11 Tips For Successful Influencer Brand Partnerships

Do not index

Consider you're a creator on YouTube, and you've just hit a milestone. The hard work is paying off. But as views, likes, and subscribers grow, you start to wonder how to get sponsored on Youtube. Why? Along with the success of your channel comes the potential for partnerships with brands that want to leverage your success to reach their target audience. Influencer brand partnerships can be incredibly lucrative, especially for creators just starting to get noticed. The more you learn about how to get sponsored on YouTube, the better prepared you will be to secure lucrative partnerships with brands. This guide will help you get there by exploring the influencer marketing process and how to make it work for you.

How Do Influencer Brand Partnerships Work?

Influencer Brand Partnerships

Influencer partnerships are when a brand and an influencer work together in a collaborative relationship. The influencer acts as a spokesperson for that company, destination, or service for a predetermined time. Influencer partnerships represent collaborative relationships between brands and individuals with substantial online followings, known as influencers. The brands hope to leverage the influencer’s reach and credibility to promote products, services, or messages to the Influencer’s audience.

How Do Influencers Get Paid Partnerships?

Influencers get paid partnerships in several ways. First and foremost, the Influencer has to have a desirable brand or platform for the company. Brands will email the Influencer directly with a collaboration opportunity. Brands might DM the influencers via Instagram or another social media platform. If the Influencer has an Influencer Talent Manager, the brand could reach out directly to the manager.

Benefits of Influencer Brand Partnerships For Your Company

Influencer Brand Partnerships

1. Boost Brand Recognition and Visibility

When influencers create content featuring your products, they help expose your brand to their dedicated audience. This is especially valuable for new e-commerce businesses that don’t have an engaged following. It’s also a fantastic way to create hype around a new product or collection launch. For instance, Athletic Greens used TikTok influencers to spread awareness of their nutritional supplements among health-conscious Gen Zers.

These social media influencers created content that showed how the supplement can become a part of their audience’s daily routines. The campaign’s success speaks for itself. The hashtags #athleticgreens and #athleticgreenspartner have over 90.6 million views and 39.5 million views, respectively.

2. Enter New Markets

Influencer marketing can help you find untapped niches and reach wider audiences. Take the food brand King's Hawaiian, which partnered with creators to create their #foodtok. They worked with 16 creators who produced slider recipes for 'Slider Sunday' using the brand's delicious sweet bread. They used hashtags like #mealinspo to reach new viewers. The key lesson here? Identify and collaborate with relevant influencers whose social following overlaps with the niche audiences you’re trying to achieve.

The first step to encouraging sales through your social media? Build an engaged social following with influencer marketing. As influencers talk about you and get their audience's interest in your brand, followers will likely follow you, too. This will hugely benefit your social media marketing efforts. A smart tactic? Partner up on some giveaway campaigns with your social media influencers. The trick of asking people to follow your brand in return for a chance to win a gift will work a charm. After all, everyone loves a freebie.

4. Receive Product Feedback

You can also use influencer marketing to source feedback on a new product, collection, or product feature. Because many influencers engage with specific niche audiences, they’ll have valuable insights into what your ideal buyers look for in a product. Plus, they can share detailed feedback by trying your products for themselves. Feminine hygiene company Thinx did just that.

They invited 25 influencers for a slumber party event in Los Angeles to get feedback on their new athleisure line. Thinx used the information they gathered to launch clothing their consumers would be interested in and grew their sales by giving influencers unique discount codes. This led to $810,000 in revenue with a per-customer acquisition cost of $35.20.

5. Gain Credibility and Trust

Content that talks positively about your brand can help you build a good reputation and is essential for enhancing brand awareness. As influencers discuss you and endorse your products, you’ll slowly build trust with your target audience. Skin + Me uses influencers and user-generated content (UGC) in their Facebook ads. From people unboxing their products to before and after videos to show how their skin has improved after using their products — this is sure to build trust and credibility with their target market.

This tactic has worked so well that customers often post their own before and after pics in the comments section showing the improvements they saw in using their products. This just adds to the positive perception of your brand when customers are making purchasing decisions.

6. Drive Sales and Repeat Purchases

Influencers can help increase sales directly as they share discount codes or recommend your product and indirectly as your brand awareness grows. Intimates brand KNIX collaborates with influencers for this reason — using custom discount codes to drive sales. For example, influencer Hilary Henderson promotes Knix's products via her Instagram page.

By checking the post descriptions, you can grab her discount code, HILARYHCOMEDY_KNIXLOVE. Every influencer has a different code, so when someone uses it in their online store, the team at Knix can quickly determine which influencer has had the most impact. Moreover, if your current customers see their favorite influencers share content about your products, they'll feel encouraged to place repeat orders.

7. Generate Unique Content for Your Brand

Creating new and creative ideas is part of the job of a marketer. But it can get tiring having to continuously think of new ideas, especially if you're a small team. Experienced influencers can bring fresh, out-of-the-box marketing ideas to the table. They'll have a new perspective on your brand and can offer creative ways to promote your product - with little effort on your part.

8. Use Micro-Influencers to Keep Costs Down

Another benefit of influencer marketing - and one your boss will love - is that it can be cost-effective. Running influencer campaigns is 30% cheaper than most advertising and marketing strategies. For this very reason, Doe Lashes‘ founder, Jason Wong, chose influencer marketing over other paid ads for the first 4 months of his brand’s launch.

Jason found that sending a shipment of lashes to micro-influencers would cost less than $10 per shipment. And if he made even one sale from an influencer, he’d break even. If he got 2-3 sales, he’d profit and slowly start gaining traction. This is precisely what happened—one month of influencer marketing led to $2.6K in daily sales by effectively reaching niche audiences!

9. Educate Buyers About Your Product

A non-salesy way to market to potential customers is to educate them on how to use or style your product—depending on what you sell. By thoroughly briefing influencers about your product, you can allow them to create content that engages their target market about your product. Not only does this help grow your sales, but it also encourages customers to create user-generated content featuring your product. This, in turn, gives you more exposure and grows brand awareness.

Take a page from Supergoop's TikTok influencer marketing campaign. The sunscreen brand reached its ideal audience by pairing with influencers in fashion, lifestyle, and beauty niches. Their influencers made creative content that highlighted Supergoop sunscreen's features in a light-hearted and entertaining way. This aligned with the brand's voice and educated the influencers' followers on the importance of wearing sunscreen. They also showed how Supergoop's clear SPF50 differed from the traditional, white-cast sunscreen people are used to.

10. Build a Bank of Content for Repurposing

If you're a small or growing marketing team, finding time to create high-quality content can be hard. You're already busy with product shots, banner ads, email campaigns, etc. Working with influencers means that content is made for you and you can repurpose it across your campaigns and channels. Brands like Starface, for example, use pieces of content created by their customers to enhance their checkout.

Using real people will add a personal touch to your brand's online store, which helps reduce friction when customers are getting ready to buy. However, you'll need to keep track of contracts and image usage rights. If you have content from last year's campaign, it is essential to determine if you have permission to reuse it next year. Using content without permission can lead to severe brand damage.

11. Collect Data to Understand Your Audience Better

Next on the list of influencer marketing benefits is the advantage of collecting data about your niche audiences. As gathering third-party audience data becomes harder, working with influencers can help you source audience data. The more data you have, the easier it is to create better and more audience-relevant marketing content. Your influencer will have data on audience demographics. That’s age, gender, and location — broken up into the different social platforms they work on. They’ll also be able to tell you about the engagement, reach, and impressions their posts get.

This will be useful in understanding how well your campaigns are going and whether they resonate with their audience. For direct sales attribution, it’s worth setting up tracking codes to see who’s clicked through to your website and checkouts. You’ll need to give this to your influencer before they start the campaign. However, not all influencers are open to sharing their audience analytics. Building long-term relationships with influencers can often lead to them giving you access to their demographic data from social media platforms and any other tools they use. This, in turn, helps you make better-informed, data-driven decisions.

12. Work With Experts to Boost Brand Authority

If you’ve good brand authority, your customers view you as the subject-matter expert in your industry. Growing your brand authority will increase brand awareness, and you’ll have a better chance of helping prospects overcome objections. To increase brand authority and focus on enhancing brand awareness, you could interview experts as part of your content strategy, create a podcast, run webinars, and be a guest on other people’s platforms.

13. Turn Influencers Into Brand Ambassadors

Another key benefit of influencer marketing is the opportunity to build long-term partnerships with your content creators, leading to increased brand awareness. If they try out your products and genuinely love them, they’re more likely to post about them organically and recommend them to friends and people outside their following. Just look at this case study from Grin, who helped an online brand, Inkbox, create an influencer campaign to build a community of brand ambassadors. They got 70+ creators to post about their products across different marketing channels. This, in turn, created a 40% uptick in unprompted creator posts. If you can cultivate genuine connections with your influencers, you can turn them into loyal brand ambassadors.

14. Strengthen Your Online Community

Online communities are fantastic places for like-minded people to connect, chat, swap tips, and share advice on particular topics. Communities mainly flourish on social networks, which makes them a great place for brands to build connections with their customers. Just look at big brands Gymshark and GoPro to see what we mean. But creating a sense of community isn’t easy. You must establish a loyal customer base, an excellent online following, and an emotional connection with your audience. This is where influencers can help. Take Lick, a UK-based paint brand. They took a slightly different approach and encouraged their Director of Interior Design to be their ‘internal’ influencer.

Having this regular face show up on socials is essential in building a strong bond with their community. Amie, Head of Social Media and Creators at Lick, says: “It's nice for our community to know that there are real people at Lick, like Tash, who’re there to give our decorators help and advice on particular topics. This is important for our brand values as well. It's also given us a unique way to lean into video content across our key platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Plus, Tash creates the colors, so who better to tell our community about them than the person who makes them?

15. Get Better Quality Leads

As we mentioned, 82% of brands say they see better ‘quality’ leads from influencer marketing campaigns over any other campaign, especially when targeting niche audiences. That’s quite an impressive stat, and after learning about the influencer marketing benefits in this post, you can see why. By partnering with influencers who talk about your specific niche, you can reach a loyal audience that’ll be genuinely interested in your products.

Aha Creator streamlines brand partnerships for YouTube creators and businesses alike. We offer a done-for-you partnership service for brands to connect with the right creators. For content creators, we handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.

Influencer Marketing Automation

Platforms That Pay Content Creators

Social Media Influencer Partnerships

How Much Do Digital Creators Make

5 Niches Commonly Used by Influencers

Influencer Engagement

How Do Brand Deals Work

How to Reach Out to Brands as an Influencer

11 Tips For Successful Influencer Brand Partnerships

Influencer Brand Partnerships

1. Use Aha Creator to Find the Right Brand Partnership Opportunities

Aha Creator simplifies the process of brand partnerships for YouTube creators and businesses alike. We offer a done-for-you partnership service for brands to connect with the right creators. For content creators, we handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.

2. Set Clear Goals for Your Brand Partnerships

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.

3. Build Relationships With Your Influencers

Influencers are people, too. A successful partnership requires both sides 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's 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.

4. Listen Up

Utilize your existing social channels to identify conversations that consumers are already having. For example, are people asking consistent questions as they slide into your brand’s DMs? Is there a more extensive campaign that can be built around current conversations? Remember, social media is a two-way conversation. Use influencer campaigns to inform, address consumer needs, and have a little fun with it simultaneously.

5. Adapt to Your Audience

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 get 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).

6. Conceptualize Your Campaign

Align with your team on what type of campaign makes the most sense for your brand. Are you planning for an upcoming holiday? Do you need evergreen content? Is there an upcoming product launch? Before selecting the right influencers for the project, develop some foundational elements of your campaign. The influencers can drive some of the strategy and identify themes and initiatives, so influencers will not only be excited to apply and participate but also create excellent work.

7. 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. 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.

8. Customize Outreach

When identifying and vetting the perfect influencers for your program, it’s no secret that customized outreach will be more effective for your campaign. You don’t need to force it, but simply be authentic and share why you feel the influencer would be a great fit for your brand and, better yet, the specific campaign. Ask them to share their thoughts and experiences about the brand.

9. Ask Influencers Questions

Sometimes, agencies and brands forget that influencers are actual people. Think of it this way: it’d be bizarre for someone to offer a stranger a full-time job without asking a single question during the interview process and expecting that they will be successful. Ask them questions that can inform you if they are a good fit, or who knows, it could inform your entire strategy.

For example, suppose they have a personal tie or story surrounding your product or service. In that case, there may be an opportunity to extend the partnership and form an ambassador relationship with them. It’s essential that they authentically connect with the brand as sometimes a forced influencer #ad can be harmful to a brand if it isn’t executed with authenticity and in line with the lifestyle and preferences of the influencer.

10. Trust Them

This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s challenging to practice. As advertisers, we sometimes forget that creators genuinely know their audience better than we do, beyond just stats and numbers. You hired them for a reason, so trust them and let them create authentic work. Find the balance between giving guidelines and brand details while allowing them to work their magic.

11. 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 consider their audience’s response.

How to Email a Brand for Collaboration

Influencer Marketing Trends

Content Creator for Brands

How to Pitch Brands as an Influencer

YouTube Brand Connect

YouTube Sponsorship Websites

Partnerships for Small YouTube Channels

Benefits of Influencer Marketing

Benefits of Digital Collaboration

Best Influencer Brand Collaborations

Where To Find Suitable Influencers For Brand Partnerships?

Influencer Brand Partnerships

1. Aha Creator: Your Partner in Influencer Brand Partnerships

Aha Creator simplifies brand collaborations for YouTube creators and businesses. For brands, they provide a service that connects them with the right creators. Aha Creator handles the negotiations for brand deals for content creators, ensuring fair value for the creator’s influence. Their matching system pairs creators with relevant brands to maximize the potential for successful partnerships. Sign up for their waitlist to connect with opportunities that align with your content and values.

Social media is a great way to discover influencers. First, look for trending posts in your industry. If you notice a post going viral, check out who published it and whether they have a substantial following. Also, look at the comment section of a popular post to see if any influencers are engaging with it. If you’re looking for LinkedIn influencers, search a relevant keyword and set the filter to “Posts.” Scroll through the results and look for posts with a high level of engagement. A lot of engagement is usually an indicator that someone has a large audience.

3. Hashtag Searches: Find Influencers Creating Content About Your Niche

Use social media platforms’ search functions to search keywords and hashtags related to your products or services. For example, an ethical clothing brand looking for TikTok influencers might check out the platform’s #sustainablefashion hashtag. If you’re looking for Instagram influencers, use location-specific hashtags to find influencers in your area. Try a combination of your location, niche, and words like “influencer,” “creator,” “blogger,” or “vlogger” — like #atlantamomblogger.

4. Spy on Your Competitors to Find Influencers

Are your competitors working with influencers? While you might want to use different talent, check out their influencers’ audience and who they follow to find similar creators. Also, keep an eye on who gets a lot of likes or comments on your competitors’ posts, as they could be influencers, too.

5. Search Engines: The Original Influencer Database

Try using Google to search social media sites. Here’s how: Type “site:” followed by the website name you’re searching. Follow the website name with a single space and then type the search phrase. If you wanted to search for a beauty influencer in Detroit, you’d type the following into the search field: site:instagram.com “detroit beauty blogger.” A search like “your industry + influencers in X region” will help you find local influencers. You might also see some articles with lists of the best influencers in that region. For instance, if you’re a San Francisco-based cookware brand, a simple search for “Bay Area food influencer” generates millions of hits.

6. Ask Your Network for Influencer Recommendations

One of the easiest ways to find an influencer is to ask for recommendations. Contact your network—colleagues, employees, friends, industry contacts, business partners, etc.—and see if they know any influencers that would fit your criteria. You could also post about your influencer search on social media. Encourage your network to recommend or tag potential influencers in the comments and share or like the post to help boost its reach.

7. Meet Influencers at Events and Conferences

Influencers may work online, but you can still personally connect with potential partners at events and conferences. Try attending creator-specific events like VidCon or CreatorConf to discover new influencers and gain tips and inspiration to optimize your next campaign. Don’t you have the budget to participate? Look up some events and conferences in your industry and see who’s speaking at them. Event organizers often hire influencers as speakers as their sizable audiences will attract attendees.

Let’s be honest: Landing a sponsorship deal can feel overwhelming for even the most seasoned YouTube creators. Not only do you have to find the right brand, but there are also negotiations, contracts, deliverables, and a ton of additional details to organize before you get to the fun part—creating content with the brand. Aha Creator streamlines brand partnerships for YouTube creators and businesses alike. We offer a done-for-you partnership service for brands to connect with the right creators. For content creators, we handle the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Our matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations.

Sign up for our waitlist today, and we'll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.