Working with influencers and building relationships can be tricky in today’s rapidly evolving digital space. The key to success is adapting to these changes, as it is crucial for finding and establishing connections.

As a business owner, you may still need to consider incorporating an influencer partnership into your strategy. However, influencer marketing can be highly effective, as their audience and following are loyal and tend to follow their recommendations, thereby boosting your brand’s visibility.

Once influencer relationships are established, your brand can benefit from utilizing their social media platforms to promote future products and offerings further. If that same influencer has a blog, that is yet another channel for viewers.

Here is your guide to modern media relations. You’ll see how your brand can find the right influencer for collaboration, where to look, and how to build those relationships and manage contacts for your business’ success.

Why Work With Influencers?

Partnering with an influencer yields many advantages and can do the following:

• Improve brand exposure and awareness;
• Increase trust and build loyalty for your brand;
• Promote to the right target audience for your product/service;
• Increase viewership and engagement.

Your business must first establish that they know their product or service well enough to know the right audience; otherwise, your attempts at creating a rapport with influencers and their followers may fall flat. 

Your marketing and advertising teams could benefit from considering, identifying, and targeting your ideal clients. Factors like your audience’s hobbies, interests, and other demographics can provide a crucial starting point for collaborating with your influencers.

Finding The Right Influencers

You must ensure your influencers have specific criteria to find the right one. They must understand your brand’s campaign goals and objectives and have the proper online community matching your audience demographics.

You also want to undergo keyword research for your niche so you can find what people are using that is relevant. Your influencers will likely use the exact keywords on their social media and web pages.

Some ways that you can find such influencers include:

• Searching your client base – you may already have influencers with massive followings who love and have purchased your products and services. You can contact them directly for a survey and with your partnership offer.

• Use an influencer marketing platform – these software or companies help brands to create and help you implement your influencer marketing strategy, like Pathlabs programmatic advertising services. They offer technology and media services to connect brands with influencers in their niche and work to communicate and track campaign analytics to measure effectiveness.

• Check with influencer agencies. These companies represent influencers in a particular niche, so they could have more than one to match your criteria, making connecting with multiple influencers at once more accessible.

Building Relationships With Influencers

Now that you have some strategies to find the influencers, how do you connect with them? 

Below are some helpful strategies that can get your foot in the door with these influencers for a possible long-term collaboration and partnership

Organic Engagement

If you find an influencer you like for your brand, do some background research so you know more about them. Consider following them outright, leaving thoughtful and insightful comments on their posts that can evoke discussion, or even asking questions if you have them. You can also share posts that you find beneficial and tag them.

These actions and their content help create an opening to build trust and show that you value what they offer. Your brand should establish these connections so the influencers can see you as kind and helpful.

Personalized Outreach

Writing an outreach message via DM, email, or other means must grab their attention. You don’t want to cold pitch, but use their social media to establish yourself first. Since you may be reaching out to many influencers simultaneously, you may want to create a more generic outline for your PR campaign.

But you must remember to customize those messages to each individual influencer. Take time to show that you understand their style, or, like a recent post, show that you’ve taken notice of them so they’ll, in turn, take notice of you.

If your brand is fun or quirky, convey that in your message. Whatever personality or voice you would use for clients needs to reflect in your outreach to influencers so they can see what you’re all about.

More Than Money

Partnerships can be mutually beneficial for both you and the influencer, so keep that in mind when you decide what to offer with a collaboration. This is especially significant if you want your influencer to become a more prominent brand ambassador for your products/services.

Think about what value or incentive you can receive from working with you besides money. Developing long-term relationships requires more than just compensation. Compensation is good, but you should always come to the table with more to create a crafted, carefully thought-out offering.

Consider providing exclusive access to your services or a free product, a percentage of which they can give as a referral to build up more free stuff. You could also provide the influencers with free training to enhance their skills or show you trust their creative style by allowing them free reign over how they post for you.

Communicate Clear Expectations

Before you get too overboard with what you are giving the influencer, make sure you have a clear picture of what your brand expects from them. Some questions you should answer right off the bat may include:

• What are your campaign goals?
• How do you want their posts to look? 
• How much will they receive in compensation?
• How often do they need to post?

You should also do some extra work to help promote actively user-generated content across your brand’s social media channels. This will show the influencers that you love their work and want your audience to see it, strengthening and building upon your relationship.

Manage Influencers Effectively

Influencer marketing is an excellent tool for your brand. In fact, 84% of people trust online reviews, so having someone rave about your business will only help. 

Prove that you care about the influencer and be consistent with reaching out so you can establish and build relationships for beneficial partnerships. You can easily follow up with more leads, adjust your products or services as you receive feedback, and analyze results.