When Hashtags Meet Strategy: Influencers as Brand Consultants
Today’s tough economic climate has made a major impact on consumers’ wallets. As people struggle with balancing their bills, items they need, and the little treats they pick up along the way, one thing remains constant—they’re actively looking for a connection with the brands they choose to spend their money on.
A great way for brands to easily connect with their target audience and potential customers is by partnering with an influencer who resonates with those they’re trying to reach. Sprout Social found that 53% of consumers look for influencers who align with their personal values while 47% look for influencers who are authentic.
Influencers don’t just promote products; they can also work as brand consultants, offering valuable insights and guidance on brand strategy, product development, and audience engagement, leveraging their deep understanding of their followers’ preferences.
So should your brand work with an influencer as a brand consultant? That depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Influencer partnerships aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and they don’t solve every problem when it comes to audience connection. That’s why we’re digging into how influencers can function as brand consultants, what those partnerships can do for your business, and when they might not be the right fit.
Influencers bring more than followers—they bring fresh insights
To win in today’s competitive market, it’s crucial to establish an authentic relationship with your customers. You need to keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to your audience’s needs and pain points so your brand can reach them where they are. You can start by leaning into social listening to keep track of important themes within your target audience, but there’s a limit to what listening alone can do.
That’s where influencers can come in. Bringing in an influencer as a brand consultant can give you insight into or guidance on messaging that will resonate with your customers. Having an outside voice chime in on decisions can bring a much-needed new perspective on what your target audience really wants or needs. Influencers can also highlight ways to engage your target audience that will resonate more with the audience in question to encourage more conversions.
A brand consultant’s contribution can range from lower- to higher-level involvement, including:
- A basic level of collaboration on a singular campaign, where they’re advising on slight adjustments to key messages, value propositions, use cases, etc.
- A moderate level of collaboration, where the brand consultant’s impact goes beyond one campaign they were involved in to include broader marketing messaging, marketing platform selection, and more
- A higher level of collaboration, which involves a brand consultant who impacts the actual makings of the product or service
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But keep in mind that adding another voice to the creative or production process can have its challenges as well. Teams may struggle with being open to another collaborator and actually listening to what they have to say or figuring out where in the process their input belongs. For a creator, giving advice that’s achievable and applicable is paramount, but that may be easier said than done–especially if they’re not used to working in that capacity.
Consider influencers as brand consultants when your business needs a change
If you’re looking to shake up your brand’s marketing, it could be the perfect opportunity to bring in an influencer partnership. The change can be anything from a single campaign to launching a new product to even expanding into a new demographic (although a collaboration like this might not be necessary at all levels).
For bigger moves, like expanding into a new country or going after a new demographic that requires more representation than is currently available with the stakeholders on the brand side, reaching out to an influencer to guide you on cultural nuances or general best practices can be a less expensive way to ensure you’ll be successful.
An influencer brand consultant can also help you enhance your connection with key audiences with a well-known voice in your chosen market. For example, childrenswear brand Carter’s brought on Hilary Duff as their first-ever Chief Mom Officer (a role made specifically for her), a collaboration that the brand said was the “first-of-its-kind for Carter’s.” They tapped the well-known mom in the parenting community to consult on their design and creative.
Source: Carter’s
As of July 2024, the partnership is still growing strong as Carter’s and Duff released a new kids’ collection to great fanfare at “a price accessible to all parents,” which was an important selling point to their target market.
An influencer partnership might not always be the right fit for your brand
Although influencers can be great resources for audience connection, these partnerships aren’t solutions for everything. If the help you’re looking for would require knowledge of a complex topic or involve a greater scope of work than a single influencer can take on, you might want to opt for a different strategy. There’s also the possibility of too much of a good thing: you may run into trouble if you’re employing a large number of influencers who have conflicting voices that could confuse your audience.
Morphe, a well-respected beauty brand favored by professional makeup artists, broke into the mainstream by partnering with influencers to launch new product lines and get in front of new audiences. But they may have flown too close to the sun: over time, the sheer volume of influencer collaborations and multiple controversies involving their partners ended up confusing people.
Source: License Global
When audiences don’t know who your brand is or what it stands for, it’s much harder to make the case for their attention and their dollars. For Morphe, this fragmented influencer strategy ended up being one of the factors contributing to the collapse of the brand.
Avoid going the “too many cooks” route when it comes to using influencers as brand consultants. Instead, look for influencer partners that you can trust to have a genuine connection with your customers and who have a real interest in growing your brand in addition to their specific expertise and audience.
Getting started with influencers as brand consultants
To get started (and make sure that you’re bringing your new consultant in at the right time) you need to conduct a more extensive audit of the influencer’s audience demographics, tone/voice, and engagement with their audience to ensure proper alignment.
During the audit, take a look at your prospective collaborator through the lens of brand safety, focusing on what matters to your specific brand. That could include making sure they haven’t worked with competitors or that they’re not providing opinions on topics your brand doesn’t want to engage with (or that they are sharing thoughts that align with your business’ values).
Once you’ve hired your brand consultant, it’s key to make sure that your expectations are clearly outlined and the influencer knows what level of input they’re expected to provide. That’s especially important because this role’s responsibilities can range widely, from feedback or recommendations on proactive or reactive messages to being part of a focus group that influences deeper product/service changes to being part of the day-to-day decisions of a product launch.
Influencers can be an excellent source for product ideas, audience knowledge, or a general pulse check on whether or not your product or service will actually connect with your target audience. With the right parameters in place, you can let them do what they do best–influence, of course–to set your brand up for success with your audience.
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