Collaborate with influencers or cooperate with influencers? What is the difference?
People may ignore the difference between influencer collaboration and influencer cooperation. It seems to look like the same stuff, but the difference has a huge impact on how brands and influencers work together.
Collaboration and cooperation are the two frequent words that started using from kindergarten in our childhood to the workplace when we have grown up.
There is an essential difference that leads to several ways that a marketing campaign gets done in between brands and influencers.
How do we understand collaboration and cooperation in the influencer marketing industry?
First, collaboration is when a brand and influencers come together and work on a marketing campaign in support of a shared mission and outcome. It’s not easy. This may need the influencers to have a strong influencership. Simply because influencers are agile, and they work for themselves.
When a brand collaborates with influencers, means they are working in a virtual organization but in different departments. They have a shared marketing goal. This is very very important.
For example, you are a brand, let’s say you are a product developer, and I am an influencer or a marketer. When we work together, we must have a shared vision, which is to make sure the product or service will be the best fit for the audience.
We get together, and work out the adjustment, and implement a change. As you can see, the brand and influencers are co-authors of this marketing campaign, they share credit.
Influencers may, not only simply just get paid, but gain more reputation, they help solve problems in their niche by leveraging brands’ manufacturing capacity or their technology, instead of just reviewing products and doing nothing.
INFLUENCERSHIP INFLUENCES PRODUCTS AND MARKETS. Brands at the same time reach wider, deeper, and more loyal users.
This function has been well reflected in our influencer marketing platform, when you are using LoongList, you may select the appropriate marketing phase when you started a campaign, and you may receive suggestions from interested influencers, you are collaborating to improving your customers’ journey.
On the other hand, cooperating with influencers is like a teammate helping you post your image on their social channels. The key difference is that there is no shared goal or vision between you and the cooperating influencers.
They don’t care about if their audiences can be transformed or not. You are paying for exposure, not for an outcome. Does this lose the sense of influencer marketing? Brands should take this into your consideration.
When an influencer understands the difference between working on some brands’ marketing campaign and working with some brands to achieve a goal that you both share. Ok, Emphasize the difference again, “work on” or “work with”. This is the first step that will lead an influencer to be influencership.
Collaboration in influencer marketing gains a sense that brands and influencers are working together and creating something bigger than themselves.
Brands need to focus more on influencers who combined the skills that can identify the values and build relationships with audiences. It can be seen as influencers provide fully customized services for each brand in different marketing stages.
Sometimes, cooperating might not be worse than collaborating. When brands and influencers are working together on some specific projects, if some of them are struggling to identify common goals, they could cooperate on the projects that other influencers are collaborating on, they just only offer their content creation and promoting services. Both collaboration and cooperation are hybrid modes of your influencer marketing campaign.
When there are some common ground and purpose that can be identified by brands and influencers, the collaboration happens smoothly.
We have made this collaborative process part of our platform and we try to improve it to be a collaborative environment for brands and influencers.
See you next time…
