Influencer Relations - How to Sustainably Build Strong Connections with Creators

1. Definition: What does Influencer Relations mean and how does this marketing discipline differ from Influencer Marketing?
2. When should companies rely on Influencer Relations and when on Influencer Marketing?
3. Why are Influencer Relations important for companies? Advantages and Challenges
4. Challenges of Influencer Relations:
5. How do you build up a functioning Influencer Relationship Management and what do you have to consider?
6. Which tools are helpful in Influencer Relations Management?
7. With what key figures can the success of Influencer Relations be measured?
8. Conclusion on Influencer Relations

Leading opinion people, better known as content creators or influencers, are used by a variety of companies in marketing campaigns. More and more often the term Influencer Relations comes up. What Influencer Relations means, when it makes sense to use Influencer Relations and how you build up this marketing discipline, you will learn in this article.

Definition: What does Influencer Relations mean and how does this marketing discipline differ from Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Relations is to be understood as a part of Influencer Marketing and refers in the definition to the long-term build-up and maintenance of relationships between a brand or a company with influencers. Influencers or content creators are leading opinion people who publish content on the common social platforms. Influencer Relations has the goal, to improve the collaboration between brand and content creators continuously, so that this bond also has a positive effect on the Social Communities. By maintaining the partnership over a longer period of time, the advertising cooperation is perceived as authentic and trustworthy.

While individual influencer marketing measures are rather campaign-based and short-term oriented, Influencer Relations thus aims for a long-term success, and a positive brand association. Here, less reach and sales are in focus, but the building of trust towards the brand and the brand image.

When should companies rely on Influencer Relations and when on Influencer Marketing?

The ideal Influencer Marketing Set Up includes both short-term campaigns and long-term partnerships. If you initially want to increase your Social Media awareness, with your brand and be present across a broad target group, classic Influencer Marketing campaigns are the recommended strategy. For this, you should research content creators from various thematic verticals on different platforms like Instagram, TikTok or YouTube and book them for individual services. Through an analysis and evaluation of the Content Creator Performance potential candidates for long-term partnerships can be identified and thus a fixed pool of brand faces can be built up.

Also for the increase of conversions campaigns are recommended, which are specifically aimed at the goal of sales. For this, you should mainly use strong-selling content creators and design the content production maximally sales-focused. A clear Call-to-Action, and a direct link to the online shop, to the app store or to the newsletter sign-up, for example via Instagram Stories, with the possibility of a direct swipe up link, are essential components of a successful Conversion campaign.

If you want to improve your brand standing in the social media cosmos or position yourself in niche communities as a brand with trustworthy products, it is worth looking for permanent brand faces, who repeatedly advertise for your brand. They have already built a relationship with their community, which can also be transferred to your brand with a regular and authentic product placement.

The combination of a fixed pool of content creators and individual cooperations, accordingly, pays into various marketing purposes and offers you the flexibility to ideally design your measures, depending on the objectives.
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Why are Influencer Relations important for companies? Advantages and Challenges

Influencer Relations offers a variety of advantages to brands and companies. At the same time, there are also challenges if you want to strategically build this branch of Influencer Marketing.

Advantages of Influencer Relations:

• Authenticity and trust-building: Long-term cooperations with the same content creators create credibility within the community. They convey a sincere and honest recommendation, which increases the willingness to buy and contributes to a positive brand association.
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• Efficient cooperation: The multitude of common projects creates a good understanding for the ideas and requirements that you place on your content creators. The Brand Face understands your brand philosophy and knows your products inside out. At the same time, you get to know the cooperation partners and the content better and better, which allows concepts and briefings to be ideally coordinated and content approvals to be implemented quickly.
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• Creative content production: Through mutual understanding, you can give the creator more freedom in content creation, which often reflects in more creative implementations and successful performance. The Content Creator knows their own community best and can align the content exactly with this.
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• Securing exclusive partnerships: Especially range-strong content creators are flooded with cooperation requests. With a long-term partnership usually comes exclusivity and loyalty towards your brand, this means that your brand faces will not cooperate with competing brands during the duration of your partnership.
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• Target group approach: Especially with niche communities, Brand Faces will help you to pick up your target group exactly where they are looking for recommendations. So you not only reach potential new Brand Lovers, but can also benefit from direct customer feedback.
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• Fast campaign implementation: A fixed pool of cooperation partners offers you the advantage that you can quickly fall back on them, because communication paths are shorter, no negotiation needs to take place anymore and the content creator already knows your products. In this way, you can also use quickly changing social media trends in your cooperation, which increases the potential for virality of the content.
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• Cost efficiency: For larger package deals, you can benefit from discounts for your booked services. Long-term partnerships offer content creators security and especially range-strong creators prefer a handful of permanent partnerships over a multitude of individual cooperations. This results in a higher willingness for discounted offers.
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Challenges of Influencer Relations:

• Identification of suitable cooperation partners: To find the right Brand Faces for your brand, you should test a variety of content creators, evaluate their performance and cooperation. This means especially at the beginning a high time expenditure.
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• Provide sufficient resources: The continuous care of relationships with creators cannot work without a high time expenditure, which you should invest either internally or in external care through an agency. So you need resources for the research, the constant exchange and sparring with the content creators. You should also plan time for regular personal meetings and/or joint events.
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• Lack of control: Influencer Relations is based on mutual trust, which is why you should no longer check every content production of your partners. The creators therefore usually publish without a preview of the content, on which you therefore do not always have influence. Hence, the getting-to-know phase, in which you can build up a mutual understanding and bond, is very important especially at the beginning of the cooperation.
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• Negative association in case of shitstorms: Of course, it can happen that your*cooperation partner*in on social media gets criticized due to negative comments or actions. Due to the connection to your brand, there is therefore the risk that this criticism can also rub off on your brand.
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• Cost factor: Even though you can benefit from discounts on individual prices for large package deals, cooperations with range-strong content creators represent a high cost factor. In addition, your Return on Invest (ROI), especially for long-term cooperations and rather Brand Image-based measures, cannot be measured exclusively and immediately by hard key figures, so it needs patience for success measurement.
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How do you build up a functioning Influencer Relationship Management and what do you have to consider?

It should be clear to you by now that the establishment of Influencer Relations is not without careful planning and an investment in cost and manual resources. An evaluation of your marketing goals can therefore help you to decide whether this investment is worthwhile for your brand.

We show you here how to build up a functioning Influencer Relationship Management in six steps:

1. Trial-and-Error for the ideal casting of your Brand Faces: For the identification of suitable cooperation partners, you should test a variety of influencers and evaluate both the performance and cooperation. Only when they meet all defined criteria, they are eligible for a long-term cooperation.
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2. Contract for legal basis: In the contract the rights and obligations of both parties should be clearly defined, to provide security and avoid conflicts. Pay attention here to a fair contract design, with which the content creator also feels comfortable. The contract should mainly include the following components: Remuneration, services, usage rights, exclusivity clause, platform guidelines, data protection regulations, withdrawal conditions.
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3. Briefing and communication guideline for content basis: The briefing is the basis for a smooth cooperation between you and the content creator. Therefore, it should contain not only product information but also your requirements in content implementation and communication of your brand messages. Conceptualize your briefings definitely with the input of the Brand Faces, to take into account their wishes and ideas here.
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4. Planning of joint projects: Coordinate with your content creator on the planned measures and events, define times for completion of content and delivery dates. Communicate at an early stage if there are changes in planning.
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5. Space for regular exchange: A personal relationship lives from communication. Plan common events, meetings or digital calls and use regular feedback loops to continuously reflect and improve cooperation.
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6. Continuous analysis of performance: Evaluate campaign results at regular intervals together with the content creator and use the learnings directly for the next cooperation, to continuously optimize the performance.

All these steps can of course also be covered by agencies in the social media sector. This is especially advisable for companies where there is a lack of in-house expertise in influencer marketing.
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Which tools are helpful in Influencer Relations Management?

Influencer Relations is the branch of Influencer Marketing that is associated with the highest manual effort. The use of tools can automate parts of this marketing discipline and be especially helpful in data maintenance.

Here you find an overview of relevant tools in the Influencer Relations area:

Iroin

Not only Instagram is covered with Iroin, but also TikTok and YouTube. In addition to large content creators, also micro-influencers from 2k followers appear in the search. This means, also the search for potential Brand Faces can be simplified with this. Contact data to the management and to the creators, prices and campaigns as well as media kits can be stored. In addition, Iroin offers you the possibility to enter internal notes into the mask of the creators and to write personalized emails. Iroin offers a comprehensive campaign management module, with which individual campaigns can be planned and measured.
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Storyclash

With Storyclash, in addition to the search for cooperation partners, you can also create your own lists and note fields. The data of the content creators, including number of followers, date of birth and duration of the campaign can be stored. It is also possible to define tags and set your own fields. Storyclash has a comprehensive reporting function, which also allows live tracking of content.
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Nindo

With Nindo lists can be created and several cooperation contracts including note fields can be uploaded. After the completion of the campaigns, the respective content creator can be evaluated according to own criteria. Furthermore, it is possible to specify the status of campaigns and cooperations. Nindo specializes explicitly in detecting bought likes and followers. The tool is currently only covering the DACH region.
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Infludata

Infludata offers a creator search from 2k followers and that for Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. In addition, the platform offers extensive possibilities to create note fields and also integrate individual fields. Also creating of lists and searching for existing cooperations is possible here.
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Kolsquare

With Kolsquare it is possible to store campaigns and prices and to specify the campaign and cooperation status. Tags can be defined and set with an own filter function and the overview about the content creators including their platforms and their number of followers simplifies. In addition, it is possible to send personalized emails and search specifically for collaboration partners.
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With what key figures can the success of Influencer Relations be measured?

The success measurement of Influencer Relations measures should be viewed on the basis of several key figures and at regular intervals. You should definitely make sure to share the evaluation of the performance also with the respective content creator. They usually have even more extensive insights about their community, which can be helpful when analyzing the campaigns.

• Reach/Impressions: The average impressions on posts with your brand integration give you insight about the visibility of your brand.
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• Engagement/Sentiment: Here you should consider both quantitatively (likes, shares, comments in relation to the number of followers is the interaction rate) as well as qualitatively (e.g., whether the community deals further with your brand within the comments, how does the community react to the product placement, etc.).
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• Follower growth: Both the increase in the number of followers on the account of the creator and on your brand account (if available) give information about the relevance of your content.
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• Content quality: The type and style of content preparation can be measured based on defined quality requirements. To what extent the content can also be used for further marketing purposes (e.g., for the use of the content assets on your own brand channels and/or on websites of your company) gives also insight about the content quality.
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• Conversion rate: The number of conversions, which can be directly attributed to the content creator (e.g., sales, app downloads, contract completions, newsletter registrations) is an indicator for the willingness to buy of the community.
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• Brand Image: Conduction of user surveys or market research studies within your target group, to measure changes in brand awareness and image.
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• Number of cooperations: The willingness of the content creators for multiple cooperations is an indicator for successful relationship management and the degree of loyalty towards your brand.

Conclusion on Influencer Relations

Influencer Relations can be a effective marketing strategy, to build trust with Social Communities sustainably and to positively position your brand with your target group. Due to the flood of product placements in the social media cosmos, followers wish for credible recommendations, what makes clear the need for steady brand faces.

As with any good relationship, the continuous care and transparent communication are the most important competences for functioning Influencer Relations.