How to build and maintain strong influencer relationships

There’s nothing more persuasive than a personal recommendation. However much a brand tries to ‘sell’ their product to you, it’s only when someone you trust gives it a glowing review will you sit up and take notice.

This is the impressive power of influencer marketing within social media. Work with the right person and you’ll have access to their entire audience.

If you’re considering bringing influencers into your organic social strategy for the first time, read on. Below, we’ll take a look at ways to build and maintain strong, authentic relationships with influencers that match your brand.

Why influencers should be a part of your organic social media strategy

So, why should you work with influencers as part of your next social campaign? Here are just a handful of the many benefits on offer:

High ROI – it’s relatively cheap to pay influencers to talk about your brand and products, especially compared to paid advertising. But the recommendations they make could lead to a considerable boost in sales and revenue, as well as generating leads and driving more traffic to your website.

Build brand awareness – choose the right influencer, and their followers can become your followers. They’ll become brand advocates, helping to build a community around your own social profiles.

Create hype for product launches – a great way to use influencer marketing is to create excitement around a new product launch or other special event. If you want to get people talking, this is one effective way to do it.

Tap into new markets – working with influencers lets you tap into adjacent markets that you aren’t already reaching. The way to do it is to find influencers whose social following overlaps with the niche audience you’re aiming to reach.

Gain credibility – a trusted person talking positively to their engaged audience about your brand can work wonders for building credibility and trust. The messaging can be so much more effective coming from someone else, rather than directly from your marketing department.

The importance of working with the right influencers

The key to success when working with influencers is to choose the right ones. They should work within a niche you’re looking to target and be a good match with your brand ethos.

Crucially – and this is something that so many companies fail to get right – they should actually like your product. After all, genuine enthusiasm for a product is hard to fake.

How to build authentic relationships with influencers

Identified the influencers you want to bring on board? Unfortunately, the next step isn’t as straightforward as giving them a brief or telling them what to say.

You need to take the time to build an authentic relationship, where you can talk openly about expectations and help them to gain useful insights into what you have to offer.

The stronger the relationship, the more persuasive the content they’ll be able to produce – and the more fruitful the partnership will be.

Let’s take a look at two of the most important things you’ll be aiming to achieve with your influencer relationships.

Establishing trust

First up, you need to focus on establishing trust between your brand and your chosen influencers. The relationship can’t feel forced, because audiences can tell – and your campaigns will fall flat.

Start with friendly, open conversations that are more about getting to know each other than getting down to business. Have one point of contact within your marketing team, giving this person a chance to build their own relationship with the influencer.

Aim to find out as much as possible about the influencer’s own interests, expertise in their niche and their audience. And in return, you can share insights into your brand, products and what you’d like to get out of the relationship.

Crucially, both parties should communicate their expectations with regards to the relationship and campaign. This can hopefully prevent any miscommunication or misunderstandings later on.

Effective communication

From the very start of the working relationship, you’ll need to set out the terms of engagement.

How will you communicate with each other, and what will each party’s role be in the collaboration? What will you provide in terms of product information and assets, and how much of the content creation will the influencer be responsible for?

These are all questions that need to be answered to everyone’s satisfaction at the outset.

And if it turns out to be a longer term collaboration, you need to keep checking in with your influencers. Even if there’s a gap between projects, it pays to keep the lines of communication open. If you go cold, the initial groundwork you put in to build the relationship will be wasted.

Nurturing and maintaining influencer relationships

Even if you haven’t decided whether it’ll be a long-term collaboration, it’s still a smart idea to actively nurture your influencer relationships. You never know which partnerships could end up being a hit.

As well as checking in regularly, you should also consider asking for feedback on everything from the product to the campaign. The influencer can give their own views as well as those of their followers, which you can leverage to optimise future campaigns.

There are likely to be challenges and conflicts along the way, but you’ll need to find a way through. Not all partnerships work out, but a professional, open and collaborative approach should help you make the most of your influencer relationships.