Unlike other professional collaborations. The relationship between influencers and brands is one that requires a level of personal nurturing as well as mutual understanding. It is one that is more delicate than most professional relationships. The fear of rejection on both ends makes it very unique and prone to disturbances that could jeopardize an otherwise beneficial partnership. These are some common mistakes that you should avoid making when reaching out to your influencers.
1. Irrelevant and Excessive Messages
True, it’s important to build good communication with your influencers. But you should be very aware of the type of messages used in your influencer outreach emails. Spamming a potential campaign partner with mass email blasts, excessive newsletters, and forwards will very quickly become a nuisance for them and they may decide to end all correspondence. This also applies if you’re spamming them with emails and messages that are irrelevant to them. Messages unfitting to their personal brand will be dismissed. Not only by the influencer but also by their audience. As that is not the type of content they signed up to see.
Additionally, keep follow-up emails to a minimum. Instead, look into analytics tools and techniques that will allow you to keep track of campaign progress, improve productivity and minimize superfluous interactions.
2. Ineffective Communication
In addition to avoiding irrelevant messages, you don’t want to be left without an effective way to communicate with your influencers. A good way to avoid this is by creating a real-time chat or forum as the main platform on which you can share relevant information with the influencers. There are plenty of platforms that offer a free or extremely cheap way of creating these forums. Allowing you to have a direct and effective conversation by limiting the time spent waiting for responses. And will also be a much more organized method of communication as it avoids inbox clutter on both ends. However, refrain from reaching out to your influencers at inconvenient hours. Work together with your influencers to find a reasonable time frame in which all parties will be available to chat.
3. Expecting Freebies
Influencers put a lot of work, time, and skills into the building and maintaining of their personal brand as well as their relationship with their followers. By expecting them to do work for you for free you’re essentially insulting everything they’ve worked for. This doesn’t change if you make your request while praising them. The expectation that they should volunteer their time and effort for free is both unprofessional and disrespectful. Most influencers will be immediately turned off by such a proposal. And may even decide to give you a negative mention and review. This will have a terrible effect on your reputation in the influencer marketing world and will tarnish your brand and lower your chances for successful collaborations.
Avoid this by creating a set budget specifically for use in your influencer marketing campaigns. Another great option is to provide product or service samples for free to the influencers you’re reaching out to. These gifts should serve the purpose of introducing the influencer to your brand and service, with no hidden intentions. Don’t make demands of an influencer just because you sent them a free sample.
Want additional tips on how to select the right influencer for your brand? Then check out this other article we wrote.