In today’s blog, we will explore key strategies and tips on how to manage influencers to maximize their impact on your brand or product promotion. It’s no surprise that brands are increasingly relying on influencer marketing to reach and engage customers worldwide.
According to Mediakix, Interest in influencer marketing has risen more than 90x from 2013 to the present. Additionally,
– 80% of marketers say influencer marketing is effective and enables businesses to increase brand awareness and boost customer engagement.
– Nearly 85% of marketers said they would launch at least one influencer campaign within the next twelve months.
If you’re new to influencer marketing, you should understand that a successful campaign is more than just a business transaction. It all comes down to efficient influencer management and developing strategic relationships with influencers in order to achieve your marketing goals.
With so many influencer management tools available and conflicting information online about how to work with them, developing an influencer relationship management strategy is more difficult than ever, but we’re here to help.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through:
- What is Influencer Management?
- Different Approaches to Influencer Management
- 5 Steps for Effective Influencers Management
What is Influencer Management?
Working with influencers involves more than just sending a DM or an email asking if they want to collaborate. To effectively work with influencers, raise brand awareness, establish product credibility, and drive customers to buy your products, you need an influencer management strategy.
The process of managing your relationships with influencers both during and after the course of your collaboration is known as influencer management or influencer relations management(IRM).
It includes everything from payment negotiations to content strategy, approvals, contract setup, and even long-term relationship building.
How to Manage Influencers: Different Approaches
There are mainly three methods for managing influencers and your influencer marketing campaign:
1. Influencer Marketing Agencies
Influencer marketing agencies/ firms act as a middleman for your marketing campaign. There are numerous influencer agencies and platforms that can help your brand with negotiations, strategy, and communication.
If you prefer a more hands-off approach, they can also assist you in sourcing influencers, managing campaigns, and developing creatives.
2. Influencer Relationship Management Tools/ Platforms
Many influencer relationship management tools and platforms are available to assist you in streamlining your influencer marketing efforts. These tools help find the best influencers for your campaigns, review all the data, and connect with influencers.
A good Influencer management platform like Happine.cc also lets you manage everything from budget negotiations, approvals, campaign monitoring, and measuring results in one place.
3. The Direct Approach
This approach involves running an influencer marketing campaign yourself by identifying the best micro-influencers for your campaign, managing them, and maintaining a direct and effective relationship throughout. But this approach can be time-consuming and less cost-effective compared to the
5 Steps for Effective Influencers Management
If you want to benefit from influencer marketing, properly manage your influencers, and make the most of your campaign, it’s important to follow these steps.
1. Define Your Objectives and Expectations
Setting campaign goals and expectations should be the first step; this provides a clear picture of the type of content you’ll co-create. The more precisely you define your objectives, the easier the remainder of the campaign will be.
Here are some things that you should define at the start of your campaign:
- Introduction to brand: Explain what your brand is, highlight the unique selling proposition and your target audience
- Define budget in advance. You should know that over 59% of marketers will increase their influencer marketing budgets next year.
- Influencer demographics: Choose influencer demographics as per your audience. Consumers ages between 18 and 24 are the biggest content generators out there, generating over 70% of all UGC.
- Content type: Decide on what type of content you want from influencers. For example, product reviews, testimonial videos, or UGC.
- Product reviews: Over 70% of consumers trust product reviews more than professionally crafted marketing content.
- User-generated content: 86% of millenials say user-generated content is generally a good indicator of the quality of a brand or service and 84% report that UGC on company websites has influence on what they buy. Additionally, 59% of millennials claim that they use UGC to inform their purchase decisions about major electronics. Also, 25% of search results for the world’s 20 largest brands are links to user created content. (Source: Medium)
- Social Media channels: Let them know which social media channels they should post it on.
- Deadlines: Define when they must submit their content for approval. You can suggest a target date, but keep in mind that some influencers may have a specific content schedule. Propose a date at least a month ahead of time so that you can agree and discuss it.
- Contract length: Specify how long the campaign will last.
- Usage rights: Be clear about the post’s usage rights – whether you can repost it, use it for promotional purposes, or on other platforms.
Highlighting a list of key objectives and goals for the campaign before it begins is critical to its overall success, whether that is to increase brand awareness, grow your audience, drive traffic, and sales.
2. Negotiate Payment
We saw that establishing clear expectations early in the conversation is critical. This is especially true in terms of payment.
Unfortunately, when it comes to negotiating payment in the Influencer marketing industry, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Most influencers will have predetermined rates when working with brands. Ask about their standard fees if this information is not provided upfront.
Make sure the influencer understands what your brand has to offer. Incentives can take many different forms, including:
- Commissions
- One-time payment
- Free products
- Discount codes or coupons.
Let them know right away if you intend to request product reviews and promotions in exchange for free products. While micro-influencers are usually less expensive than well-known influencers, don’t expect anything for free. In fact, 72.2% of influencers have reported that they’re not offered adequate compensation.
Let’s take a look at some common pricing factors:
- The higher the engagement rate, the higher the fee.
- The time and resources required to create the content you’re looking for. This includes photoshoots, outfits, travel, and other activities.
- Usage rights, such as the right to repurpose their content for your brand’s website, ads, or other platforms.
- The campaign’s duration. How long do they have to create content about your product or brand?
3. Set Up Contracts
A legal agreement is always required whenever money is involved. This is done to ensure that both parties follow the terms of the agreement. A contract is required for an influencer campaign because it is a business arrangement.
The contract also serves as a formal way to ensure that everyone is on the same page about what the deliverables are, which helps the campaign run smoothly.
You must include all relevant information in your terms and conditions, such as copyright and content requirements, payment requirements, the approval process for deliverables, and a cancellation clause, to name a few.
It’s important that you draft an FTC-compliant contract before you begin your campaign.
Tip: To avoid unnecessary litigation, the contract should specify where and how any disputes should be resolved.
4. Allow Your Influencers to be Creative
60 percent of consumers believe that the most important aspect of an influencer campaign is authenticity.
The last thing you want is to over-direct the influencer to the point where the content becomes forced and fails to resonate with the target audience. While it’s great for your brand to provide some key talking points, you don’t want to make the campaign obvious and alienating by imposing your brand’s voice on influencers.
You might be wondering how can brands ensure their sponsored influencers are properly spreading their message if they don’t have a say in what content an influencer produces. Here’s what we think:
- An influencer’s audience follows them because of their distinct style, so attempting to force something else just isn’t going to work. They understand what appeals to their audience.
- By cultivating strong relationships with influencers, you can provide some direction while also allowing the influencer creative freedom to create content that appeals to their audience.
In fact, according to a study, 77% of influencers reported they’d be more willing to repeatedly work with a brand if the brand gave them creative freedom on their projects.
Giving influencers creative freedom allows them to build trust with their fans, which helps your brand gain new customers. Who knows, you might end up with more creative content ideas than you could have thought up in-house.
5. Measure Campaign Results
It’s all about impact when it comes to influencer marketing campaigns. It is critical to track, monitor, and measure the outcomes of your campaign. This way, you’ll be able to see how the content performed, and use that information to inform future campaigns.
Besides metrics, there are several ways to track the performance of influencer campaigns. Here are some additional options:
- Check in regularly with your influencers to track campaign progress and provide any assistance they may require.
- Check to see if the influencer is getting any questions about your brand or product, in case you need to clarify anything.
- If you’re not getting the results you want, reach out to your influencers and talk to them about what changes can be made.
Conclusion
Do you know that More than 90 percent of consumers say they trust word-of-mouth recommendations over ads and 47 percent of consumers use ad blockers? So, working with micro-influencers can help your brand, whether you want to raise awareness, drive sales, or stay top-of-mind with customers. We hope that our guide on ‘how to manage influencers’ was helpful so that you will be able to launch your first influencer campaign right away.
Consider setting up a call with your influencer after the campaign to discuss how the campaign performed in relation to your goals, what the results were, and how you both felt about the partnership. Inquire if they have any suggestions for future campaigns or unique ways to engage with followers. In the long run, if you want to work with the influencer, make them feel appreciated to help strengthen the relationship.
Additionally, we would suggest you use an influencer marketing tool like Happine.cc that will help you automate most of the influencer management processes. Click below to know the pricing!
