Are you on the verge of your first campaign with an influencer or multiple influencers? Or maybe you’ve done a lot, but would like to go through the checklist with us to make sure you didn’t forget anything. In this and in any other case, we invite you to read.
Where should cooperation with an influencer start?
From cooperation with the client, and more precisely, the joint creation of a specific plan for the campaign. Depending on the goal of the whole action, different influencers will be the ones who will fulfill the task set before them. What is your client most interested in? Would you like to raise “brand awareness” around a new product or does it focus entirely on sales? What KPIs will you have to account for after completing your activities with the influencer? You need to know this at the beginning of cooperation.
When planning a campaign, you may encounter two situations. The first: your concept or client will emphasize cooperation with specific names. Perhaps there are marketing variables behind blogger A that you will be able to turn to your advantage during the campaign. Second: you don’t have a specific candidate.
How to find an influencer?
Let’s assume that the strategy of the whole action is ready and the only thing you are missing are the perfect candidates for an influencer. What remains is diligent research, which will allow to select those that meet the criteria established during the work on the project’s strategy. There are tools that can help make this process faster and more effective. What apps can you use? Of course, if you do not use the help of a platform like indaHash or Reach a Blogger.
* InfluencerTool which offers a powerful database necessary to find the right influencer. You can check each record (bloggers, celebrities, public figures) in terms of metrics related to fans, reach and their increases and decreases. In addition, a very interesting functionality is the cloud of phrases most often used by a given person.
* Social Blade allows you to quickly, without prior registration, look at the statistics of the selected blogger. I recommend this tool in particular for the initial analysis of YouTube channels. Sometimes a simple set of Social Blade stats can detect a fake, as you can read more about in Wojtek Kardyś’s article: http://eura7.click/13
* Don’t forget about two powerful tools that you already know very well – hashtags and Google search. The former will lead you to people who match the profile of the influencer you are looking for, directly on a given medium/social channel. A well-known and popular search engine gives you the opportunity to narrow down the results, which significantly speeds up your research. How to narrow the results in the Google search engine? http://eura7.click/14
* You can always look for help on Facebook groups like: Influencer Polska. Colleagues from the industry will be happy to provide support in research, and maybe the ideal candidates for influencers will apply themselves.
Good advice: start reporting your work at the research stage. It will be a diary kept more for you than for the client. Choose any tool, notebook, spreadsheet, whatever. Note down e-mail addresses, phone numbers and your comments. Write down at what stage of talks you are with individual people, whether the package has already been sent to Mr. Adam and whether Mrs. Beata has already sent back the completed contract with the agency. All this will allow you to perfectly understand the situation at individual stages of work and respond quickly to inquiries from Account Managers/Project Managers or the client himself.
How to “talk” to an influencer?
You have already selected the candidates and you are faced with the challenge of establishing contact with them. Fortunately, you don’t have to search for mutual friends or search through an archaic phone book. You can find the e-mail address in special tabs on the blog or on the YouTube home page. What if the micro-influencer running a blog on Instagram didn’t leave contact information there? Just send him a message through the Instagram platform itself. As a last resort, you can try to search for private profiles on Facebook and contact via Messenger.
ANDinfluencers are people tooTherefore, when editing the first message, do not create a business and accounting offer that puts you to sleep at the very beginning. On the other hand, too much freedom in communication is also not good. You’re just writing an ice-breaking message. You have done a solid research, so you probably know the work of a given influencer. If you feel like giving him a high five for the last movie or adding your two cents to the entry about the best burgers in town, this is a very good time to do it. Thus, at the outset, determine that there are people on both sides of the computer.
How to work with an influencer?
From the very beginning, when you reach an agreement on remuneration and scope of work, try to establish clear rules of cooperation regarding reporting activities and information flow. If the influencer anticipates a publication such as Instastories or Snapchat, it is worth asking for these video materials to be sent directly to your e-mail inbox or to another selected place. Your client will certainly want to see the fruits of cooperation, and “disappearing” formats do not make it easier.
You should also set any deadlines at the beginning. Their absence will cause chaos, which may affect the results of the action. After all, your communication plan may provide for a correlation between the influencer’s publications and, for example, the launch of a new product. Even if this example does not apply to you, agree on a time frame together. Nothing will happen if, with the knowledge of both parties, a date changes, but both parties will still know where they are.
Also, don’t forget to keep reporting to yourself. I assume that you have already created your knowledge base about the project at the research stage. It remains for you to conscientiously supplement it with each subsequent step of the influencers. Although you can try to remember every detail, in the case of an action involving more than 5 influencers, it may turn out to be very difficult, and with, for example, 30 – completely impossible.
How to report a completed action with influencers?
An extremely strong point of action with influencers, from the brand’s perspective, is content. If during the initial arrangements, and then in a more formal form – on the contract, you obtained copyrights to photos, videos and other intellectual goods created by influencers, it is worth taking care of their proper archiving. Gather everything into one package, place it in the cloud and/or on a remote server in the company. Don’t forget to send it to the client as well.
If at the stage of preliminary arrangements you obliged influencers to provide you with statistics after the planned end of the action, you have nothing to worry about. Did you miss this point? Do not worry. Write a polite e-mail, and when all participants of the action send you the results of their posts and entries, submit it in a legible report that you will present to your client. Remember to highlight the indicators directly related to the goal of the whole action. It is worth explaining individual sub-points, indicating whether a given number is relatively large or relatively low, and drawing final conclusions that will be valuable in the future.
The most important issue of cooperation with influencers!
Never send bulk emails/messages to influencers! Treat each of them individually, as you would like to be treated by your superiors.
PS Influencer is your business partner and you should care about such a relationship with him!
