7 effective practices for better brand collaborations with influencers

Cultivating authentic partnerships can boost credibility and expand your brand’s reach to new audiences and markets. Building these connections requires effort, but the payoff can skyrocket your sales success like fireworks.

Last year, BBQGuys, the outdoor entertainment experts, experienced unexpected results by teaming up with nine influencers to promote its outdoor living furniture and Blaze outdoor kitchen appliances.

These influencers ran the gamut from cookbook author Shubhra Ramineni and travel writer Caitlin Palumbo to Michelin Award-winning chef Sammy Monsour.  Each showcased what BBQGuys outdoor entertaining products can do to upgrade a customer’s cookout clout. 

The campaign played to the brand’s and its partners’ shared strengths and values. The result? A cool 105 pieces of authentic creator content showing real people using BBQGuys products to enjoy life. More than 48k people engaged with the content from these trusted experts, and 1k clicked the link to learn more or purchase. 

A success story like that requires a true partnership: communication, collaboration, and nurturing. 

Here’s how you can do it. These seven tips will help you form better brand collaborations with influencers:

1. Determine your goals to align with partner compensation
2. Get to know your influencers to build lasting relationships
3. Adapt to your audience so you can connect authentically
4. Automate your campaign to stay focused on priorities
5. Measure your partner’s performance metrics
6. Communicate clearly and often
7. Diversify your program to reach more people

#1: Determine your goals to align with partner compensation

Successful partnerships are built on well-defined goals. Goals provide a clear direction for your creator partners to work toward and help you measure performance. It’s up to your brand to communicate your goals to your partners so you can work together to achieve them. 

Your goals can guide you toward the right incentives to motivate partners. Aligning your program’s goals with compensation will galvanize creators to score big wins for your brand. According to our research with Adweek, most creators prefer a hybrid compensation model. This model combines a flat fee with a performance-based commission. The creator is compensated for their hard work and motivated to go the extra mile.

Track each stage of the customer’s journey with impact.com / creator. Ensure you reach your goals and reward influencer partners for their contributions.

#2: Get to know your influencers to build lasting relationships

Influencers are people, too. A successful partnership requires both sides to try to learn about each other. Onboard your partners and align them with your brand values and what success looks like for you.

Most importantly, give them creative freedom. Adweek’s research with impact.com indicates that 39 percent of influencers rate creative control as crucial when considering proposals and forming long-term partnerships with brands.

WARC’s research with impact.com reveals that the longer you work with a creator, the better results you’ll see. Creating a strong personal bond is crucial for a long-term partnership, which means being mindful of creators’ challenges when working with brands. According to the same research, creators and brands struggle most with:

• Brands: Correctly linking the creator compensation with the value they bring
• Creators: Balancing creative freedom with the brand’s requirements
• Brands: Providing creators with clear metrics related to their performance

Overcoming these challenges will keep creators motivated to work with your brand.

#3: Adapt to your audience so you connect authentically

Every audience you want to reach needs an approach tailored to its needs and tastes. A successful influencer program requires constant testing and refinement to match the right audience and the best creative approach.

Start with identifying your target audiences. Once you know who you want to reach, work with your influencer partners to find the best ways to reach them authentically. Audiences respond best to non-scripted and authentic content.

Tip: Position your brand as a status symbol that inspires consumers to post about it. As much as 47 percent of consumers love it when you repost their user-generated content (UGC).

Subaru gains 1.3 million views with UGC 

Car company Subaru launched the #MeetAnOwner campaign to build a community of passionate, loyal customers. The brand hired creators like YouTube influencer Devin Graham to create content showcasing the adventurous lives of Subaru Impreza owners. Graham created a video showing him and his friends using a slip-and-slide to launch themselves off a cliff and parachute down—hitting an impressive 1.3 million views. 

Videos from these creator partnerships inspired viewers to post their own content celebrating the car they love and the adventures they take it on.

YouTuber Devin Graham’s video perfectly merges entertaining content with product placement, engaging adventurous audiences and inspiring them to share their own stories. 

#4: Automate your campaign to stay focused on priorities

Managing multiple influencers across your campaigns can be tedious without the right tools. impact.com / creator offers a marketplace to filter for influencers across follower size, niche, and more. Once you’ve found your perfect match, you can automate the fastest payouts in the industry, as well as contracts and performance tracking reports, all in one platform.

GetSmarter, an online education platform, used impact.com / creator and it’s managed services team to run its entire influencer campaign—from influencer recruitment to negotiating rates, performance tracking, and content amplification. This multi-tiered strategy scored the platform more than 8 million impressions and 1.5 million reach.

GetSmarter commissioned creators to create content encouraging sign-ups to their online education platform.

#5: Measure your partner’s performance metrics

Nearly two out of three brands will expand their budget for influencer marketing this year. That comes with the pressure to perform well and justify the increase. With the right tools, you can use data to prove your budget’s value.

To capture the data needed to prove the partnership program’s worth and hone its strategy, brands need to track partner performance at every campaign step. impact.com / creator’s platform lets you get granular and see where your campaign is flourishing so you can invest in high-performing partners and sunset underperforming partners and strategies.

Determine what kind of content performs best on specific social media platforms, the messaging audiences respond to, and keep your partners in the loop to adjust their content as you go.

impact.com / creator allows you to track each partner’s performance across all social platforms. Measure everything from reach to impressions, clicks, and more.

#6: Communicate clearly and often 

Communication can make or break your campaign. Think of your brand as the plane taking consumers to their destination (a great purchase and product experience) and the creators as the pilot. Clear directions ensure a smooth take-off.

In impact.com’s research with Adweek, influencers emphasize the importance of receiving clear expectations of performance, creative briefs, and examples of what your brand wants. Creators rank the overall experience working with your brand among the top three drivers of satisfaction. So, collaborate closely with your partners and let them weigh in about their audience’s response. 

This excerpt from Ghosted No More: The secrets to thriving brand-creator partnerships emphasizes the importance of clear communication between brands and creators. 

#7: Diversify your program to reach more people

Creators come in all sizes. Big celebrity influencers may have a greater reach, but smaller niche creators punch above their weight in terms of audience engagement. Recruit a diverse set of partners to reach wider audiences with nuanced preferences.

Rinck Advertising, a full-service creative agency, commissioned a mix of micro-, macro-, and mega-influencers to promote the hair products of its client, TONI&GUY. The influencers created styling videos that reached different audiences, resulting in nearly 300,000 video views and 500,000+ impressions. 

@annasarelly boasts 1.2m Instagram followers—just one of the many influencer tiers Rinck Advertising used to reach a wide audience for TONI&GUY’s products.

FAQs

Strong partnerships build stronger campaigns

Strong relationships are essential in the creator economy, but forming those relationships takes work. Clear goals, good communication, and a strong understanding of how your values and target audiences align will put you on the right path toward a productive partnership.  

With impact.com / creator, you have all the tools you need to build better partnerships. You can easily find right-fit partners, measure performance, automate tasks, and keep partner communication all in one place. Sign up for impact.com / creator or request a demo today.