Everything You Need to Know About Influencer Marketing Collaboration

What is cyanoacrylate and why should you care?

If collaboration is the glue that binds brands and influencers on the road to success, trust is the cyanoacrylate, the main ingredient in super glue, is what makes them successful.

Glue is a binding agent that makes two surfaces adhere together. Once they’ve been linked, they’re stronger together. This is how successful influencer relationships and collaborations work. Like glue, the two of you are stronger, more successful as one. 

We've all used glue, but have you ever given thought to what makes it so strong? It’s cyanoacrylate. Many marketers recognize the value of influencer marketing to drive word of mouth awareness and purchase consideration but miss the mark on the cyanoacrylate of collaboration; which is trust. 

Best Practices

Best practices dictate that there should be an agreement or statement of work between the two parties defining guidelines on how the relationship will operate and what’s expected of both parties. It’s important to protect both sides to ensure a path of success. After all, you can’t make glue without a formula!

Your agreement should have requested use of brand hashtags, FTC disclosure requirements and on-brand messaging or campaign alignment. Where things go wrong with many marketers is when they overly dictate an extensive set of rules and requests. Don’t misunderstand, do’s and dont’s are important, but if you’re demanding specific looks, shots, lighting, placements, calls to action and extremely specific or lengthy copy, you’re doing it wrong. That’s how you create an advertisement -- and you’re better served doing exactly that. If all you want or need is Crazy Glue, don’t ask someone else to make it just buy it!

Where the Magic Happens

Choosing to work with influencers means you realize that the reason they have a dedicated following is because they have developed and perfected their style and voice. That is what has earned them the trust and respect of their audience. Their most engaged followers are looking for content and recommendations that aligns the influencer’s values, beliefs and persona. 

When you can have that influencer endorse your products or services, you get authentic consideration from their admirers. This is the moment the magic happens. To ensure the success of your campaign you want the creator to bring their style to your brand. That’s how you generate positive sentiment and intent for your brand through the collaboration. Said another way, that is how you make the glue work.

Once you’re ready to let the influencer be in their own driver seat with your activation as the fuel and you as their co-pilot, you’re ready to build a tie that binds with them, and their followers. 

Now that you realize the power in the collaboration you’re ready to consider the best ways to work with influencers. 

Collaboration Types

There are many effective ways you can collaborate with influencers to achieve your marketing goals. Working with influencers can help you raise awareness for your products and services, create word of mouth and is a high speed, low friction way to create content. 

Brands find content collaboration with creatives to be an effective way to accomplish a plethora of marketing goals in a very fun way. 

But what are the ways in which you can work with influencers? When most marketers think of influencers they typically think of sponsored posts, where they’re essentially paying for the creator to endorse their product but there are many options to explore. 

Below are 6 awesome ways you can collaborate with influencers to accomplish your marketing goals:

Sponsored Social Media Content

Partnering with influencers in exchange for sponsored social media posts is the most common type of influencer collaboration. An influencer creates and shares content to promote your brand on their social media accounts. In exchange for their time, effort, creativity and sharing with their followers, they receive compensation in the form of revenue, goods, services, gift cards or even exposure. 

If you’re sponsoring content in exchange for a post to social media, as an added bonus you can reach more people by boosting their post through targeting as a third party advertiser through your Facebook business account. This saves you time and money while delivering authentic peer recommendations.

Gifting

Gifting is similar to sponsored content, with one major caveat, the brand or agency offers free goods or services. The influencer in this case is not required to post any content and therefore there is no expectation from the brand. 

It’s merely a show of appreciation with the hope that the content creator likes what they have been gifted and would like to make a recommendation to their audience. 

This is a really great option for products and consumer packaged goods. One pitfall to beware of when using gifting to collaborate, it could result in negative reviews or a misrepresentation of the brand. If you really want to hit your marketing benchmarks, consider opening a budget for sponsorship instead.

Takeovers

A takeover is a great way for a brand and an influencer to make glue that mutually benefits them both. In a takeover, a brand asks an influencer to generate and curate content to be shared on the brand’s social media for a given period of time. Typically takeovers last for a day. 

All the content in a takeover is written by the influencer in their tone and most often with their own content. All of that content is then shared with the brand’s followers with notes that it’s been created by the third party. 

Whichever party has a larger audience, the other gets the benefit of follower consideration and gain. The influencer gains authority on the subject or product by getting access to brand loyalists. Bonus: it’s one less day that you have to create content for your social channels. 

Brand Ambassador Programs

When an influencer truly has a strong connection to the right target audience for a brand, it’s time to consider a brand ambassador program. These are typically sponsored relationships where influencers use the brand’s products on an ongoing basis and continually promote them online to their followers. 

They take a lot of time, effort and creativity but often yield the best results. Why do you think you’ve seen that super poxy commercial so many times? More impressions lead to more consideration. More consideration leads to more trust. More trust means sales conversions.

An ambassador program lifts up both the brand and the influencer into a super glue situation. They require a lot of cyanoacrylate but for the brand bold enough, there is a payoff. 

Sponsored Blog Posts

Instagram and YouTube are incredibly popular channels for influencer marketing, but they aren’t the only ones. There are all kinds of influencers out there, especially in the CPG and recipe space, that regularly update and maintain blogs. For their fans that want to go deeper than an Instagram post or YouTube video, they can engage with the content creator through longer form written or video content. 

As a brand, you can double down on your glue making through collaborations that include long form blog content and promotion through social channels. Blogs can also be shared on the influencer’s owned social media accounts and paid media campaigns. Typically blog followers feel a deeper connection with the creator than those working exclusively with social media. That means a stronger connection and higher chance of purchase consideration when the influencer recommends your brand.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging takes blog collaborations to a new level. This is when you work with a blogger to create content that lives on your own brand website or social channels. 

Not only does your brand get the value of the influencer’s authentic recommendation and their audience but you receive the benefits for the lifetime of the content. 

The influencer receives the benefit of validation as a subject matter expert and possibly getting residual audience to their blog or social channels. 

SUCCESS = CYANOACRYLATE

The key to all of these types of influencer marketing collaborations is trust. If you want your influencer marketing efforts to be successful, choose the right type of collaboration and then trust the influencer to represent your brand in their voice. You’ll be laughing all the way to the glue factory.