You know how they say creative people need a little extra patience when working with them? Well, when working with Bloggers, you definitely need a little extra, but not necessarily patience. More like you need a little extra strategic thinking and a little extra time to create a plan of action + expectations.
Here are some steps to guide you:
- Have A Plan: Why do you want to work with a blogger? What are your expectations of the partnership? What kind of bloggers are you looking to work with? What platforms? These are the kind of questions your plan should have. Your plan should be concise, simple, clear and easy to understand.
- Know Why: This 'why' is the expected result of the partnership. Do you want to grow sales or introduce your product to a different audience? Properly identifying this will help you select just the exact blogger to work with. They might have the same audience but different impacts on the audience so it is good to know and understand what success will look like in the end.
- Start With A Bond: Bloggers are real people. They want to know you really care about them, their content and their brand. That you value all the work they put in. When reaching out, ensure it is from a position of knowledge of them and their work. Ideally, follow them and interact with their work for a period of time before reaching out with a business proposal.
- Leave Them Be: A lot of times, brands interfere in the creative process after contracting a blogger. The brand forgets that one of the core reasons they selected the blogger was for their unique voice and style. Interfering with this, will contaminate the content they produce. Give them a guide i.e. colours, style, words e.t.c. but leave them to be the creatives they are so they can create great content for you.
- Have A Great Offer: A lot of times the bloggers only have vanity metrics on their side (especially here in Nigeria), but considering that you as a brand can't boast of that, you need to decide what will be worth the bloggers while. Is it money? Is it a lifetime supply of your product? or maybe a reward or their audience or an honorary position as your brand ambassador. When you are the one approaching the blogger, you need to make sure this is sorted out so you don't get the boot.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
