How to Master Influencer Marketing

Do you know exactly what to do to build a strong influencer relationship between your company and the influencer and best of all, the audience of that influencer. Howdy. Howdy everyone. Nate here. HubSpot reached out to me to make this video for you because I have spent thousands of hours working directly with influencers just like the ones you're looking at and understanding the behind the scenes of what's going on in those influencers minds and exactly what they're looking for to work with you. So let's dive in here, shall we? I boiled it down to three main things that influencers are wondering when they're considering working with you and consequently, when you accomplish these three things with your influencers, you will have an extremely lucrative long term relationship with them. One they want to know are you cool with cool here? Meaning are you as a company cool? Is your point of contact cool and what is the experience of working with you? Is that cool? And yes, I intentionally used a more casual word here. I could have replaced that with professional ethics, ethical, etc. But I think as we walk through this you'll understand a bit more of why a more casual word was used instead of the alternatives. You see what's really going on in the influencer's mind underneath this question is what is it like to work with you? And the number one thing that makes or breaks that relationship between your company and that influencer is your point of contact. The person that you have designated in charge of partner relationships. If that person understands these things I'm about to explain to you, it will make a world of difference. You see what you're looking for with your point of contact is twofold here. Number one is this. If your point of contact or your partner manager on your team feels like they pre appreciate what that influencer is doing before asking for money or asking for any sort of partnership, it makes a huge difference. I can't tell you how many emails I get in my inbox literally every single day of companies that reach out and say hey, we saw your content and by the way, we have this product that is really awesome and we think it'll fit your audience. Contrasted with hey, I watched your recent video about insert something in the blank and here is why I thought it was so cool. In fact, after watching that video I decided to watch more videos on your channel. I really appreciate how you insert whatever real appreciation things your point of contact has for that influencer. Would you be open to having a conversation about promoting what we're doing with your audience? I Think it might be a really awesome fit. So we've got genuine appreciation. Here's the second thing. Influencers are looking for advocacy between your point of contact and your company. Because many influencers don't have the experience of working with a huge team or having a large company behind them. In fact, many of them are influencers because they didn't want that. It can feel like your company is this big unknown thing that they don't know if they want to navigate. They're not sure. They want to put the mental focus in that it requires to understand how to effectively work with how your company does business. You could have the coolest company culture in the world and that influencer might not know it. Which is why it's so important for your point of contact, your partner advocates or your partner relationship manager to feel like they are the one that's the interpreter or the advocate between your company and what projects you're going to do with the influencer. In fact, if you want a meta example of this, I don't work directly for HubSpot, but HubSpot reached out to me because of my expertise in these topics and Jake and Brandon on the HubSpot team have been absolutely excellent to work with. So brownie points for HubSpot for doing this really well. Okay, so let's talk tactics with your approach here. Here's what I want you to do. First, have your partnership manager or point of contact watch this video to understand the vital nature of appreciation and advocacy before any deals are made. And in fact if you want a simpler way to go about doing this that's mostly completely done for you, I'll include a very handy HubSpot made guide for working with influencers. It includes templates, is mostly done for you. You just need to fill in the blanks. Next with your approach of working with a new influencer, I would recommend doing a test period, make it a certain number of time or a certain number of pieces of that allows both you and the influencer to fully answer this question. Are you actually the type of person or business that I want to work with? Then after that you can look into longer term agreements with influencers. All right, let's move on to the next big question on influencers minds. Is it worth it to work with you? Just this past week I was working with an influencer who is in my opinion poised to explode very soon and they were starting to get these messages from companies like yours requesting to work together. And as this influencer and I were reviewing these options that were being Presented, a couple of important things came up. Number one is influencer fears. When it comes to working with you. This is so vitally important that your point of contact, or if you're the partnership manager, watching this, you understand what's going on behind the scenes. For these influencers, the first big fear they have is being a sellout with their audience. You see, each overtly sponsored video that they do for your company has a cost associated with it. And we're not just talking money or time here, we're talking relationship cost with their audience. So that cost can be small or large to that influencer, depending on how well what you're doing fits. And as a general rule of thumb, the closer your product or service matches the needs of that audience and you're a cool person, which is what we talked about previously, the lower the perceived cost to the influencer. So to get inside the influencer's mind here, I want you to think of it in terms of a scale from not happy to very happy to work with you. This space right here is what I would call the no go zone. There's some non negotiables. If the influencer is smart, they have some non negotiables. And if something about the partnership doesn't fit for them, they will say no, that's an absolute not, I'm not going to do this. But everywhere between this non negotiable line and here to absolutely loving working with you is a space that we can work with and there are actions that you can take to move it further this direction. If this is being helpful to you thus far, I would love if you would like this video so that it can spread further to more people. I appreciate it. Which brings us to our approach here. These are the knobs you can turn to make it much more worth it to your influencer. A, you can pay more. It's no surprise that any influencer, any relationship, any business, we're looking to make money with what we're doing. So, A, you can pay more. B, you can do this. Streamline the process of working with your influencer as much as possible, the easier you make it for them to work with you, the less the perceived cost, including the mental load of working with you. And third, is this the more creative freedom you give that influencer to work with you, it tends to be better within limits. So let me give you a scale example of what this freedom aspect looks like here. On one extreme, it can look like, hey, we want to sponsor a segment of your video, it needs to be 90 seconds long. Here is the ad read. Here is exactly the footage you need to put in. Here's exactly what you need to do. On the opposite extreme, we've got influencer anarchy, where you say, well, hey, just talk about our stuff however you want to. What you're looking for is somewhere in between. And it's going to be up to you to figure out exactly what that looks like based on what you're offering and what the influencer, influencer's style is like. But with our approach here, the more favorable these three things look to your influencer, the happier they will be to work with you. All right, and we're moving on to the next question that your influencer will have before working with you. Is what you have valuable? Is it the type of thing that I want to promote? Now, part of answering this question is making sure that what you offer is actually good. It's actually valuable for an audience, which I hope it really is. So assuming that is true, we need to make sure that your potential influencer also knows that that is true and not only, but that it's a fit for their audience. So here's how I look at it. I've drawn out this sequence here. Your product, what you're offering, shared with the influencer, who then hopefully shares it with their audience. So if this is a sequence, it makes sense that we have a few important points to make sure this partnership is successful. Right here and right here. To make sure your offering connects well with the influencer, it makes sense to do a test. Now, depending on what your offer is, it could look like giving them access to your software and or shipping something to them. But the important thing here is to give some parameters, parameters for this test to know that it's successful with the influencer. One, give them a time limit to test out your thing. And two, if you're looking for a more organic or integrated into the influencer's life type of promotion, ask them to use it in their everyday life and see what they think of it. Because if we do this well, then hopefully at this point the influencer is on board and it's time to take it to the audience. The main thing to say at this point when the influencer is sharing with their audience is that not all influencers are the same when it comes to selling. So an important thing you can include at this point point is some tips for selling. These can include prior integrations that performed well. Like if you've worked with other influencers previously and they've converted really well, you can share those videos and the timestamps of those call to actions with this new potential influencer. You can also give them industry standard wording or phrases that they can use within the video to make it more simple for them. If you want to see some industry standards for how to approach doing this, I'm going to put the link below this video now. I wanted to include a bonus here for the overachievers here. They roll out the red carpet for their influencers by comboing the benefits for those influencers. Let me give you an example. Aside from the base compensation which is standard when working with between companies and influencers, the companies that I've seen be most successful with this also offer an insider group like maybe they only work with very particular influencers and those insiders get access to a specific group where they get extra support or extra help from you as the company. Other companies I've seen implement a bonus system where if a certain amount of traffic is generated for the company, they offer awesome bonuses like trips or cash, et cetera. And the third combo thing that I've seen be successful again and again is genuine appreciation. Most influencers, the type that you're going to be reaching out to, are receiving a lot of messages from companies that appear outwardly to be just like yours. If your point of contact genuinely really appreciates what that influencer is doing, maybe they're organically watching their content. Outside of reaching out to them, the conversation is way different. So give it a go. Use the free ready made templates made by HubSpot in the link below this video. And you also want to check out this next video that happens to be extremely useful for businesses working with influencers.