As a luxury PR team, we understand how important it is to keep up-to-date in the ever-evolving world of marketing and PR. Here at MirrorMePR, we ensure that our brands are always ahead of the competition, and the same applies to our approach of influencer marketing opportunities and relationships. In this blog, we discuss the marketing trends that you need to know as a brand or influencer.
Long-Term Relationships
Our brands are looking for longevity in their relationships with influencers, and this is a practice we celebrate and encourage. Giving value back to the influencers is essential in nurturing those relationships. For us, it’s about offering mutual value, which will benefit both the brand and influencer, and continuing to work with influencers as part of an integrated approach to our marketing plans.
Brands Using Influencer Agencies
As a luxury PR team, we’re an agency that’s familiar with influencer marketing. This is a service all our clients benefit from, but when it comes to negotiating directly with an influencer, you’ll need to recognise that each influencer will have a different approach. This process is more more about exploring, rather than dictating, how you can work together. Remember we mentioned value earlier? Yes, it’s just as important to a credible influencer as the monetary/product value associated.
Quality Over Quantity
Big corporations are starting to turn their focus on including ‘micro’ influencers into influencer marketing, and we’re doing the same when and where its is relevant. Although accounts with a large number of followers might seem impressive (if they are real followers – which we can tell), engagement with content still comes out on top over the number of followers you have.
Engaging and building strong relationships within a community network is an important factor for us to consider, when deciding which influencers we approach, on behalf of our clients.
An Open & Transparent Relationship
In the previously murky waters of influencer relationships, it seemed that obvious associations were hidden away in a mountain of hashtags (if any), and declarations on relationships between brands and influencers were far and few between. Now with the FTC cracking down, the call for transparency is finally being heard.
While some influencers and brands in our sector continue to ignore these guidelines, it will only be a matter of time before their luck runs out and the brand and influencer will experience the wrath of the TFC. Not to mention potentially tarnishing the influencer and the brand’s reputation and leaving their fans feeling like they have been duped into believing that the posts featuring the products had no benefit to the influencer, when the truth is that the brand pay of give the product, for free, to the influencer.
Either way, the FTC make their position clear, if a brand pays an influence to make a post (no matter if it’s cash, or a product), then that is still a material relationship, and it needs to be clearly stated in the post.
