerships with Influencers
Influencer marketing can be a game-changer, but only if DTC brands do it right. Businesses rely on influencers to increase brand awareness on social media and get their community excited about their products. However, most operators are not approaching influencer marketing the right way. This results in failing campaigns and frustrations from everyone involved—especially the fans.
For DTC brands, community and distribution are the keys. By partnering with influencers, brands are able to integrate their products into a relevant community with a high conversion rate at a relatively low cost. Branded content is often welcomed in influencer communities, but fans expect influencers to promote products they care about. More than 41% of consumers get more interested in a brand when they partner with a celebrity or influencer they love.
In this post, I’ll outline everything you need to do to ensure your influencer marketing campaign is a success. Before we begin, let’s take a look at the current state of influencer marketing and why traditional branded influencer campaigns are often doomed from the start.
Influencer marketing is just beginning
My entire thesis on influencer marketing focuses on the fact that it is just beginning. Some marketers think influencer marketing is dead. They don’t understand the magnitude of opportunity at hand. And honestly, they likely think that because their strategy is wrong and they aren't working with relevant influencers to get the results that they want
Transactional vs. relational-based partnerships
Traditional brands follow a template that’s easily replicated for all the influencers they work with. Select the influencers. Give them free products. Pay them for a sponsored post or two. Supply a discount code to promote. Ask them to put #ad in the copy to comply with FTC regulations. Wait until the post goes live. Track key metrics. Move onto the next one.
This approach is purely transactional and sets up the influencer marketing campaign for failure. It is merely adding content to your social media marketing strategy. Even worse, it commoditizes the relationship, only focusing on the bottom line and the short-term revenue gains from a simple post like an Instagram Story that is published at a single moment in time.
Instead, you should look at social media influencers as partners and content creators who are an extension of your team. They’re sharing your products and vision with their audience. You should work with them to create meaningful, native content that delights their followers. The goal shouldn’t be to pay them for sponsored content. Instead, you should develop a meaningful relationship that is beneficial for both parties and provide the resources they need to create native branded content that their audience will love.
Successful influencer partnerships are based on trust—not reach. They aren't built on vanity metrics like follower counts. They’re focused on reaching their target audience with relevant content. By keeping this in mind, you’ll move beyond immediate short-term revenue gains and capitalize on all the other benefits the influencers, bloggers and micro-influencers have to offer.
More than just monetary ROI
If brands are so focused on their return on investment, they can overlook the value social media influencers provide. Influencer marketing campaigns are multi-faceted. Successful influencer marketing campaigns build brand loyalty, decrease customer acquisition costs, and enable marketers to track influencer-driven impact on a performance level.
When done effectively, influencer marketing campaigns don’t just involve branded social posts with certain hashtags in the influencer's feed. Instead, influencers can provide a range of valuable insights and assets that can inform and improve a brand’s marketing strategy.
Some common benefits include:
- Audience Data - What demographic, geographic, psychographic and brand affinity data can you source from your successful influencers to learn about your customers?
- Enriched Insights - What product shots, use cases, content types resonated the most with audiences that converted?
- Audience Loyalty - How can you channel the loyalty the audience has for the influencer and connect it to your brand?
- Branded Content - How can you repurpose the influencer content for other marketing campaigns to acquire new customers?
Those are just some of the many benefits you can get out of your partnership. When you understand how to effectively work with different types of influencers, you’ll start to look at the relationship differently and take advantage of everything they can offer.
How to partner with influencers
By forging a relationship with the influencers you’re working with, they’re more likely to post about your brand without you even having to ask. This content is more native than the old-fashioned branded content with #ad front-in-center in the copy.
Here are three steps brands can take to evolve their transactional influencer marketing strategy into one that’s a partnership that’s beneficial for everyone involved.
1. Selecting the right influencers
Immediately, brands are faced with the most consequential decision of their campaign: who should they partner with? If they select the wrong influencer for a product launch, they could lose their investment of money, time, and resources with nothing to show for it.
Whether you work with a YouTube influencer or an Instagram influencer, you need to find one with an audience that is closely aligned with your target market. Successful sponsorships examine the influencer's audience and their brand affinities. Examine the influencer's followers and similar, related posts they've created for other brands. Review the giveaways they've conducted for inspiration, and give them the creative freedom to take the lead with your branded social media posts.
Find influencers who believe in your product. If they don’t, the content they create won’t resonate. Most influencers only want to work with brands that they believe in and promote products on their social channels that they would use. They don't want to jeopardize their subscribers' trust. Offer to provide your product to the influencer to test before they have to commit. When you work with an influencer that truly believes in your brand and appreciates your product, the content that they create is gold.
Cosette Rinab (@cosette) has 2.2 million TikTok followers and works with dozens of brands. She says, “When you have an audience that trusts you, the most important thing is to be authentic. I take my brand alignment very seriously, and for that reason, I only work with brands/products that I love or have a personal connection to. For example, if a skincare company reaches out, I will ask to trial the product first to ensure I'm recommending a product that is authentic to me.”
To get started, make a list of influencers that align with your brand. Don’t solely focus on the number of followers they have or their content, but rather, pick influencers that have a high engagement rate and have values, goals, and ethics that align with your brand.
2. Effectively pitching influencers
Once you have your list ready, it’s time to conduct influencer outreach. A lot of marketers think they can’t be successful at influencer marketing if they don’t have the right connections. However, they are underestimating the power of the cold email or a casual direct message.
Go through your list and put together a short DM or email for each influencer. The majority of the message can be the same for all influencers with slight tweaks and personalization. I’ve included a sample message that I’ve used before:
Hi _____,
I’m Nik and I work at @ReadySetJudy, a company that helps Americans be more prepared in natural disasters.
We just launched our newest product, The Safe, and I’d love to send one to you on me to see what you think of it. It comes out on April 16th, but we’d love to send you on ahead of time.
Lmk what you think,
Nik
It’s three short sentences. One explains the company. One highlights the product. One ends with the ask. The message is informal and doesn’t dive right into transactional details like payments or post requests. Instead, it’s enough to see if the influencer is interested in your product and wants to work with you.
After adjusting your messaging over time, you'll find a pitch that consistently works for you.
3. Maximizing for success
To keep track of responses, make a spreadsheet devoted solely to your influencer marketing campaigns. You should include columns for name, @handle, address, tracking #, post (yes/no), verified (yes/no), coupon code, URL, and general notes.
This can serve as your dashboard, so you can keep track of all aspects of each individual influencer campaign you have in motion. Most importantly, though, you can use the tracker or another marketing platform to monitor the influencer’s progress with your brand.
It's important to note which influencers are over-indexing with engagement. Those are the ones you want to do more with.
Renewed influencer marketing
Brands that treat influencers as partners as opposed to paid marketing channels will see the value in their campaigns. To take this approach, brands need to work collaboratively and focus on long-term gains rather than short-term revenue.
By selecting the right influencers, crafting your pitch, and maximizing your success, you’ll get more out of the partnership than a one-time increase in sales. You’ll get an entirely new audience to work with and an ambassador that’s sharing your product in effective, engaging ways.
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Question for you… what is the million-dollar question for you that if you could get answered (within my lane of knowledge) could tremendously help you out? I’d love to know.
A lot of you have emailed me saying a full breakdown of running FB ads effectively with different tricks and hacks to look for, would be incredibly helpful. I’ll send that next Sunday. What else though?
I hope you get 9 hours of sleep tonight. Have a great upcoming week. :)
