Influencer marketing is an invaluable tool; when used properly, it can transform results for any fashion brand, helping them to engage deeply with their audiences and reach out to new ones. However, there are improper methods that can bring about less-than-desirable outcomes, which is why brands must undertake proper planning and consideration to get the results they seek. In this piece, we’ll be outlining the best practices for working with influencers in the fashion industry including tips on how to set up goals and objectives, how to track them using metrics, and general industry insights that can help you protect your reputation, build lasting relationships with influencers, and exceed your marketing goals with your next campaign.
5 best practices to follow for working with fashion influencers
While these examples can be applied to many industries other than fashion, that doesn’t make them any less crucial when it comes to reaching out to influencers for your campaigns.
Here are 5 steps to follow when working with fashion influencers:
Clearly define the terms of the partnership: To avoid any misunderstandings or confusion, set things straight from the outset by defining the duration of the partnership or campaign, the content the influencer needs to create, and the payment terms or alternative incentives such as free products that they will receive in exchange.
Set clear goals and objectives: Understanding what you want to achieve upfront will enable influencers to understand exactly what their content needs to be geared towards, helping them tailor their approach and keep their messaging consistent.
Provide resources and support: Ensure that the influencers you work with have all the tools and resources they need to make their content high-quality and on-brand. This could include product samples ahead of time, as well as general content ideas or access to events you intend to run as part of the campaign.
Communicate and collaborate: Keeping everyone on the same page is key, and that comes with regular communication with the influencers you partner with. Collaborating efficiently will ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign for everyone involved.
Measure and track results: The only way to know how you’ve performed and what went right or wrong is to regularly measure and track your campaign’s results. This can help you to optimize your future campaigns and make informed decisions and iterate where necessary.
While not exhaustive, these five tips can help steer you in the right direction and better position you to make a success of your influencer campaigns. Now, let’s go over each step in a bit more detail.
Clearly define the terms of the partnership
There are a few crucial steps to go over when setting up and establishing your partnership with any fashion influencer – doing so correctly will negate misunderstandings down the line and help keep things running smoothly.
Creating a detailed contract of course the most fool-proof method to make sure everything is outlined and on paper, allowing both parties to have expectations and guidelines set up front. The contract could contain terms such as the length or tenure of the campaign, the type or number of content pieces that need to be created by the influencer, and information regarding compensation be it monetary or otherwise. A part of this process, but not necessarily restricted to the contract, is outlining the specific roles and responsibilities of each party. This will help both your brand and the influencer to understand what they need to do and facilitate an effective working relationship.
Expanding on the posts the influencer will be creating, it's vital to set clear expectations for the content that will be created. Factors such as tone, format, and overall messaging should be discussed to make sure that they align with the brand and product’s positioning. Finally, communicating regularly is key to making sure everyone stays on the same page – progress updates should be discussed, and additionally, brands should let influencers know that they should feel free to ask questions or clarify anything they may need.
Set clear goals and objectives for your influencer marketing campaign
Goal-setting is a significant step in the influencer marketing process, as it helps to keep you steered in the right direction and ensures that any campaign content or decisions are undertaken with the purpose of meeting goals or objectives.
Determining the purpose of the partnership should be one of the first things to clear up – is it brand awareness you’re after, or a boost in sales for a specific product? Knowing this will assist in guiding your efforts more efficiently. Once that’s out of the way, you can move on to setting specific and measurable goals for your campaign. These goals should be easy to track using metrics and could include increasing sales, improving engagement with a target audience, or building trust and credibility, among others.
Next up should be communicating these goals with the influencer you’re partnering with. They need to have a clear picture in mind of what it is you’re setting out to achieve with your influencer marketing campaign, as this will aid them in the creation and tailoring of their content. Don’t feel like you’re locked into these decisions though, as you can always review and adjust your goals as needed as you measure the results and progress throughout the campaign’s tenure. For example, if you notice that your objectives need adjusting to better reflect your progress, or if sudden changes arise in your industry or market, you may need to act on the fly.
Provide resources and support
In order for influencers to be able to do their job to the best of their ability, they need to be given all possible resources and assistance prior to the campaign to avoid uncertainties, delays, and other hiccups that may occur.
The first way you can help is to offer a clear brief at the outset of the collaboration. This will help influencers best understand the goals and intricacies of the campaign, allowing them to meet expectations. This brief should contain information about the brand and its messaging, the target audience, and any other specifics that the brand wants to communicate through the influencer’s content. Depending on the nature of the collaboration, the brand may also need to provide the influencer with resources such as product samples, images, or relevant information about the brand for posting purposes.
It’s best not to just set and forget when it comes to influencer collaborations, so offering guidance and support throughout the process is highly recommended. This could include providing influencers with feedback on their content pitches or ideas or giving them further advice on how to effectively promote the brand or its products authentically. After they’ve undertaken all this hard work, influencers should always be offered fair compensation that suits the level of time and effort they’ve put in. Creating a healthy and fair working relationship with influencers can help motivate them to create high-quality content for your brand, as well as secure your chances of working with them again in future campaigns.
Communicate and collaborate
Nothing keeps the work flowing smoothly and effectively like maintaining clear communication. Misunderstandings and uncertainties hinder work for both parties, so making your collaboration one that promotes open conversation and clarifications will only serve to benefit your results.
As touched on previously, establishing clear goals and objectives is a major step not just for the brand internally, but between the brand and the influencer. There needs to be a mutual agreement on objectives to ensure the direction of content and the overall campaign can serve these objectives and achieve good results. In line with this, maintaining open communication should be a high priority throughout the collaboration process. Making an effort for this communication to be regular will help clear up any issues or concerns, keeping both parties on the same page.
Brands need to be open to feedback and suggestions from influencers and be willing to take their comments into consideration. Influencers tend to offer unique perspectives and insights that brands may otherwise overlook, so be sure to listen and use this information to create more effective campaigns going forward. Coupled with this, it is, therefore, crucial for brands to be willing to compromise and find mutually beneficial solutions. Taking the time to hear out an influencer’s ideas could be a boon in the long run, allowing you to get ahead of the curve and make effective adjustments to your marketing strategy.
Measure and track results
No one benefits from working in the dark; you should therefore always keep tabs on your campaign’s progress and monitor results as they happen to get a clear picture of how your influencers are performing.
This begins by setting clear metrics that can aid in measuring the success of the collaboration. Popular metrics include reach, engagement, sales, or website traffic, and will differ depending on the objectives you laid out during the goal-setting stage. To do this, using analytical tools can give you a huge advantage. Social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram offer their own built-in analytics trackers to get you on the right path, but dedicated influencer marketing tools such as HypeAuditor’s Campaign Management tool offer extensive features to help you track influencers’ content and the results thereof, such as audiences reached and the cost per engagement, and much more.
For collaborations that are focused on driving sales, it's important for brands to track sales figures influenced by the creator’s content. This can be done using unique promo codes or by analyzing changes in sales data before and after the influencer’s posts went live, or through using sophisticated tools like HypeAuditor’s Shopify integration, which allows you to generate promo codes or affiliate links that can directly be tracked to determine performance. Monitoring feedback through responses from customers and followers can help brands further understand how an influencer’s content is landing with their audience. While you can comb through comments for an idea of this, a helpful method of doing this is by using automation tools. HypeAuditor’s Campaign Management tool contains a sentiment analysis feature, allowing you to view the feedback for each sponsored post and identify areas for improvement for future posts.
Protect your brand's reputation
Fashion brands need to be aware that, when using influencer marketing, there will be changes in the perception of the brand’s reputation – for better or for worse! To help preserve your reputation, take note of some of the following tips:
Choose influencers carefully: Influencers vary greatly, and while some might be great for your brand image, others might be more controversial and cause trouble with your target audience. Take the time to find safe influencers who fit your brand’s values and messaging to mitigate any potential risks.
Establish clear guidelines: Rules and guidelines can help keep influencers in line with your brand’s wishes and further protect your reputation. This might include dos and don’t regarding language and content, as well as stipulations for disclosing sponsored posts.
Monitor influencer content: Regular monitoring of influencer posts can help you take quick action where necessary, especially if a post is controversial or inappropriate. Analytical tools such as HypeAuditor offer a Brand Safety check in their Reports and Influencer Discovery tools, helping you further vet influencers to ensure they are appropriate to partner up with.
Have a crisis management plan in place: Since problems can occasionally arise, it’s important to have processes in place to mitigate them. If an influencer’s content garners criticism or generates a negative sentiment from the public, you should be able to act on this immediately with a pre-determined plan.
Stay up-to-date on industry trends and best practices
Trends change constantly, and even more so in the fashion scene, so staying on top of changes is key to keeping your influencer marketing campaigns on point. A few ways you can stay up-to-date on these ever-changing trends include:
Attend industry events: Fashion brands can get a peek at trending topics and more through trade shows, conferences, and workshops. There are often valuable insights to be gained through presentations and panels from industry experts, and these exclusive events get you a first look before many others get inside information. Some events include:
Fashion Week: New York Fashion Week or Paris Fashion Week, among others, are major events in the fashion world for brands to showcase new collections, and facilitate networking with influencers and other industry heavy-hitters.
Trade shows: Shows such as Magic Las Vegas or Première Vision Paris give brands the chance to connect with major fashion influencers, media, and other relevant industry pros.
Blogger conferences: Events such as BlogHer or InfluenceHer Collective serve as a hub for major influencers and brands in the fashion scene to come together, offering the opportunity for networking and education on happenings in the industry.
Follow industry publications and blogs: Major publications and blogs can be a great source for up-and-coming trends, as well as insights on new developments across the industry as a whole. Some examples include:
Vogue
Harper's Bazaar
Elle
Vanity Fair
Marie Claire
Allure
High Snobiety
The Cut
Refinery29
Network with other professionals: Networking is a powerful tool that shouldn’t be ignored in the fashion industry. Engaging with industry organizations, online groups, or even personal connections within the fashion scene can help you unlock important insights that you may otherwise miss.
Experiment with new platforms and technologies: Trying out new methods can also reap positive rewards, as you may discover new ways to streamline your existing processes and find hidden trends yourself. This could include trying new social media platforms and strategies or exploring new types of software tools.
Be transparent and disclose sponsorships
A big no-no in influencer marketing is the lack of advertising or partnership disclosure on collaborations with influencers or other brands. Transparency is always best, so make sure to check off the following best practices:
Be open and transparent about the terms of the collaboration: Transparency includes the influencers you directly work with – make sure to let them know all the terms of your collaboration upfront, including an explicit declaration of any compensation or benefits they will receive.
Clearly communicate expectations: It’s best to let influencers know up-front what your expectations of them are, including specific requirements, guidelines, or restrictions they need to follow for their posts.
Encourage honest feedback: Being open to hearing influencers’ thoughts, feelings, or concerns about the collaboration can help foster a better working relationship and also offers the chance to improve the approach for your collaboration.
Sponsored post disclosure:
Use hashtags: When promoting sponsored content, one should take care to include #ad or #sponsored in the captions or as text in story posts. This helps viewers to clearly identify sponsored content and further ensures transparency.
Include a disclaimer: Captions and descriptions are a great place to include disclaimers, and brands and influencers can use this as an opportunity to state that the featured content has been paid for.
Use the "paid partnership" feature: Platforms such as Instagram and Facebook offer a feature called "paid partnership" that brands can use to disclose sponsored content, which is another clear indicator for viewers.
Respect the influencer's audience and personal brand
While influencers may work with multiple brands, they do have a personal brand and image to uphold throughout their content, sponsored or otherwise, and it should be noted that this needn’t be overwritten when partnering up with them.
It is important for brands to respect the influencer's content style and tone rather than trying to force them to conform to the brand's style, as their unique touches help to keep them in favor with their audiences, and allows them to stand out even when working with a brand or featuring its products. As such, influencers shouldn’t be asked to promote products that don’t align with their personal brand, as this can cause alienation from their audience, as well as give the brand middling results due to the lack of compatibility. Brands can also get involved by engaging with the influencer’s audience through likes, comments, and other interactions in the comment sections of sponsored posts (or even general posts, if it feels appropriate). This can help build a sense of community and also signals to the audience that a brand values them.
Build a long-term relationship with the influencer
Once-off collaborations can be fine and even appropriate in certain scenarios, but building a lasting working relationship with an influencer can be of great benefit to a brand and its image. A few ways to do this include:
Provide value to the influencer: Beyond the obvious monetary compensation, providing additional value to influencers is a great way to build a relationship. Benefits such as exclusive product or event access, or support in growing their personal brand can go a long way.
Foster open and transparent communication: Building a long-term relationship requires consistent and honest conversation, so brands should be willing to hear out the influencer’s ideas or concerns and work collaboratively to address them.
Offer fair compensation: Work and effort should be rewarded appropriately, so it’s important for pay to reflect this. Influencers who are paid fairly are also more motivated to collaborate with brands in the future.
Show appreciation: Brands can also build long-term relationships by letting an influencer know how much value they bring to the collaboration. Small gestures such as thank-you notes or small gifts, or even public recognition of their contributions, can go far in helping them feel appreciated.
Conclusion
Working with fashion influencers can be a complex process, but it is an invaluable way for brands to achieve new heights in terms of their results and audience perception, and to reach new consumers when promoting products and services. Following tried-and-true industry practices can help streamline this process and ensure that your collaborations with fashion influencers go as smoothly as possible, keeping both parties happy throughout your partnership. We hope that these insights, tips, and recommendations can help guide your future influencer marketing endeavors and help your fashion brand grow within the influencer space and beyond.
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