5 influencers and marketers on building authentic partnerships
On Tuesday, Glossy hosted the premiere Beauty Pop event, bringing together brands and influencers for a day of meetings, intimate discussions, panels and networking. During speaker sessions related to building meaningful connections, brand executives and influencers discussed the hows and whys of partnering in authentic ways. Five highlights are below.
The importance of leveraging influencers
“Influencer marketing is one of our biggest (marketing) levers; it’s one of the biggest levers you can pull. Because nowadays, for us, [influencers] aren’t just creating content for their own channels to reach their audiences. We’re also using that content for digital advertising on TikTok. Or we’ll want to use that content on a PDP page with a retailer. Or we’ll use it as education materials. … Influencers are media companies. We’ve tested their creative time and time again, and it’s the creative that works.” -Somer Tejwani, svp, global marketing at Too Faced Cosmetics
Maintaining followers’ trust
“It’s important to me, as a role model to my followers for so many years, that I create trust. I won’t endorse anything that I don’t believe in, so it’s never fake. I’m very sincere as a person — who I am and how I move — so the marketing strategy that I bring to a business is creating that community of trust. … Building a community is a great strategy that will bring longevity.” -Shanina Shaik, co-Founder, Sala
Influencer briefs that work
“[Influencer marketing] is still, to this day, a discovery process for us as a brand – because everything is moving and changing so fast all the time. … The brief is so important. When we partner with an influencer, it’s because we love their content. And, in my view, influencers are among the most talented types of performers out there. We aren’t there to put words into their mouths, when it comes to the brief. So we study their content closely, and we partner with them because we love the style of their content. And when we brief them, we’re only including examples of the things that we love from their existing content. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or change anything around. We, of course, include the business objectives of the partnerships, but influencers are stunning performers. And they take [the brief] and run with it, and that’s what we love.” –Sheena Zadeh-Daly, founder, Kosas
“For the brands that do a super intense brief, it’s easy [for an influencer] to get overwhelmed. When you’re collaborative on the brief and the message [the brand is] trying to get across, that resonates best with [an influencer’s] audience and keeps them on brand.” –Kensington Tillo, content creator
“We are bold disruptors. We look to [influencers] to help guide us … and then we shape culture. We don’t lead culture, we don’t guide culture — we shape it. But we shape it with [influencers]. Obviously, [the objective] is to connect with communities, which [influencers] do every day. So the brief has to be authentic to them. … We are not going to dictate what [influencers] do; they know how to do it better than we do. So we really listen to them to decide how to show up.” –Patrick O’Keefe, vp of Integrated Marketing, E.L.F. Beauty