Are you curious about how brands connect with influencers and build relationships that drive real results?
Nicole Dye-Anderson, senior vice president and head of media relations, experiential, and influencer strategy at Wells Fargo, brings over 20 years of experience to the conversation. From entertainment to financial services, she has been at the forefront of high-profile communications, crafting influencer strategies that lead to impactful coverage and outcomes.
Here, Dye-Anderson, a speaker at PRSSA’s ICON 2024 in Anaheim, Calif., on Oct. 14, shares practical insights on building long-lasting partnerships and managing influencer strategies.
During your career, you’ve built strong relationships with social media influencers. What factors help PR pros foster authentic, long-lasting connections with influencers?
The operative word is “relationships.” There are different types of social media influencers: celebrity, micro and macro influencers. [Building those relationships requires] going along with them on their journey. They might start small and end up being huge.
So, that emotional connection, identifying with them as people first, influencers second, is the biggest advice that I would tell anyone. Have strong relationships and continue through the years with them.
How do you tailor influencer strategies to engage audiences and generate results?
First and foremost, it is strategy. Influencer marketing is not spaghetti on the wall; we’re not going to throw it out there and see what sticks. Understand your overall goals and objectives first.
Then, treat your influencer like a partner, not like someone that you’re hiring to do a service for you. By doing that, you’re going to get the key performance indicators that you set out originally, your goals and objectives.
Make sure that you’re partnering with an influencer who’s showing a following and engagement. It’s not up to the PR professional to get the engagement. Provide the influencer with content they can use with their audience to foster engagement.
For brands that are just starting to invest in influencer strategies, what’s your advice for getting it right?
Partnering with influencers is now the rule. It’s just [a matter of] determining the right influencer for your specific audience and needs. You have to serve as a liaison between the influencer and your key stakeholders within the business. Again, treat influencers as partners.
You have a brand to protect, a reputation that you want to make sure grows positively. You want to mitigate reputational risk. Well, influencers are the same way. Just like you’re trying to protect your brand, they’re also trying to protect their brands.
They need to be authentic and keep their voices. If they lose their credibility, they’re going to lose their audience, and then they’re useless to you.
[You need to] get buy-in from your internal stakeholders — whether executive leadership, legal, compliance — from the very beginning. If you get [those points] right, then everything else will fall in [place] seamlessly.In these videos, Dye-Anderson discusses how to ensure that an influencer aligns with a brand’s values and credibility, and how the influencer marketing landscape has changed in recent years:
What trends will shape the way that brands connect with influencers in the next few years?
When I look into the future, the key is understanding that the media landscape has changed. Social, pretty much, is king. People used to send out a press release or have a press conference when they’re making a statement. Now you’ve got the President of the United States sending out an Instagram or a TikTok post to say, “I’m stepping down.”
The landscape has changed from a media perspective. That’s going to continue, and that’s a trend that we need to be a part of, and quite frankly, leading. News is no longer breaking in print followed by TV. It’s breaking on social. That trend is going to continue, so we need to be prepared to handle that.
Newsrooms are shrinking. As they’re losing their jobs, unfortunately, [journalists are] coming to us as PR professionals, pitching ideas to us because they now have to pitch ideas to newsrooms to sell a story to make a living. That trend is unfortunate, but it’s going to continue.
And I would challenge folks to really understand what that means when they’re building their strategies and relationships with these media. Because [a reporter] may be at Business Insider today and then be a freelancer tomorrow. If they are freelancing, instead of one publication, you can now have access to multiple. That’s a trend I see continuing to happen in 2025.
[Illustration credit: sandy hong]
