Trustworthy collaborations with the right creator.

What is influencer marketing, and how is a collaboration set up properly?

Influencer marketing is a brand's promotion of its product or service through content creators who have trust and influence over a specific audience. A collaboration can be made in exchange for payment, products or services; in every case, it must be clearly stated to followers that the content is advertising.

Why does influencer marketing work?

People listen to the experience of someone they follow and trust more than to what a brand says about itself. When a content creator shows the product in their own voice, within their own daily flow, the brand makes natural contact with an audience it has not yet reached. In addition, the content produced from these collaborations can also be used on the brand's own accounts and in its ads, to the extent permitted in the agreement. For this effect to occur, there are two conditions: the creator's audience must truly overlap with the brand's target audience, and the collaboration must be run sincerely and transparently.

A big account or a micro influencer?

Follower count alone is not decisive in choosing a collaboration. Accounts with very large audiences can provide wide visibility quickly, but their audiences may be scattered and their collaboration budgets are high. Micro and local content creators, who are smaller but focused on a specific subject or city, usually build a closer relationship with their audience. For a newly opened cafe in Sakarya, a local account sharing the city's food and venue recommendations can be more meaningful than a nationally known account whose followers live in other cities. Often, working with several well-matched small accounts rather than one big name delivers a more balanced result.

How do we choose the right content creator?

When building the candidate list, we look beyond follower count. The main points we evaluate are:

• Audience fit: Do the followers' region, age range and interests overlap with your brand's target audience?
• Naturalness of engagement: Are the comments real questions and conversations, or repetitive short and meaningless phrases?
• Consistency: Does follower growth show sudden jumps, or a natural curve spread over time?
• Content quality and language: Do the account's visual style and way of speaking match your brand's identity?
• Past collaborations: Have they worked with competing brands before, and have they clearly disclosed advertising content?

We remove from the list accounts that give the impression of purchased followers or engagement. Such accounts both waste the budget and can harm the brand's credibility. When making the selection, we also ask the content creator for screenshots of audience statistics.

The brief, agreement and ad label

For a collaboration to run smoothly, expectations must be in writing. The brief and terms we prepare generally include:

1. The topic of the content, the key message to be emphasized and phrases to avoid,
2. Format and quantity: Reels, stories, posts or a combination of these,
3. Publishing date and the approval process before publishing,
4. The right and period of use of the content on the brand's accounts and in its ads,
5. How the ad label will be used,
6. After what period and in what form the statistics will be shared.

The ad label is not a preference but an obligation. In posts made through a commercial collaboration, it must be stated, in a way followers can easily see, that the content is advertising. We recommend using the platforms' paid partnership labels together with clear wording. This transparency protects both the brand and the content creator in the long run.

Before publishing, we check the content for compliance with the brief, but we take care to let the content creator keep their own voice and style. Followers notice immediately when an account reads a stock ad text that differs from the voice they are used to. That is why in the brief we clarify the message and the limits and leave the manner of telling largely to the content creator. After publishing, we gather and interpret indicators such as reach, views, saves, profile visits and, if any, the use of a special link or discount code.

On-site and online execution

When planning local collaborations in Sakarya and the surrounding area, we can invite content creators to your venue and be present on the shooting day to help keep things in line with the brief. For events such as openings or tastings, we also plan the guest list and the flow together. For campaigns across Turkey, candidate research, communication, briefing and reporting run entirely online; if products need to be shipped, we plan the logistics with you. When working with content creators in different cities during the same period, we gather the publishing dates in a single calendar and follow each one's progress in the same report format.

Common mistakes

• Looking only at follower count: Reaching a large but uninterested audience is often less effective than reaching a small but right one.
• Sending a product without a brief: When expectations are not written down, the resulting content may not carry the message the brand wants.
• One-off collaborations: A relationship with the same content creator spread over time is more convincing than a single post.
• Hiding the label: Content not disclosed as advertising both violates regulations and causes a loss of trust when noticed.
• Not measuring results: If statistics are not requested and recorded, you cannot know what worked in the next collaboration.