Managing influencers is a challenge even for experienced brands. Here's our guide to influencer management with tips and tools to help you grow your campaigns.
Managing influencers is more than most brands bargain for.
And the more creators you collaborate with, the tougher influencer campaign management gets.
According to our new micro-influencer marketing report, creator collaborations are growing by 33% year-over-year. Mastering influencer management is a must-do for busy marketers scaling UGC and building creator communities without getting overwhelmed.
Making it happen means having the right strategies and tools. This post explains step-by-step how to establish an organized method for managing influencers and tracking campaign results.
Influencer marketing campaign management refers to how marketers plan, execute and track their creator collaborations. Effective influencer management involves communicating and setting expectations with creators while also monitoring campaign performance and results.
The day-to-day duties of an influencer manager vary depending on the scope of your campaigns and the size of your team. That said, influencer management covers a combination of the following:
Given the legwork involved with each of these tasks, brands rely on influencer management platforms to automate or do most of the heavy lifting or eliminate these duties outright.
Managing all of the tasks above without a strategy or the right tools is a recipe for burnout.
Not to mention an underperforming influencer marketing strategy.
Because the bigger your campaigns get, the bigger your headaches get.
That's why it's crucial to put your influencer campaign management strategy under the microscope to understand where you can improve.
Even running campaigns featuring just 25+ influencers at once involves wrangling dozens of emails, contracts, shipments and pieces of UGC across multiple platforms. It's exhausting.
An organized approach to managing influencers can help you save time, reduce stress and guarantee your campaigns deliver the results you’re looking for. Having an established influencer management strategy also makes scaling your efforts much easier as you work with more influencers over time.
Successfully managing an influencer marketing campaign involves a ton of moving pieces. Below we've broken down those management tasks into five steps.
The success of your campaigns almost always comes down to finding the right influencers.
You need authentic creators that align with your target audience and products. Beyond that, you also need to make sure your influencer partnerships meet your criteria when it comes to the following:
Activating creators can be a time-sink, especially for brands launching new products to new audiences. Escaping the revolving door of finding influencers and vetting them each time you run a campaign means:
Brands running collabs at scale can't afford to spend hours per week chasing creators or combing over individual profiles. Whether in a platform or influencer tracking spreadsheet, consolidating your creator community in one place should be a priority.
For busy brands, managing influencer relationships can be a tricky balancing act.
You want to make connections with individual creators and personalize your communication with them.
But doing so is impossible when you're working with 100s or 1000s of creators across campaigns.
Consider that there are better ways to keep influencers happy and engaged beyond personalized messages, though. For example, some overlooked aspects of positive influencer relations include:
Once an influencer becomes part of your community, it's crucial to maintain clear and consistent communication throughout your campaigns. Be available to answer questions and provide personalized support when someone needs it.
However, consider that your day-to-day influencer management related to negotiation or compensation should be handled by an influencer platform if you want issues to get resolved in a timely manner.
A clear creative brief is essential for getting high-quality content from your influencers. Your brief should outline:
We recommend providing creators with a checklist of quick instructions rather than a massive list of must-dos. Below is a creative brief sample that highlights how brands can strike a balance that's a win-win for both parties and results in the type of UGC you're looking for.
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While it’s important to provide guidance, avoid being too restrictive. Influencers know their audience best and should have the freedom to present your product that results in the most engagement.
If your campaign involves product seeding or freebies, your fulfillment process needs to be smooth and well-organized. Anything you can do to create a stellar shipping experience for creators is a plus.
Here are our key tips for effective influencer fulfillment and shipping:
Manually entering names and addresses into a spreadsheet is a recipe for missed deadlines and shipping errors. Meanwhile, outsourcing your influencer fulfillment to a third party can also be nerve-racking as you lose control of the creator unboxing experience.
Consider that some influencer marketing platforms like Statusphere actually handle product fulfillment on behalf of brands with a wholly-owned warehouse. Our fulfillment technology keeps creators in the loop about the status of their product shipments.
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Beyond that, our platform can automate product seeding and send personalized influencer boxes to creators for their birthdays or other life events. In our experience, fulfillment is one of the most vital aspects of influencer campaign management that brands overlook.
Ask yourself what you hope to achieve with your campaign. Then, figure out which metrics and KPIs you need to track to measure them effectively. Common influencer marketing goals include:
Once your campaign is live, you’ll need to track performance to see if you’re hitting your goals. Here are some key metrics to monitor:
Remember: your influencer marketing goals should be measurable and easy to report. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, track metrics like impressions, reach and engagement rates. If your goal is to generate sales, focus on metrics like conversion rates from UGC ads.
Many influencer marketing tools offer built-in analytics to help you track these metrics in real time. This makes it easy to monitor progress and adjust your campaign with more confidence.
The right influencer management platform can take a ton of work off your plate so you can focus on results, not wrangling creators. The more you can automate, the better. Below are some tools to help.
Statusphere's micro-influencer marketing platform helps brands find influencers, manage campaigns and track results without requiring manual outreach or one-on-one management.
Our platform uses 250+ first-party creator data points to target relevant influencers, going far beyond basic search filters and demographic data to match brands with creators. For example, brands can use Statusphere to match with creators who shop at specific retailers or have unique dietary restrictions.
The platform's automated matchmaking aligns brands with vetted creators for pre-negotiated collabs. Brands also have the option to upload their own creator list to the platform as well.
Statusphere also handles everything from product fulfillment to content rights management, saving brands 1000s of hours per month as a result.
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Consolidating all of your brand's UGC and performance data in one place, brands have a home base for their influencer collabs that doesn't require manual vetting or communication. This means you can focus on getting more content and building an influencer community faster.
CreatorIQ's influencer marketing platform helps brands discover and manage influencers with AI-powered tools to optimize discovery and vetting. The platform lets brands filter potential creators by factors like engagement rate, demographics and preferred products.
While the platform still requires brands to vet individual creators and review profiles by hand, features such as built-in e-signatures speed up processes like securing agreements and content rights.
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Promoty is an influencer CRM that excels at organization and workflow for brands that want to take a more hands-on approach to influencer management.
The platform offers features like Kanban-style creator boards, note-taking and analytics to help brands keep a pulse on their campaigns. Brands with existing influencer communities can use Promoty to manage relationships and track the status of individual creators more effectively.
Brandwatch is comprehensive influencer campaign management software that also assists in discovering, managing and analyzing influencer profiles. The platform's features include CRM functions and real-time reporting coupled with a massive influencer database of 24+ million creators.
Built-in reporting and analytics coupled with content tracking help brands understand at a glance how their influencer campaigns are performing and how close they are to being complete.
The sooner you master influencer management, the better.
Setting clear goals and objectives coupled with the right expectations and tools can definitely help.
And speaking of tools, influencer management software is a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to getting content at scale.
Again, you can only do so much DIY. That's why it makes sense to invest in a platform that doesn't require individual vetting and combing through influencer profiles.
If you want an influencer platform that prioritizes saving time while scaling influencer content, Statusphere's software can help. Our micro-influencer marketing suite and vetted creator network allow brands to grow their campaigns faster and with fewer question marks. Features like built-in UGC ads, product fulfillment and analytics help make it happen.
Want to see how our platform works? Get in touch with our team to see why Statusphere is the best influencer marketing campaign management tool for consumer brands.
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