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With Black Friday and the festive months rapidly approaching, an effective way to make your brand stand out could be by collaborating with an influencer; allowing you to push your company to a wider, more diverse audience. With influencer collaborations being such a fresh, modern and creative way to showcase your product, the marketing team at affise has devised its top tips for maintaining a smooth partnership.
Tip 1: ALWAYS pay your influencer on time
Influencers have to make money too, especially during the festive months - nobody wants to be low on money for Christmas shopping! A platform entitled ‘F*** You Pay Me’, created by former model Lindsey Lee Lugrin, highlights the growing issue of late payments.
Free products are obviously a great way for the influencer to showcase your brand to their followers, but those working at it as a full-time job need monetary compensation too. It’s important to remember the amount of hours that go into creating high quality content for your brand, meaning delays in payment are inexcusable.
Tip 2: Make sure promoted product has plenty of stock
We’ve all been there: excitedly clicking on an affiliate link, frantically typing in the discount code - only to discover that the lusted-after product is no longer in stock. What follows is usually a mix of disappointment and passionate rage, which is never good for reputation and their chances of returning to your website.
If a product has been sent to a prominent influencer to showcase to their followers, ensure that the particular item has more stock than you would usually need; it is going to be under the spotlight, receiving more attention than ever, which means it is critical that people can actually buy it once it’s grabbed their attention.
Tip 3: Give a clear brief to your influencer
Any job is difficult to do without clear instructions, especially when it comes to promotion. It is important to highlight the kind of angle you would like to see - are you an edgy brand? Compassionate and cruelty free? Is your packaging sustainable? If you would like it mentioned, it needs to be laid out in a brief.
However, you have chosen to work with this influencer for a reason: you like their energy and charisma, so be careful not to crush that when creating the brief. They have to remain themselves and radiate the same personality that encouraged their audiences to follow them in the first place.
Tip 4: Lay out how everything will be tracked, to show progress
Determining ROI is extremely important, making it crucial to explain to your influencer the kind of things you will be tracking. For example, are you trying to push traffic towards a certain page? Are you trying to increase sales of a certain product? Clicks and conversions?
The campaign is destined to flop if your influencer is unsure of the overall goal, so always be totally transparent about your aims and how you will be measuring them.
Will you be using particular software? If so, which one? It is imperative to keep your influencer in the loop every step of the way, even when it comes to the minor details, so they can create suitable and click-worthy content.
Tip 5: Create a friendship with your influencer
For the most effective campaign possible, it is important that you get to know your influencer as a person, in order to identify whether they are right for your brand. For example, an influencer that only uses cruelty free products would not be interested in advertising something tested on animals.
Building a relationship ensures that there is a level of trust involved on both sides, offering a better incentive to work harder. Nobody likes sterile, clinical work conditions, so get to know them!
Tip 6: Set a clear deadline for the end of the campaign
Your influencer needs to know when to get cracking, how much time they have to research and to create content, so keep them updated. If the campaign is only going to be running for a certain amount of time, with a limited discount code, these facts need to be laid out - or you risk confusing both your influencer and your customers.
Tip 7: Compliance is key
Depending on whether your influencer is micro (10,000 to 100,000 followers), macro (100,000 to 1 million followers), or mega (1 million+ followers), each one will have to play by the same set of rules.
For example, if something is an advertisement, the Committees of Advertising Practice (CAP) states that it must be easily identifiable, and have ‘#ad’ clearly stipulated within the post. It cannot be hidden within other hashtags. It is crucial that these kinds of regulations are discussed prior to the launch of the campaign, to iron out any confusion.
