Sarah Bertness Glawe

In influencer marketing and social media overall, prioritizing space for creativity and new ideas from every voice on your team is essential. Create a weekly stand up where team members all bring something they’ve seen that’s inspired them. Encourage them to look in unexpected places to bring in different viewpoints. Have them share why it resonated, and as a team use these ideas as a brainstorm jumping off point for possible new applications or iterations.

Thinker bigger and more creatively - as well as long term - when it comes to influencer compensation packages will allow your budget, and partnership to be as impactful as possible. Remember this is a business partnership. So don't assume you know what your influencer partner may find most valuable. Ask them, instead! Being collaborative in your conversation may: 1: Unearth value adds you would not alone have thought of (eg. maybe they are trying to launch a new channel or into a vertical where you have existing reach and leverage) 2: Tell them about the type of partner you will be, your commitment to wanting to work with them and develop a mutually beneficial lasting partnership.

When pitching influencer marketing or other social-first strategies in to executive leadership, it's critical to speak *their* language to get attention, understanding, and buy in of your strategy. Leave the influencer/social industry jargon out (likes, followers, engagement rates), and translate the objectives and potential impact into terms they understand and care about, with supporting data that shows the metrics that matter to the C-suite. ✅ What's the potential ROI? ✅ Who else in the competitive landscape is investing in influencer marketing? What results are they seeing? Where's the white space for your brand? ✅ Share a case study that shows business impact in growth or sales numbers.

If this is happening, you have not set your influencer marketing campaign up for success by letting: ➡️ Your marketing team provide the campaign objective/brief to the influencer, and then... ➡️ Your cast influencers being the expert on their content and audience, and taking the marketers brief and leading on the creative/content itself. Clear swim lanes of who is in charge of what will help avoid this situation. You must trust and empower the influencers you cast to lead on their content. 🚫 If you don't trust your influencers to be the executive strategists behind their own content, you haven cast the wrong influencers. 🚫 If you don't empower the influencers you've cast, you won't ever get the best results of your partnership.

Trust your influencer partners and your in house social team - they are in the data daily, and will likely know about algorithm shifts before (and if) platform announcements happen. Give your influencer collaborators and your social team the input they need to make your partnership and content a success. That means flexibility around: - content type - content creative - content timing A successful influencer marketing campaign is a true collaboration: marrying your brands' objectives and your marketing data with the influencers' platform, content and audience expertise and creativity. Be sure to ASK for input, to ensure they can bring their expertise of platform algorithms and more to your partnership.

In influencer/Creator marketing — an industry that's inventing and reinventing itself in real time — if you haven't failed, you haven't tried. So reframe your failure as: invaluable firsthand data and learnings. And iterate. While you refine, remember that the influencer marketing industry has been built on testing and never been done befores. Pioneering strategy takes practice and patience. Things rarely go "viral" the first time you try. More often, you try something new and the data is inclusive. So you try again, adjusting small things. Remember: Impactful influencer marketing is a long game. Meaningful influencer relationships are a long game. One "failed" collaboration is not necessarily a failed strategy or relationship.