11 Best Practices For Successful Social Media Influencer Partnerships

Do not index

Brands are pouring money into social media influencer partnerships, and for good reason. Research shows that up to 90 percent of consumers trust influencers more than brands. Social media influencer partnerships can help you get viral on YouTube and quickly build the credibility and authority you need to achieve your goals. Keep reading to learn more about how they work and how to get sponsored on Youtube. Aha Creator helps creators like you get sponsored on YouTube through brand partnership deals. With their help, you can achieve your goals through influencer marketing services.

1. Amplify Your Brand’s Visibility

When creators produce content that showcases your products, awareness of your brand will naturally increase among their audience. This is especially beneficial for new ecommerce companies that don’t have an established fan base. It’s also a fantastic way to create hype around an upcoming product or collection launch.

For example, Athletic Greens utilized TikTok influencers to spread the word about their nutritional supplements among health-conscious Gen Zers. These social media creators produced content illustrating how the supplement can become 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. Find Untapped Markets

Influencer partnerships can help you identify untapped markets and reach wider audiences. Take the food brand King’s Hawaiian, which partnered with creators to create its #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 is to 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? Building an engaged following with influencer marketing. As influencers talk about you and get their audience’s interest in your brand, their followers will likely want to check you out, too. This will hugely benefit your social media marketing efforts. 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. Gain Insights on Your Product

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. Build Credibility with Your Target Audience

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 showing 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 before-and-after pics in the comments section, showing the improvements they saw in using their products.

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 very reason, using custom discount codes to drive sales. For example, influencer Hilary Henderson promotes Knix’s products via her Instagram page.

You can grab her discount code, HILARYHCOMEDY_KNIXLOVE by checking the post descriptions. Every influencer has a different code, so when someone uses it on their online store, it’s easy for the team at Knix to know 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 Fresh Content for Your Audience

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. Leverage 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 percent cheaper than most advertising and marketing strategies. For this reason, Doe Lashes‘ founder, Jason Wong, chose influencer marketing over other paid ads for the first four 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. He’d profit and slowly gain traction if he got two to three sales. 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 by educating 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.

10. Build a Bank of Content for Repurposing

Finding time to create high-quality content can be challenging if you’re a small or growing marketing team. You’re already busy with product shots, banner ads, email campaigns, etc. Working with influencers means that content is created 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 they’re 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’s essential to determine if you have permission to reuse it the following year. Using content without permission can lead to some severe brand damage. Using a tool like Dash, you can set expiry dates for assets. This gives you and your team complete control over your content and helps maintain your brand's reputation.

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—age, gender, and location—broken up into the different social platforms they work on. They’ll also be able to tell you the engagement, reach, and impressions their posts get. This will be useful in understanding how well your campaigns are going and whether it’s resonating 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. Remember that 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. Collaborate 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 give you a better chance at 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.

One of our customers, Forthglade, does this well. As a dog food brand, they know their customers only want the best products for their furry friends. So, in addition to providing lots of tips on their blog, they work with different types of influencers like Dr. James Greenwood on their social media platforms to provide objective, expert advice on how to look after and care for your best friend.

13. Turn Influencers into Brand Ambassadors

Another critical 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 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 building a sense of community isn’t easy. You must establish a loyal customer base, a good 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. This is important for our brand values as well. It's also given us a unique way to lean into video content across our critical platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Plus, Tash creates the colors, so who better 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.

Influencer Marketing Automation

Platforms That Pay Content Creators

How Much Do Digital Creators Make

Influencer Brand Partnerships

5 Niches Commonly Used by Influencers

Influencer Engagement

How Do Brand Deals Work

How to Reach Out to Brands as an Influencer

Types of Influencer Collaboration

Social media posts featuring a brand's products or services provide a straightforward way for brands to partner with influencers. In these collaborations, influencers create content about a brand's product or service in exchange for a fee or product. These posts are typically tagged with #ad or #sponsored. Ideally, influencers promote brands they genuinely like while receiving compensation. For example, fitness brand Gymshark often collaborates with fitness influencers like Whitney Simmons and David Laid, who share workout content or product highlights with #ad or #sponsored tags. This allows Gymshark to reach the influencers' fitness-focused audiences and boost brand visibility.

2. Brand Ambassadors: Long-Term Partnerships

If you're a brand seeking to build long-term relationships with influencers while boosting traffic and business, consider a brand ambassador. This influencer consistently represents your brand through their content over an extended period. Brand ambassadors align with your company's values and serve as the face of your brand to your target audience. For example, Daniel Wellington's ambassador program is widely known. The watch brand partners with a diverse range of influencers who consistently promote the brand by sharing photos with their watches, often accompanied by discount codes. This long-term collaboration helps reinforce brand identity.

3. Product Collaborations: Creating New Products Together

Product collaborations involve partnering with influential individuals who appreciate your products. If an influencer has proven successful in driving business and increasing traffic, consider dedicating a product or product line to them. A product collaboration entails a brand joining forces with a famous influencer to create and launch a new product, service, or product collection. This approach benefits influencers by giving them more recognition and a steady income. It also allows brands to have their products endorsed by a social media icon who genuinely supports their business.

Product collaborations often seem more authentic due to their longer-term nature. For example, Morphe and influencer Jaclyn Hill collaborated to release the Jaclyn Hill Eyeshadow Palette. Jaclyn Hill was deeply involved in designing the product, contributing to its authenticity and appeal to her followers. This collaboration helped both the brand and influencer gain popularity.

4. Influencer Gifting: Get Your Products in Front of the Right People

If you're a brand with a limited budget looking to raise product awareness, consider influencer gifting. This strategy involves providing influencers with free products in return for honest reviews. It's an effective way to initiate a professional relationship with an influencer and assess the outcome. Although they aren't paid, this arrangement benefits influencers by supplying them with free content creation products. For example, many skincare brands, like Drunk Elephant, send products to beauty influencers in the hopes they'll review them. The influencers often share "unboxings" or genuine reviews with their followers, giving brands exposure without requiring direct payment.

5. Affiliate Marketing: Tracking Influencer Sales

Affiliate marketing collaborations occur when brands supply influencers with tracking links or codes for their products, rewarding them with a commission for every sale generated. While brands typically gift their products to influencers in return for their content, they may also offer extra compensation or bonuses. In this scheme, influencers join as affiliates, sharing links to the brands' products and services. For example, Amazon has a popular affiliate program where influencers, like tech reviewers on YouTube, receive commission from product sales made through their custom links. Influencers like Marques Brownlee often use these links in video descriptions, allowing their followers to purchase recommended products easily.

Social media takeovers allow influencers to represent your brand authentically by showcasing their unique voice, thereby connecting with your audience differently. A takeover involves an influencer announcing to their followers that they will manage your account for a specified duration, often daily. During this period, they promote your products, enhancing their brand recognition and offering your brand an engaging advertising medium. The influencers can be compensated either monetarily or with products. For example, Contiki frequently partners with travel influencers for Instagram takeovers, where influencers post stories or content directly on Contiki's account. This allows Contiki to reach new audiences while showcasing destinations through authentic perspectives.

7. Giveaways: Everyone Wins

Giveaways can be mutually beneficial for brands and influencers. They enable influencers to enhance engagement and follower count while brands gain increased recognition. In giveaways, influencers encourage their followers to participate in a challenge or contest to win free products from a brand. This could involve joining an email list, tagging a friend, using a brand-specific hashtag, or following the brand's account.

The brand typically supplies the prize and may compensate or provide products to the influencer. For example, makeup brand Anastasia Beverly Hills collaborates with beauty influencers for giveaways, where followers must tag friends, like posts, or follow the brand to enter. This boosts engagement for the influencer and brand, expanding reach to new potential customers.

8. Virtual Events: Hosting for Brand Exposure

If you seek collaboration that boosts brand exposure, consider virtual events. These are opportunities for influencers to represent a brand on platforms like Instagram, Twitch, YouTube, and Amazon Live, showcasing products to a vast audience. Live streams offer the flexibility for audiences to join at any given time. Influencers can also host these events on the brand's page. This allows followers and customers to witness influencers' genuine reactions to products, potentially increasing the follower count and engagement for brands and influencers. For example, Amazon Live hosts influencers like Jessica Alba or Kristen Bell to promote products in live shopping events. These influencers showcase product demos and answer audience questions in real-time, enhancing brand exposure and creating an engaging shopping experience.

9. User-Generated Content: Emphasizing Authenticity

User-generated content (UGC) is a highly effective form of social media collaboration for brands. UGC collaborations involve social media users or customers creating content for a brand, which the brand uses in its marketing efforts or on its social media channels. In authentic UGC, the creator is sometimes compensated, but the brand seeks permission to use the content. However, some creators request payment to produce UGC that brands can use. For example, GoPro encourages users to share photos and videos taken with their cameras, which GoPro then reposts on its social channels. This allows the brand to showcase its products through real customer experiences, providing authentic content that resonates with audiences.

10. Sponsored Blog Posts: Bonus SEO Benefits

People often use social media platforms for shopping and finding trending products, but many also visit blogs for in-depth information about brands and their offerings. Sponsored blog posts can generate revenue through affiliate income, monetary compensation, or free product exchanges. Blogs enable brands to enhance their online presence and improve their SEO through links from sponsored content. For example, fashion and lifestyle blogs like "The Everygirl" regularly feature sponsored posts for brands like Nordstrom. These articles often contain affiliate links and promote the brand's products in a way that aligns with the blog's editorial style, providing value to readers and boosting SEO for the brand.

Aha Labs 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.

How To Find Suitable Influencers For Partnerships

1. Unlock Opportunities with Aha Creator

Aha Creator simplifies collaborations between brands and YouTube creators. Aha Creator provides a done-for-you partnership service for brands to connect with the right creators. For content creators, Aha Creator handles the heavy lifting of brand deal negotiations, ensuring you get fair value for your influence. Their matching system helps pair creators with relevant brands, maximizing the potential for successful collaborations. Sign up for their waitlist today, and they’ll work to connect you with partnership opportunities that align with your content and values.

Use social media to discover influencers' wildly trending posts. If you notice a post going viral, see who published it and whether they have a substantial and active 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. Utilize Hashtag Searches

Use social media platforms’ search functions and look up keywords and hashtags related to your products and services to find influencers already creating relevant content. 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. Analyze Competitors

Check to see if your competitors are 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, pay attention to who gets a lot of likes or comments on your competitors’ posts, as they could be influencers, too.

5. Leverage Search Engines

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. Tap into Your Network

One of the easiest ways to find an influencer is to ask for recommendations. Contact your network—colleagues, employees, friends, industry contacts, and business partners—and see if they know any influencers who 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. Connect at Industry 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.

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

1. Partnering with Aha Creator to Streamline Influencer Collaborations

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 to Align with Partner Compensation

Successful partnerships are built on well-defined objectives. 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. Get to Know Your Influencers to Build Lasting Relationships

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 compensation with the value they bring.

Creators

We are 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 to 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 with the best creative approach. Start by 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).

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 strategies to identify themes and initiatives, so influencers will not only be excited to apply, participate, and 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 vital 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 letting them 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.

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.