Influencer recruiting and vetting are two of the biggest roadblocks for brands scaling their creator communities. We dig into ways brands can automate both processes.
For brands today, influencer recruiting is a never-ending process.
Especially when brands are partnering with 30+ creators on average per campaign.
It's no secret that recruiting and vetting influencers are both massive time-sinks. They're also two of the most important tasks related to influencer marketing that you can't sweep under the rug.
But combing through countless profiles isn't an option for brands scaling their influencer campaigns.
And brands rightfully want collabs with authentic influencers, not fake profiles or random creators.
Our take? Brands should work smarter (not harder!) with recruitment and vetting. With thoughtful automation and the right strategies, you can streamline both with confidence.
This post explores four ways to speed up the processes of recruiting and vetting influencers without sacrificing attention to detail. These strategies will help you:
And with that, let's dive in!
Anything you can do to get influencers to come to you is a plus. Not to mention a massive time-saver!
Influencer recruiting pages are a standard and straightforward way to attract new creators. This is step one to automating the recruiting process so you can continuously build your creator pipeline without constantly scrambling for creators and conducting manual outreach yourself.
However, these pages can actually start to work against you when your influencer program pops off.
We've heard horror stories of influencer managers swamped with hundreds of applications and collab requests from random creators. As a result, they're overwhelmed trying to sift through them all with no success and still are short on influencers to support their campaigns.
The solution? Use your influencer recruitment page to weed out irrelevant creators that don't align with your brand or target audience.
Consider coming up with specific criteria for influencers and building it into your application form. You may have required fields or minimums related to the following:
For example, you could set up your influencer application form to automatically disqualify applicants with fewer than 10,000 followers or less than a 3% engagement rate.
Here's an example of what this might look like in the wild. Note the follower count field coupled with the posting frequency field to help brands get a feel for how active and engaged a creator is.
Let's say you wanted to only work with creators with previous experience collabing with brands. Or on the flip side, you could automatically reject creators that work with your direct competitors. You could then qualify or disqualify these applicants based on your criteria and campaign goals.
Raising your influence recruitment criteria raises the bar in terms of creator quality. Some brands go as far as requiring applicants to link their TikTok or Instagram profiles to their application with a third-party tool to prove they're real. This might make sense if you're truly swamped with creators.
Having a fine-tuned application process is crucial for the sake of being more efficient with influencer recruiting and vetting. The time you save upfront will allow you to scale your influencer community and spend your time more efficiently.
No surprises here: recruiting influencers usually requires consistent and timely communication.
Thankfully, a lot of that communication can be templated or automated (or both).
Here are some examples of how brands use influencer automation to speed up influencer recruitment without sacrificing a personal touch:
As your list of influencers grows, time spent on this sort of one-on-one communication will quickly dominate your schedule. The time you save automating all of the above will open up more time to personalize campaigns and likewise give full support and attention to creators that need it.
Again, anything you can do to avoid manual back-and-forth is a plus. Recruiting influencers requires attention to detail and creators shouldn't be treated like numbers on a spreadsheet. That said, automation is perfect for more general onboarding tasks that don't require a personal touch.
Sometimes the best way to recruit new influencers is to tap into the ones you have.
Doing manual outreach is a time-sink and productivity. As is vetting creators by hand.
Alternatively, you can use a matchmaking platform to match creators with creators that resemble your current influencer community.
For example, let's say you have a five-star collab with a specific fitness influencer on Instagram. Using a platform like Statusphere, you can use lookalike audience tools to find similar influencers with comparable follower demographics, engagement rates and content styles. With our platform, matches are automatically based on 250+ first-party creator data points.
Leveraging your existing influencer data can help you identify new potential influencers who are likely to be a good fit for your brand based on hard data. Contrast this with finding influencers one by one and trying to figure out the fine details of their profile.
Reducing manual influencer recruiting is the end game here.
And that's where having the right influencer management platform is make-or-break.
Most influencer platforms provide a list of influencers or an unvetted database that you have to review yourself. Ideally, you should invest in an influence platform that skips this step and instead matches your brands with vetted creators by default.
For example, Statusphere's influencer marketing platform exclusively matches brands with creators from our opt-in network. This takes influencer vetting off your plate 100% as it's already been done behind the scenes.
Having access to a community of vetted micro-influencers is also useful in situations where you need a high volume of influencer content quickly. This is common for brands that want to run TikTok Spark Ad campaigns or product launches with maximum reach. Rather than manually try to recruit 50 micro-influencers yourself, our platform can make those matches happen in a fraction of the time.
For brands running influencer marketing campaigns consistently, having a dedicated influencer marketing platform is an expectation rather than an exception to the rule.
To wrap things up, consider how the right influencer platform can help you overcome the biggest headaches related to influencer vetting and recruitment:
Building an influencer community requires serious legwork. That's the ultimate understatement.
Influencer managers are scrambling to remove roadblocks so their campaigns can actually scale. Streamlining recruitment should be a top priority for the sake of taking back your schedule.
That’s where Statusphere’s software can help.
Our platform serves as an all-in-one influencer management tool for brands to build and manage their communities without all the manual legwork. We eliminate time-consuming communication and automate the process of getting products into vetted creators’ hands ASAP.
And as a result, we take both recruiting and vetting off of your team's plate.
Want to see how our platform works? Get in touch with one of our experts to see how we can streamline the influencer recruitment process for your brand.
Does an influencer CRM make sense for your company? We dig into the best influencer relationship management software and what tools your brand really...
Vetting influencers is a crucial process in today's crowded creator space. We explain step-by-step how brands can audit influencers more efficiently.
As influencer marketing grows, so do concerns over fake creators. This post explains what brands need to know about influencer fraud and how to avoid...