Marketing with social media influencers: Tips for successful collaborations

By Yiwen Wang, Account Supervisor

Marketing with social media influencers: Tips for successful collaborations

Social media has skyrocketed in the time since its start. Social media influencer refers to individual-operated social media accounts on such as Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

If you are a communication specialist trying to promote for your client or company, you may want to take advantage of the collaboration with influencers to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and increase profitability.

Social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram now offer a wide range of functions for businesses to track the engagement of published posts. For example, businesses can track the age group of their audience and the response rate through Google Ad Manager.

 Here are seven tips to help guide you through successful collaborations with social media influencers.

1. Set a measurable goal

The first step is to establish a meaningful goal for this collaboration. What results do you want to achieve? What kind of impact do you want influencers to accomplish? How many sales it could increase ultimately?

You may want to follow the S.M.A.R.T rule in your every goal and objectives, that is, be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.

2. Find the right social media influencers

Before you start the collaboration, research is necessary to find the social media influencers that work best for your business. Here are some key components to consider: 

• Who is your target audience? You need to know well who you are trying to reach, narrow down your audience group and create audience personas.
• Choose the right social media channels
• Find the niche
• Looking at the engagement rate and trustworthiness

3. Plan your timeline and budget

Creating a social media calendar that lists all your important dates to publish content and special events can ensure your collaboration in advance. It is essential to plan ahead when you work with influencers with extensive collaborative projects. It would help if you also thought about how much money you’re willing to spend working with influencers. Some special payment structures, such as complementary products or services, are more economical for small businesses.

4. Build a benign relationship with influencers

Once you find your desirable influencers, you not only want to collaborate with them but also want to build a long term mutually beneficial relationship. A loyal partner can increase the credibility of the post as well as avoiding subsequent disputes that will have a negative impact on the brand image.

5. Develop content strategically

A successful promoting collaboration is built on the base of publishing content that correlates to your business. Thoughtfully crafted format, theme, and context that are best befitted for your business image can help the post successfully stand out of the competition. Making good use of photos, videos, and hashtags will contribute to generating higher engagement rates as well. Also, you may encourage your influencers to generate followers giveaway by offering your products or services. Remember to be consistent with your content strategy throughout your posts.

6. Don’t hesitate to interact with your followers

As the collaboration progresses, don’t forget to monitor how audiences express their views of the brand at any given time. This is an invaluable opportunity to learn about your audience’s feedback while growing the community with them. The power of word-of-mouth always functions as earned media to promote your brand!

7. Learning from tracking metrics

Understanding metrics is the best way for businesses to learn customer behaviors and what they say about you. As the post mentioned before, Google Ad Manager works well when you are marketing on Facebook and Instagram. There are also a variety of third-party monitoring tools to help you gather meaningful data, such as Keyhole, Hootsuite, and Sprout.

 8. Evaluation

The evaluation step is necessary for understanding your past performance on social media platforms as well as drawing up your future plan. Once you gather data and analyze it, you can evaluate how you are meeting each of the KPI (Key Performance Indicators), and whether the influencer marketing plan achieves your goal. You can also find out areas of improvement through online surveys, understanding how your audience views your promoting collaboration.