How do you balance strong creator relationships with the more difficult aspects of influencer marketing (i.e budget negotiations, performance metrics, etc.)?
This is the question we posed a few weeks ago at our IMPACT London event to Bella Clark, Head of Influencer and Partnerships at Lipton, Maria Ogundeji, EU Influencer Marketing Manager at Samsung, and Amy Wanstall, Influencer Marketing and Communications Lead at Coty UK.
During this panel discussion, these three brilliant influencer marketers break down the intricacies of developing strong, long-term creator partnerships.
Long-Term Creator Partnerships Rely on Great Briefs
“With the creator brief, you need to go slow to go fast. Craft a clear and specific brief that shares your brand’s guard rails but doesn’t stiffen the creator’s creativity. Make it easy for your creators so you don’t waste time later on with multiple rounds of edits and amends.” - Bella Clark, Head of Influencer and Partnerships at Lipton
Let’s be real, both marketers' and creators’ worst nightmares involve going through an endless amount of edits to the content that has been created. To prevent too much back and forth with your creator partner, you need to craft an “impeccable brief.”
Here are a few tips from Bella, Maria and Amy on what should be included in your brief to creators:
- Get specific: Include your objectives, timelines, and guidelines for the content. Be thorough in providing clear and specific details. Again, this will avoid the endless rounds of edits with your creator partner and legal team.
- Make it pretty: Take the time to make it an enjoyable experience for the creator to look through. Use your brand colors, share picture examples, and make it ✨ shine✨!
- Get personal: Bella shared that sometimes she’ll film herself doing a video of what the brand envisions for the campaign. A) This shows exactly what you’re envisioning and B) provides a human touchpoint to the experience. If you don’t have time to film, make sure you’re providing examples of what you are looking for.
- Talk it through: Guide your creator partner through the campaign brief and idea. Let them ask you questions, and ask them what ideas they have for the content after reviewing it. If you can, get on the phone with them so you can get that human touchpoint.
“I like to sit down with the creator and share what our goal for the campaign is. I always like to ask what their ideas are and how they plan to bring them to life. At the end of the day, this content is going to live on the creator’s page, so as long as their audience resonates with the content that’s a win for us.” Maria Ogundeji, EU Influencer Marketing Manager at Samsung
Pro tip: Start crafting your specific and personalized influencer brief with this handy template.
Long-Term Creator Partnerships Require Experimentation
“We’ve focused our strategy on building strong relationships with creators and having “always on” programs. These longer term partnerships have led us to have more upfront and honest conversations – whether it’s being transparent with our budget constraints for a campaign, or being able to talk through why a post didn’t perform well. In the end, it’s benefiting both our brand and our creators.” - Amy Wanstall, Influencer Marketing and Communications Lead at Coty UK
Just like any relationship, longer-term creator partnerships require attention, care, and a growth mindset. Maria likes to call this the “test and learn” approach – it’s all about building the habit of evaluating performance, and working closely with creator partners to figure out how to up your content game for future campaigns.
There will be a time when a piece of content doesn’t perform as well as you’d hoped for. When this happens, keep these points in mind when discussing the results with your creator partner post-campaign:
- Reflect internally first: Could you have briefed the creator better? Were the content guidelines too strict? Partnerships are a two way street, so before you place blame, make sure you’ve reflected on how you communicated and orchestrated the campaign first.
- Ask open ended questions: Instead of heading straight to the data and performance, ask your creator partner about how they felt the campaign went and performed. You can ask questions like “What would you do differently next time?” or “What aspects of the campaign would you change?” or “What kind of feedback did you get from your audience on this content?”
- Provide solutions: Go beyond just providing feedback and provide ideas/solutions that the creator can act on so future content for campaigns perform better. Bonus points if you can make this a collaborative moment with your creator partner — invite them to riff off of the solutions that you bring to the table! The goal should always be finding ways to tweak the content so that it will resonate best with the creator’s audience.
The beauty of longer-term creator partnerships is that they can (and should!) evolve over time. Figure out the strengths of your creator partners and where they best fit into your strategy in the advocacy funnel.
Long-term Creator Partnerships Last If You Put in the Work
Strong, long-term influencer relationships can take a long time and a lot of effort, meaning that not every creator partnership is built for the long haul.
It’s important to be able to identify the ones that are worth your time and adjust your relationship building strategies as your brand’s (and the creators’) needs change.
A few parting thoughts from Amy, Maria and Bella on how to sustain long-term creator partnerships include:
- Get to know your creator’s talent manager: Talent agents are often the key to creators, so you want to build a relationship with them as well. Amy shared that this is a key part of Coty’s strategy and has helped in building strong partnerships with creators.
- Focus on relationship building events: Creators want to connect with your brand and one another, so provide them opportunities to do so! Just make sure to focus on your brand and product second. The main focus should be on nurturing the relationships with your creator partners.
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