Social influencers have become an important part of the social media landscape, racking up legions of followers through a combination of social media savvy, accessibility, and providing a unique and often spirited point of view. Businesses are tripping over themselves to take advantage of the influence these individuals command.

Once you’ve finalized your custom website design, honed your SEO strategy, and engaged in more traditional marketing efforts, it’s time to think about how your business can benefit from collaborations with social influencers. Here are a few ways to create a successful influencer marketing campaign.

Consider Platforms

Social media influencers may operate on any number of social media platforms, and some are equally active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Periscope, just for example. However, these people tend to have preferences and build followings on a platform of choice.

Many celebrities, for example, are extremely active on Twitter. This doesn’t mean they don’t keep up profiles on other platforms, just that they tend to show preference for a particular social media platform.

Whether you’re doing some research on your own or working with marketing services to create your influencer campaign, you should probably consider which platforms are best suited to spreading your message and then seek out influencers that tend to utilize those platforms.

Select Appropriate Influencers

A lot will go into selecting the right influencers for your marketing campaign. Success in your endeavors relies not only on finding a celebrity, blogger, or other influencer with an army of followers, but also pinpointing individuals that have some connection to your industry, that you want connected to your brand, and most importantly, that are interested in supporting you.

This last factor may take some time and effort on your part. Unless an influencer is already a customer and/or a fan of your company, chances are you’ll have to do some finessing to encourage promotion of your brand.

However, there’s a lot of legwork that goes into finding the right social influencers to work with your company. You need to do your homework to make sure that anyone you select matches your brand ideology and has the reach and influence you need to see a notable return.

Build Relationships

Once you’ve found a handful of candidates to work with on your social media campaign, it’s time to make contact and start building the foundations of a solid working relationship. Make no mistake – the process won’t be easy.

Social influencers are constantly getting hit up for promotions, so there are two things that should raise red flags. If they are too quick to respond and start asking about money for their services, they are probably the type to promote every brand that offers a buck.

This is bad news for you because it means their backing holds little weight. If they’re willing to promote anyone who pays them, their support becomes worth very little. Of course, you should also avoid influencers that won’t reply to your efforts to make contact.

If you’ve made several attempts to connect with an influencer with no result, it’s time to move on. Either these individuals are too busy, which is no good for collaboration, or they have no interest in your brand and you should stop wasting your time.

If you want the best chance to forge connections with social influencers and ultimately take advantage of the exposure and lead generation opportunities they can offer, you might want to start by following their feeds, asking questions and commenting on posts, and generally getting to know them and introducing yourself informally.

From there you could send a more formal request for collaboration on a marketing campaign, but you may not want to tip your hand too soon. You’ll gain the best advantage from influencer promotion if the influencer actually likes you and genuinely wants to support your brand.

Consider Suitable Campaign Strategies

A social influencer campaign is not like your average promotional effort. Whereas you may be familiar with the basic tenets of custom web design, premium SEO services, and creating online ads, you’ll find that a different strategy is needed to conduct a successful social influencer campaign.

To some extent, you’ll have to rely on the discretion of your influencer. By creating canned promos, for example, you may alienate the audience. In order to make promotions believable, they should be in the influencers own words to an extent.

This means foregoing ad copy in favor of providing direction and letting the influencer take the reins. You should definitely create promotional materials for the influencer to utilize (product pictures, calls to action, links to landing pages, etc.), but then allow your chosen influencers to do what they do best – speak to their audience.