With consumer interest waning from traditional TV advertising, you certainly can’t ignore influencer marketing as part of your brand’s overall marketing strategy. However, before hiring an influencer agency to take on this task, it’s best to ensure they have the experience, capabilities and temperament to deliver results. Agencies are a great way to tap into a niche talent pool, scale your influencer marketing program and level up your social media presence. However, in our experience, all agencies aren’t created equal. So before you go through the expense of hiring an agency, explore these questions to rule out any red flags of working together.
Red Flag Number One: Reporting Manually
It is hard to believe that agencies who work with influencer marketing are still reporting their campaign results manually. Manually reporting engagement data is inexcusable in 2022. The key to success in the influencer marketing industry is data, testing and relationships. You need to be able to conveniently find and access data in order to improve your campaign performance.
The Influencer Consultant represents a variety of solutions for your brand to track, manage and engage influencers for campaigns.
Our favorite starter service is InfluenceKit. This solution is low-cost and effective at reporting and sharing content between creators and brands. It takes the nuance out of manually gathering data from campaigns.
If you are managing influencers at scale, we recommend using Grin. It’s an end to end solution to help you track all facets of an influencer campaign. It’s like Salesforce but for the creator economy.
There are a variety of solutions available for your business needs. If you need customized recommendation help or solution implementation, click the button below to learn more.
Red Flag Number Two: No Pay Frameworks
When you don’t have a compensation structure refined to your business, your brand will have no justification for the rates you can afford to charge for campaigns.
Our firm has put together a data set that is tuned to niche companies of all sizes with validated influencer campaign rates so we can put together a compensation structure that meets your business goals and aligns with your marketing efforts.
Red Flag Number Three: Generalized Strategy
For many companies, their biggest growing marketing budget allocation is influencer marketing. We all know the results can be outstanding, but the unique challenge of influencer marketing is that it’s not necessarily a consistent process. With other tactics such as SEM, PPC and Display advertising you have standard best practices to follow; however with influencer marketing you still need to test and learn which is best for your brand.
There’s a growing trend we’re seeing from brands who decide to invest in content and influencer marketing. A lot of them hire the cheap agency who promises to get the most amount of followers for your money. The problem is, those agencies have one strategy for every niche and it rarely works. The end results are campaigns that don’t convert into sales because instead of being revenue drivers then end up being awareness drivers.
Influencer marketing isn’t just about getting your brand more social followers, it’s about driving sales through a strategic understanding of each unique industry you’re promoting within.
Where we step in is being that expert market research partner alongside your agency to do the baseline strategy work before you have them execute. TIC’s specialized knowledge allows us to be an addition or precorsor to hiring an influencer agency so that you can launch an influencer campaign with industry leading results.
We love working alongside agencies to provide them the support and insight needed to execute your brand’s marketing goals. Influencer marketing is a very nuanced area of marketing because you have to rely on the art of hiring people and need the science to validate the investment. The Influencer Consultant is finely tuned to provide a framework for lean marketing teams to execute influencer campaigns and drive best-for-you results.
