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Shared Value: A Sustainable Approach to Influencer Relationships

In most influencer campaigns, there are three primary stakeholders. You are probably one of them; a brand, an influencer, and an audience. Each of you has something unique to gain from the other as well as something unique to offer. Being able to both contribute and benefit is where the concept of shared value originates.

Shared value is a philosophy and a business practice that should be explored and practiced to make all those in an influencer marketing ecosystem happy. The long-term benefits of shared value relationships are loyalty, impact, enhanced communication, better return on investment and financial reward.

Let’s start with understanding the big picture, the needs of all stakeholders and where these overlap.

This graph shows some of the objectives, goals, and desires of the three groups. These are not ALL of the possible goals of each, but an example for the sake of getting across the point. You can substitute the ambitions for all on a campaign by campaign basis.

Here are some ways you can ensure you foster an environment of shared value:

• An audience wants to be understood by a brand. Brands want to better understand their consumers. Influencers can offer a solution for both sides by providing brands with relevant insights into their audience. I have found that market research with influencers is a super underutilized benefit of influencer collaborations!

• Influencers can take advantage of the additional production value of working with brands to create high quality, authentic content that their audience wants to consume and engage with.

• The brand’s objective to amplify their content can be correlated to the influencers goal of getting paid for access to their audience. When a brand remunerates an influencer, they receive greater reach and impact.

• When brands collaborate with influencers to build advocacy, influencers solidify their business, brands receive added value from the influencers and audiences develop stronger loyalty to the brand.

These are just a few of the cases where value can be shared by the community around your brand. It is important for brands not to think of themselves as islands, but as contributors to a wider economy of values. When starting to think about a strategy that involves influencer, consider using the graphic above as a template which you can fill in with your own unique objectives.

This is a concept that takes time and practice to get right. We need to be open to learning, making mistakes and trying again. When the result is one in which everyone wins, the effort is compounded to produce long-term results.

It’s important to note that sharing value does not mean meeting everyone’s needs. As a brand, you do not need to contribute something that does not provide a reciprocated value. Similarly, influencers need not provide a service if it does not benefit them to do so. Brands, influencers, and audiences are on their own journeys to meet their goals. The magic happens when there is overlap in the journey.

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As an Influencer, the Webfluential Media Kit is Your Online Resume

Marketers, Brands and pretty much anyone looking to collaborate with influencers can view all of your audience demographics, performance data and highlights at a glance. Your media kit can also provide insight into what your personality is like.

This matters in the new age of Influencer marketing because the game is not just about having high follower counts anymore, marketers actually need to make sure that they pick the right influencers in order to get a better return on their investment – better results.

As an Influencer, this also means you can show marketers that you’re a good fit by making them understand your content, audience and reviews.

When it’s done right, your media kit becomes one of your greatest assets. Chief among the many benefits of having a credible media kit is that it acts as a single reference point for anyone looking to work with you. It could mean the difference between your getting booked and your being overlooked.

The initial media kit set up is quick and easy, just a few clicks from your Webfluential profile and voila! Your kit is ready. – It already comes with key information divided into three sections:

About

• This is where all of your basic profile information is found, it should include a short bio that gets right to the point, your general location and some audience demographics like what age groups and market segments you speak to. The About section also includes a visual overview of just how your total social audience is distributed, so we can easily see which platforms the majority of your people are on.

Social channel statistics

• This is where Webfluential steps up by providing you with deep insights into the performance of content across multiple social channels. Here we can basically see how well your tweets and posts are actually received by your audience. By measuring your Reach, Relevance and Resonance per channel, we are able to place you in a specific tier, grouped together with other similar Influencers. Your tier ultimately affects what you can charge per post.

Booked by Webfluential

• This is the booking form found at the bottom of your media kit, it collects the main information needed to get the ball rolling, giving brands, marketers and anyone else viewing your kit the opportunity to send in a booking request immediately!

With just these three sections, your media kit is essentially complete. However, if you really want to make the most of this platform and effectively increase your chances of getting booked, take the time to customize your media kit and make it stand out by using these 6 pro tips:

1. Custom URLs

When you first create your media kit, it has a long complicated URL like the one in the image below. This is something you can and should change immediately, it just takes a second.

• Go to “My Profile”
• Click on “Customize URL”

Be sure to choose a simple URL that will be easy for you to remember and for others to find, you can read more about how to customize your Webfluential media kit URL on our blog.

2. Custom Header

Your header is the first and biggest thing people see when they land on your media kit, make a great impression by uploading an image that says a little more about you.
Note that there are specific size requirements here, and make sure that your image fits.

3. Media Kit Highlights

The optional highlights section is one of the most underrated media kit features at the moment. In truth, this section is your little piece of free space as far as the overall media kit structure is concerned.

This section allows you to add text, embed content and generally link to all sorts of information that wouldn’t otherwise be found on your media kit. The available space is limited so use it wisely – stick to the facts here and add something relevant.

4. Featured Content

The featured content section is one way to really spice up your media kit. If you’ve written an article for a brand, if an article has been written about you, or if there is just a really key piece of web content that you would like to showcase – this is the place to do it. You can build credibility by adding links and descriptions in here; they come out very nicely and make your media kit stand out even more!

5. Featured Tweets

This section is great if you’ve done any promotional work for brands on Twitter, also good if you’d like to showcase your diversity or give us a sample of your caption writing skills. Whatever the tweet content is, all you have to do is find those links and add them in here. This embedded display also works very well for your more visual Tweets with images or videos in them.

6. Personality Profile

The newest addition to we’ve made to Webfluential media kits is a feature that gives you the option to really personalise it, called the Personality Profile section. This has been built with IBM Watson, an analytics product that gives brands a better idea of your digital personality based on the content that you publish online. You can learn more about setting up your personality insights here.

Once you have all these extra features in place you can be sure that your media kit is like no other! Be sure to keep it updated, adding to it or changing things up every once in a while. Most importantly, remember to share your media kit link. Put it on display like a business signpost or keep it on hand and give it out like a digital business card, and pretty soon you’ll find yourself with more opportunities than you can handle.

*This post was written by Wati Mbewu

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