Once you are done researching your options available and come up with a list of the social media influencers you might get a little confused on how to reach them. You need to start inquiring about the possible partnerships and collaborations that particular influencers can do. But it might be a little difficult on where to start. What platform do you need to use to reach them? How much information should you reveal in your first message? How to avoid miscommunications? To avoid all these confusions here are the 5 tips that will help you in effective influencer outreach to start off your collaborations.

1. Before influencer outreach, follow them

Before reaching them for collaboration, take time and start them following on social media platforms. Start following them from your multiple accounts and try to engage with them. This will give you a closer look at their style and their interests.

Check for their frequency of postings on all social media platforms. Try to take a look at the comments under their posts and their replies. This will help you down analysing how they react to the comments, how much they can take criticism and praise. Don’t just read the comments. Start analysing if they have the potential to work with you or are they a good choice for your brand collaboration.

Don’t just blindly follow their accounts, try to like the posts that impress you. Try to comment and start engaging with them. This will give them a message of your existence.

Also, try to share the influencer’s content with your own followers. This will give you many benefits. If you are selling beauty products and if you share any other influencer’s skincare routine, your followers might appreciate it. The same goes with a cooking video of your favourite influencer if you are selling cooking utensils or kitchenware.

Plus you can get a chance for that influencer to notice you or your brand. Upon reaching them they will be a little familiar with your brand and will help you while reaching for a collaboration.

2. Contact them directly

Now that you are a bit familiar with the influencer’s style and their work. Now after engaging with them, you can now start communicating with them about your brand. You can reach out to them via DM or email. Check their bio for the mode of communication they prefer and for the email id.

In the first message try to speak about the influencer rather than your brand. Explain to them about what you like about them and why you like them and their content. Later on, in the message or mail make sure that you are interested in collaborating with them. Include any relevant links that might be helpful for them to go through. Don’t go deep with the details because you might not know if they accept your collaboration.

Remember that an influencer gets a lot of messages in one day and many collaboration requests. So, make sure you keep your content short and crisp to the point. Also, keep the message’s header standing out in an inbox. A busy influencer might skip long and unwanted messages.

3. Share your views and objectives

Once they start showing interest in your brand collaboration, start messaging to continue your relationship and build your communication. Now you can share more details about your brand and the values and its objectives. Don’t just talk about yourself. Ask the person about their goals and their experiences.

With this, you can build a strong relationship that will help you in a long-lasting partnership. If you are owning a local small business and even if the influencer is interested in supporting that kind of business it would be easy to start off as you both share the same views and goals. Once you get to know their views and goals, then you can start off pitching about the collaboration.

4. Be specific

After sharing the details, if the influencer is interested in collaboration now you can start being a little specific about the content. Be clear about what you need from the influencer. Make sure you are ready to answer these particular questions in order to be clear about the content they make.

• What kind of content do you need? Be a little more specific rather than saying a video, post or story. Tell them about the length of the content. If you need a social media post tell them about the word length and for a video tell them the time limit.
• The number of times content needs to be shared. If you need daily posts or weekly videos or whatever goal you have in your mind to make sure you reach the audience.
• Give them the details that need to appear in their content. Ask them to mention the giveaways or your product launches in their content if you have any. Ask them to include the links of your page or tag your account on social media. Make sure you ask them to use your specific hashtags on social media. This will bring much more visibility and make it easier for interested audiences to find.

Tell the influencer about your brand and your taglines and your styles that will help them to inspire and guide them.

5.Propose fair price

Make sure how you want to pay the influencer. Explain various strategies or ideas you have with you and offer them accordingly.

• Either by the exchange of the product
• Cash
• In-kind and cash

Make sure you offer a fair price. Don’t expect the influencer to do a collaboration if you offer less price compensation. The price compensation basically depends upon the followers they have, the engagement rate, the type of content they create, the number of social media channels they are active in, the quality of the content and the frequency of their posts.

Sometimes, influencers can make it easy by having their own pricing info. But sometimes you need to research well and know about the pricing of the influencers. Whatever the price you offer, make sure you negotiate if they are willing to do the collaboration. If at all try to lessen your demands and the frequency of posting. Any influencer might show interest if they require less time for any collaboration.

At UKP media, we have influencers from different genres with which you can make sure your content will be in one place. You can also have your dedicated campaign manager for your brand to develop your business with the strategies.