Many digital marketing strategies now include influencer management, which is an efficient and cost-effective option. How does 578% sound? That’s the typical return on investment working with influencers, and some brands are reporting returns as high as 1800%! Advertising coming straight from brands can be stale and impersonal, whereas influencers can add personality and trust to a brand's products. Over half of brands reporting on their strategies stated their influencer content outperformed their standard marketing efforts. It can be overwhelming to start and manage an influencer network for your brand, but the cost is even greater to NOT work with this strategy…and there are tools to make your task a lot simpler.
Your new best friend is an influencer relationship management platform. This management tool centralizes your influencer network and tracks all actions taken with your influencers. There’s a lot to it so let’s dive in and see how it can make your life easier and more profitable.
Influencer Management Made Easy
An influencer relationship management platform allows you to add new social media influencers to your network quickly and easily. It also allows you to manage all elements of your campaigns more efficiently: from onboarding new influencers to sending products, tracking posts, and sending payouts.
It’s a central hub that tracks all the tasks and actions connected to your influencers, products, and campaigns. You are no longer bound by the tangle of emails, DMs, and messy spreadsheets that are never up to date. You’ll be free to expand your network and grow your brand.
How Can My Brand Benefit from an Influencer Relationship Management Platform?
Let’s take a closer look at the tools packaged in influencer management platforms and how they can help you grow your brand and your business.
Connect to the Best Influencers for Your Brand
Think about going through each of your social media accounts one by one and analyzing the influencers you follow or who follow you. Do you know who is an influencer and who is a bot? Can you see their true reach and engagement rate, or just what they tell you they have? (Are you having nightmares yet?)
Using an influencer relationship management suite, you can grow your influencer network based on a variety of options, such as keywords, tags, niches, aesthetics, engagement rates, and target audience.
Sometimes the work is done for you: influencers and social customers mention your brand or your tags without you ever having contacted them. These potential collaborators are ready and waiting to join your team! A great platform will have social listening capabilities to see when you get mentioned and by whom, so you can invite them into your network and get them on your next campaign.
Efficient and Intuitive Interface
Say goodbye to manually logging all your interactions and tasks in messy spreadsheets and long email chains. Instead, keep all your communications and tasks on the same searchable platform no matter what social network your influencers use. Chat with your network, send products, see posts, and send payouts all on the same screen.
You can even create customized workflows based on trigger actions, so you’re sure nothing gets missed in any campaign. Schedule follow-ups and get notifications when influencers need contact, so you’re never left wondering what needs to get done.
Centralized Influencer Contact Database
Relationship marketing isn’t just for selling products: it’s for working with your influencers too. Keep those relationships strong by keeping your influencers happy. Send product and payments based on trigger actions or on a recurring schedule, and keep your marketing team in the loop with assigned tasks. Keep track of all messages in one searchable central location. Your dashboard will show you how the performance of your influencers changes over time, which influencers are driving the most sales, and personalized recommendations of influencers to add to your network.
Better User Content, Made Easier to Share
Organizing user-generated content has always been a messy proposition until now. A solid influencer relationship management platform will include tools to save and reshare content created by your network of influencers and social customers. Then, Reshare on the same platform, or cross-post to the others, tagging your influencer and your brand’s keywords to increase your reach dramatically.
Instead of only using brand-generated content, which can have a limited range of creativity, adding user-generated content from your influencers can add unlimited new voices that customers can grow to like and trust. With a variety of faces attached to your brand, you can ensure your marketing is diverse and that you’re reaching many more potential customers with their content. Take content sharing to the next level by turning UGC into paid ads to reach an even broader audience. Storytelling and community building are at the heart of content creation. Influencer management suites help you get it right.
Create Promotions to Increase Sales
Why are you doing marketing campaigns? It’s not a trick question, the obvious and right answer is to increase sales! An innovative influencer relationship management platform will help you manage all of your campaigns, including promotional offers and coupon codes, to drive sales forward. Promo codes get customers and influencers discounts on your products, and affiliate links will let your influencers increase their earnings based on sales from their posts. In addition, having a transparent commission structure will keep you and your influencers happy. All of this will be managed right from the dashboard in your platform.
To ensure mutual success, you and your influencers have to continue to have a great time working together. To nurture this relationship, look for an influencer management platform that easily integrates the other tools both you and your influencers regularly use, like Shopify and WooCommerce, as well as email managers and payment gateways.
When should you start using an influencer marketing platform?
Most brands start by tracking their influencers manually, which is fine for a while. However, at some point, it will get too messy and confusing to manage all the tasks associated with your influencers through emails and spreadsheets. In addition, this method is impossible to scale, as it only gets more overwhelming as you add more influencers to your team. The best time to invest in an influencer relationship management suite is just before you’re at the point of tearing your hair out in frustration, and the second-best time is now. If you have ever said, “There has got to be a better way to do this,” then you’re ready to have a platform handle your influencer management. The more well-managed your network is, the better you can track results, focus your sales efforts, and increase profits for you and your team.
You’ll need a management platform to amplify your campaigns and take your brand to new heights. Without great influencer management, it’s overwhelming to nurture relationships with brand ambassadors, social customers, and affiliate programs.
You have choices when it comes to your influencer marketing platform, and you should carefully consider the features, cost, and benefits of the tools available. Please accept our humble invitation to experience Hubble for yourself, and see how easy influencer relationship management can be. You’re ready to grow your brand. Let us help you grow to new heights.
