How to Work With a Social Media Influencer in Five Different Ways

In such a short time, influencer marketing has cemented itself as one of the most preferable strategies for many brands to expand their audiences and increase their sales and conversions. It gains even more favor considering it typically costs significantly less than classic forms of advertisement. However, a surprisingly high amount of businesses and entrepreneurs have admitted that the concept is still unfamiliar for them to optimize the reaped benefits. Below, you’re going to read about five different types of collaboration you can make with social media influencers that have been tried and tested.

5 Types of the Most Common Influencer Collaborations

• Giving out products as gift

The first method to work with influencers is to gifting your products to them for free. It is a low-costs and effective ways, as the only incurred cost is your product. This approach is used by plenty of brands to encourage the influencers to use, review, and feature the products in their contents.

 

That being said, the drawback of this practice is that you cannot put any obligation to the influencers to promote the products, due to the fact that it doesn’t involve any contractual agreement. The influencers may decide to share the products with their followers if they like them enough, and your brand is going to get return by gaining great exposure.

 

Gifting products is an ideal strategy to use by companies that operates in the clothing, makeup, skincare, books, and similar types of products. In short, it is suitable for brands that put out relatively low-priced items.

 

• Sponsored content on social media

Another effective type of collaboration with influencers that’s deemed as effective by a lot of businesses is sponsored content. This approach requires you brand to make agreement with the influencers, where they need to create and post contents for promoting purpose.

 

The companies usually make brief of requirement details of the content and then reach their selected influencers by approaching them directly or contacting their agencies. For each post they made, the influencers are going to receive fee. 

 

This method is suitable for a lot of products and services types. Chance is you’ve already come across influencers who promote various products and services from numerous brands on their social media platforms. The impact can be increased as well by raising the engagement and exposure through working with multiple influencers in a single campaign.

 

In order to optimize the impact of this specific approach of influencer marketing, it’s best not to overly control the brief. Offer some room for the influencers to be creative with their contents, as they are the ones who knows their followers better than you. Besides, audience is going to feel less interested if the content comes off as scripted and inauthentic.

 

• Brand ambassador programs 

Want to take your collaboration with the influencers to the next level? Then you may consider using a brand ambassador program. It involves more extensive collaboration with the selected influencers to promote the products online.

 

The influencer who’s chosen to be the ambassador of your brand will post and share their daily experiences of using the promoted products or services. They may also be the representative person for your brands for important events.

 

Moreover, you may also make the influencers as the face of the company. The extensiveness of this method requires you to choose your influencer thoroughly, as they have to suit the image of the brand and share common value with the company. The best way to utilize this approach is by using another method first to test the water.

In general, businesses can earn valuable rewards by working with influencers. Successful influencer marketing campaign will help to raise the awareness, exposure, and reputation of your brand, which will translate into higher sales. However, first, make sure you employ the most suitable type of influencer marketing methods.