Working with an Influencer

Can we take an example from your experience? A brand approaches you or you’ve advised a brand to approach an influencer; how does it, typically, work?

It’s never a one size fits all model. All partnerships tend to be pretty different. Usually, for me, a brand will approach me. They’ll say, we’ve either seen the A Lady in London blog, or on Instagram, or wherever we’ve looked. We like what you do; here’s what we want to do with you. They’ll either say, can you tell us what you can do for us, based on the content we’re looking for and the brief that we’ve given you. Or they’ll say, we want exactly this – X number of Instagram posts, X number of blog posts, tweets, Facebook, what have you.

Then, from there, either they let me go do what I do, or they are very prescriptive about, it has to be photos of this kind of thing; there have to be people or no people in it, or it has to be this type of subject matter, or that type of subject matter. Again, there’s not really a specific, one size fits all model for it. I’m in travel, so most of my partnerships tend to be with tourism boards or travel companies, that send me off on a trip somewhere. Again, some of those trips are very prescribed itineraries, where I go do this, this and this. They tell me, we want photos of this, this and this. Others, it’s very much, go do your own thing. We want you creating your style of content, because we know you know what works best.

What do you prefer? What do you think works best?

In my opinion, it works best when they let me do my own thing and let me get my own shots. I know what works and I know what my audience is going to like, as long as they don’t have one specific thing that they have to be promoting, especially with the tourism board, where they are just promoting the destination, in general. That works really well, because then I can go out and get the shots that I know are going to work and that are going to promote the destination as best I can promote it, to my audience and my demographic. That’s not to say that I haven’t had successful partnerships that are completely the opposite of that. It just depends on what the campaign is and what the brief is.

What, typically, goes wrong in a partnership?

I’d say the partnerships that go wrong are usually the ones where there is a lack of communication. Either the brand expects something, but they don’t communicate that to the influencer and then the influencer does what they do and then brand says, wait, you didn’t do what we expected. The influencer says, well, you didn’t tell me what you expected. Or there is miscommunication between things that are more details in the contract. I’ve heard of instances where influencers will assume, if the brand didn’t tell them that they wanted the content live indefinitely, the influencer will assume they can take it down the next day. Then the brand says, why did you take it down and the influencer tells them that they didn’t say they couldn’t. Things like that.

I just say, whenever I’m talking to people about influencer partnerships, on the influencer side or the brand side, I usually say to make sure that you communicate anything that you want. That saves a lot of trouble.