When it comes to influencer marketing campaigns, there are a few requirements you should meet to ensure its success. Factors, such as an unclear brief, can create an unpleasant experience for both you and creators, but there are ways to avoid this. We interviewed our Customer Success team, as well as several creators on our platform, to better understand what creators expect from brands in collaborations.
Based on their responses, we’re sharing 7 of the most important things creators wished brands understood:
Relevant collaborations
In order for your collaborations to be authentic, you should first do your research before sending creators booking requests. This may take more time, but the creators you work with will be well-suited to your brand. Working with creators who are aligned with your brand image will increase the success of your campaign because: (1) it leads to genuine collaborations, (2) the creators will have an audience that’s likely interested in your products, and (3) sponsored content won’t look out of place in their social media feed.
While creators receive many collaboration requests, most of them will work only with brands that they’re passionate about and love. To determine whether creators are relevant for your brand, take a close look at the creators’ content and ask yourself:
- Are their profiles compatible and relevant to your brand?
- Would the creators be interested in your products or services?
- Does their content fit your brand’s aesthetic and personality?
- Do you want your products or services associated with the profiles?
Clear briefs and creative freedom
Creators want to be sent well-structured briefs that clearly outline what the collaboration’s objective is and what it entails. When guidelines and deadlines are easily understood, it saves you, and the creators, time from needing to clarify certain aspects of the brief. It’ll help them avoid making any mistakes and make you both feel secure with the collaborations.
In your brief, you should still leave creators room for creative freedom. There’s a fine line between telling creators what to post and working to create an inspiring story together. If you provide creators with strict limitations about the type of photos or captions they can create, your collaboration will appear inauthentic to their audience, and it’ll result in an ineffective campaign.
Remember, creators are able to build a following because they know what type of content their audience enjoys and how to create it. By granting them creative freedom, it’ll lead to authentic storytelling and content.
Fair compensation
It takes a considerable amount of time for creators to build up a profile with authentic content and a dedicated audience. By collaborating with creators, your brand can utilize these benefits, but most creators expect to be compensated for their work.
Though your compensation arrangements will vary depending on the creator, they should always be fair and mutually beneficial. Creators invest a lot of time, resources, and effort into creating exceptional content to build your brand’s credibility, and they want their work to be appreciated.
There are 4 ways creators can be compensated for collaborations:
- Cost per acquisition (CPA), where creators are paid per click or sale. Creators may be more open to this type of agreement if you offer them a base fee in addition to CPA.
- Freebies, where they’re given free products or services in exchange for posts. If you plan to provide creators with only products for the collaboration, the value of the products should be high enough to pique their interest.
- Pay per post, where they’re paid per social media post.
- Paid long-term partnerships, where they’re paid for publishing posts over an agreed period of time.
To show creators that you do value their work, you should compensate them as you would any other professional. Keep in mind, if you have a tight budget, creators are flexible and are often willing to negotiate their fees.
If you aren’t sure how to fairly compensate creators, you can use our Instagram Pricing Calculator, which will give you estimate fees based on their performance.
Dependable communication
Great communication between you and creators is essential for any successful collaboration, so it’s important that you’re accessible and present to answer creators’ questions within a reasonable amount of time. Creators may not be able to start a collaboration until they’ve clarified a couple details in a brief. They may also have questions or concerns about payment and product shipments. If they’re unable to get a hold of you, it could result in delays and incorrect content.
Reliability
When creators accept your booking requests, you and the creators enter a binding agreement. You’ll both be expected to comply to the terms of the brief, as agreed upon. This will ensure the collaboration is completed as you’ve requested. It also helps creators feel safe entering an agreement.
Once the brief is accepted, additional terms shouldn’t be added to it, and existing terms shouldn’t be altered. By making any changes, you’re essentially creating a new agreement. Unexpected changes can leave creators feeling frustrated that the collaboration they agreed to complete isn’t what they expected, and it can give them a negative experience with your brand.
If changes need to be made after the booking request has been accepted, it’s good practice to communicate what changes need to be made and why. If the creators agree to the new terms, you should send them new booking requests on inzpire.me with an edited brief.
Transparency
For collaborations to run smoothly, you should be upfront with any information that may impact your collaborations with creators, so they can anticipate what they should do next. If there are any delays in product deliveries, for instance, you should let them know immediately.
Most creators commit to several brand bookings every month. They’ll likely have a schedule in place that prevents them from posting too many sponsored posts in a row and keeps them on track with their delivery dates. By keeping creators informed, they’ll be able to reshuffle their schedule and work with you to successfully complete the collaboration.
Constructive feedback
After a collaboration is complete, let creators know how their content affected your campaign, or how the collaboration, as a whole, went! It’ll provide them with insights they can use to improve their work or collaboration process, which will help your future campaigns.
Need help collaborating with content creators? We’d love to help! We can search for relevant creators and draft your briefs, as well as manage your campaigns and communications. To learn more, contact us here!
inzpire.me
inzpire.me is an influencer marketing platform that connects brands with creators across the globe. Ready to launch a campaign? Schedule a call today!
