PR AGENCY DIARIES: WHAT BRANDS ARE LOOKING FOR WHEN PARTNERING WITH INFLUENCERS
Marrying up with the right influencer can be a boon for promoting a business - but how do brands choose their perfect social media marketing partner?
No one would dispute the sexiness of influencer marketing. Its ability to boost brand awareness and reach niche markets is unrivalled. Not to mention the high return on investment (ROI) – when the cents make dollars, the dollars make sense.
But much like a marriage, if a business is looking to work with influencers, the qualities of who they’re partnering with need to be more than skin-deep, and very carefully evaluated.
Brands want to hitch their wagon to influencers who have “done the work”. That is, spent time developing their own platform of quality content, put energy and care into growing their audience, and are deeply engaged with their followers – who heart them right back.
As with any relationship, a collab between a brand and an influencer needs to be built on trust and mutual respect. And like most prospective partners, a business will be looking for red flags before they put a ring on it.
In partnering with you, a brand’s objectives will be to;
Heighten brand recognition and awareness
Reach new audiences and/or target specific ones
Promote key messaging around the brand
Create engaging content, ideally that the company can reuse across its own social channels
Drive traffic to their website
Convert awareness to sales
Increase their own social media following
And they may be investing a decent wodge of cash (or supplying product/service in the form of contra) in exchange for content creation services, so you can be dang sure they’re doing their research before deciding where that outlay will go.
On their checklist will be any or all of the following;
YOUR TYPE ON PAPER? (or YOUR PERSONAL BRAND)
How personable are you? Your content might be anything from aspirational to girl-next-door relatable, but if you’re not likeable, no one is going to buy what you’re selling
Are you passionate and engaged with life - and the people you are communicating with? A blasé approach to your content will earn an equally impassive response from your audience
Can you speak with expertise or authority around certain topics? A bit of wisdom and insight goes a long way toward building trust with your community, and providing them with real value when consuming your content
Most importantly – are you genuine and authentic in the delivery of your content? Social media users are educated, curious and sometimes sceptical – they can smell a purely transactional partnership a mile off
YOUR DATING PAST (or CONTENT HISTORY)
While most businesses understand that content creators are individuals who have their own lives and opinions their audiences follow them for, expect potential brand partners to do a deep dive into your content history to ensure it aligns with its values.
They will be interested in which businesses you have partnered with before; whether you have worked with any of their competitors (unless it was a long-term ambassadorship, this is not always a disadvantage – it can show you already have understanding and experience of the industry they are a part of); and if you have posted organically about their brand in the past – this is an advantage if so.
Also of note is how often you share sponsored posts. If your feed is one long advertisement, it’s a red flag – businesses and followers alike enjoy seeing plenty of organic, ad-free content, that paid content can sit naturally within.
THE JUNK IN YOUR TRUNK (or THE QUALITY OF YOUR CONTENT)
While businesses will want you to dovetail in some way with how they display their own brand, the objective of the partnership is to deliver content with your fresh take. They will be looking for scroll-stopping posts - memorable moments that separate you from the sea of other influencers.
When appraising your content, brands will be considering all the “c”s – is it consistent? Is it captivating? Are your captions carefully constructed?
Is it to a standard that the brand would want to negotiate usage rights to repost your content on their owned profile, or send it out via dark posting/whitelisting to specific audiences? This adds a whole other layer of brand compatibility - and money in your piggybank.
Bonus points for demonstrating you never miss an opportunity to delve deeper with different formats, like an instructional video, or a Q&A session.
ESSENTIAL STATS (or YOUR METRICS/ANALYTICS)
Your metrics are equally as valuable as your content itself. Brands will need to assess your reach, average engagement stats and NZ audience before deciding to work with you.
Reach is the main measure of ROI from an influencer campaign – the unique number of users who clamp eyeballs on one of your posts. Small followings don’t have to be a disadvantage here – you might be able to introduce a niche audience to the brand, or produce significant engagement stats (for example, a gluten-free flour is much better placed to be promoted by a coeliac-friendly food influencer with 7k followers, than a lifestyle influencer with 50k). An influencer can have hundreds of thousands of followers and still have a low reach and a silent audience, making them an ineffective partner option for marketers.
Engagement is – how (and how often) is your community interacting with you? And what are these exchanges like? Brands will look for the number of likes your posts receive, if your followers leave comments or questions, and how you respond to these. A disinterested audience won’t benefit a business in any way.
NZ audience - for most businesses, having a significant proportion of NZ-based followers is key, as the local market is where they want to convert, track and report on sales. So if a high percentage of your followers are based in Spain, no bueno.
In the end, the perfect marriage for a brand is a collab with an influencer from whom they can leverage their personal equity to grow that of their brand. They are looking for relatable talent whose authenticity and trustworthiness deeply connects them with their community of followers in a way unique to them.
Think you’d be a perfect match with a particular brand? Check out this guide on how to pitch yourself to a business. And of course, if you are a brand that wants their budget to work harder, get in touch with us here.
