How to Collaborate With YouTube Influencers to Grow your Business

YouTube is one of the biggest social media platforms, with over 2 billion monthly active users, second only to Facebook. Additionally, nearly 81% of 15-to-25-year-olds in the US use YouTube, and about 58% of people above the age of 56 years use it too. This makes it a great platform for brands to reach out to their target audiences.

However, building your reputation and subscriber base on YouTube is quite challenging due to the humongous number of videos that are uploaded onto the platform daily. 

In fact, nearly 500 hours of videos are uploaded every minute onto YouTube, and this makes it extremely difficult for any new or small business to grow on the platform. 

This is where you can take advantage of YouTube influencer marketing. The platform has many micro-influencers who have a highly engaged subscriber base. You can tap into this audience by partnering with them.

What’s more?

Micro-influencers tend to charge lower fees due to their smaller audience sizes, and this can be great for startups and small businesses, which often have budget constraints.

However, creating an influencer marketing campaign for YouTube is no easy task. There are several steps involved and it can be difficult for beginners to navigate them. 

So, let’s take a look at how you can partner with YouTube influencers to grow your brand.

How Can You Partner With YouTube Influencers?

Let’s take a closer look at how you can partner with YouTube influencers to grow your brand:

1. Decide on What You Want to Achieve From the Campaign

Just like all other influencer marketing campaigns, when you’re looking to partner with YouTube influencers, you need to set your campaign goals first. 

This is essential because you need to have a clear picture of what you want to accomplish. Without it, you’ll be aiming in the dark, and your efforts won’t be aligned towards achieving the goal.

What’s more?

Setting your goals helps you decide on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to track. They enable you to find out how well your campaign is progressing. 

Lastly, the goal will help you determine the ideal YouTube influencers for your brand. Each influencer can help you with different goals like growing brand awareness, increasing engagement, driving sales, lead generation, etc. So your goal affects the choice of influencers too. 

2. Look for YouTube Influencers

Once you’ve decided on the goal of your YouTube influencer marketing campaign, you need to start looking for relevant YouTube influencers for your brand. 

This step is critical because it’s important that you find the right influencers. Remember, influencers are viewed as an extension of your brand, so whatever they do can affect your brand image.

So, what should you do?

You should look for YouTube influencers who have genuine engagement and share the same values as your brand. 

For this, you can search for keywords related to your industry and see who’s posting relevant videos regularly. You can then go through their profiles to find out if it’s worth partnering with them. Don’t just look at the number of views their videos generate but also go through their comments and analyze their quality.

However, a manual search can be quite challenging and you may not be able to find influencers with ease. Additionally, it can be difficult to determine the demographics of their subscriber base. Without this, you won’t know if the influencer’s audience matches yours. In such a situation, an influencer discovery tool like Fourstarzz Media can be helpful. 

It’s got over 750K influencers, and you can get detailed reports on each of them, which shows you all the details from their audience demographics to engagement rates. 

You can filter the influencers based on their niche, platform, reach, engagement rate, country. Fourstarzz Media also offers advanced search features like hashtag search, name search, audience interests, and more.

Image via Fourstarzz Media

3. Reach Out to the YouTube Influencers

Once you’ve found reliable YouTube influencers, you need to reach out to them with your pitch for a partnership. A great way of doing this is by building a rapport with them first. You don’t want to make the influencers feel like you’re connecting with them just for promoting your brand. 

Remember, they are creative people who love to have their work recognized and appreciated. So you should start building a relationship with them before you pitch your idea for a collaboration. 

You can begin by commending their work or giving your views on some of the kickstarter video that they’ve created. Once you’ve established a good relationship with them, you can send them an email with your pitch.

4. Draw Up a Contract

Once the YouTube influencers have agreed to work with your brand, you need to draw up a contract for the collaboration. This contract should detail the deliverables from both parties so that there’s no conflict at a later stage. At the same time, it serves as a guideline for both to work together too.

For this, both the brand and the influencers must agree on how the campaign’s success will be evaluated. Being transparent with the influencer can help you win their trust, and this can motivate them to do better for your campaign too.

What’s more? 

The contract should elaborate on the type of collaboration and video too. There are a variety of videos that YouTube influencers can make for your brand. These include product reviews, testimonials, Q&A videos, how-to videos, demos, tutorials, and more. This can help you define the campaign better too.

For instance, Sarah Louise Porter is a YouTube influencer who partnered with Poundland to promote their range of makeup items. She created a tutorial video to show her audience how to use the items.

5. Execute the Campaign

Once the contract is signed, you can start the campaign. While you may want to be in control of things to ensure that the video created by the influencer is top-notch, you should refrain from doing being too controlling. 

Make sure you give your influencers enough creative freedom. They know exactly what works with their audience and what doesn’t. 

So, what should you do?

You can provide a few guidelines to the influencers on how you want the video to be but leave the rest to them. Trust your influencers to come up with high-quality videos related to your brand and products using video creation tools. Once they’ve created the videos, you can discuss changes with them, if any, before uploading it.

6. Measure and Analyze

The last step of a YouTube influencer marketing campaign is that of measuring the progress of your campaign. Based on your campaign goals, track the relevant KPIs. 

For this, you need to go through video analytics. This can give you an overall picture of whether your campaign is progressing the way you want or not.

Based on these analytics, you can determine the future course of your campaigns and identify where you’re excelling and where you’re lagging behind. Accordingly, you can modify your approach and optimize your YouTube influencer marketing campaigns.

Final Thoughts

YouTube is one of the biggest social media platforms, and you can leverage it to promote your brand via influencer marketing. 

All you need to do is decide on your goals and find the right influencers for your campaign. Once that’s done, you can reach out to them for collaboration. 

Make sure you draw up a contract for the campaign and give enough creative freedom to your influencers. Lastly, track the progress of your campaign and analyze it so that you can figure out where you can improve and optimize it. 

Do you have any questions about partnering with YouTube influencers? Let us know in the comments.