Running an influencer marketing program is grueling. While there are a lot of creative and interpersonal aspects in influencer marketing, you can often spend a lot of time doing mundane tasks (e.g. spending countless hours searching for influencers on social platforms, putting them in spreadsheets, and tracking each task and milestone in the relationship).
The truth is, doing these types of tasks manually wastes a lot of time that an influencer marketing software can help you accomplish with more speed and efficiency faster. Here are a few ways an influencer marketing platform can help you work smarter, not harder.
5 Ways An Influencer Marketing Platform Saves You Time
1. Quickly find influencers that are a good match
Natively searching for influencers on different social platforms can be excruciatingly time-consuming. Your technique for finding influencers can vary depending on the type of campaign you’re running. With an influencer marketing platform, you can quickly find potential partners with rich insights on each influencer right at your fingertips.
“Different brands have different influencer marketing objectives — this is important to keep in mind when you are going through your influencer discovery process. The influencers you want to work with will be determined by whether you’re focused on driving brand awareness, virality, and sentiment (top and mid funnel) vs driving tangible revenue (bottom of the funnel), and so on.” — Haley Schluter, consumer and brand engagement expert
An influencer marketing platform can help you narrow down your influencer search with multiple layers of data. For example, Traackr allows marketers to search for influencers by:
- Demographics. Is the influencer’s audience in the right market? Or are you potentially investing in an influencer whose audience won’t be able to buy your product? Traackr allows you to see an influencer’s audience broken down by country.
- Audience type. Sometimes the number of followers represented on a person’s social profile doesn’t represent their actual audience. Traackr allows you to see which percentage of an influencer’s audience are real, mass, and suspicious followers.
- Brand affinity. Has the influencer and their audience shown affinity to similar brands? For example, if you’re launching a sustainable fashion line, you probably want to partner with folks whose followers have affinities to Everlane, not H&M.
Traackr’s proprietary technology is the only influencer marketing tool that allows you to layer search parameters and get really granular in your influencer search. For example, if you’re looking for influencers for a beauty brand’s full-funnel campaign, here are some ways Traackr’s influencer marketing platform could help you find the best partners:
- Search by interest. You don’t have to isolate one interest. Influencers' interests can overlap so stack interests in your search to really hone in on discovering influencers. For example, you can include “skincare”, “makeup”, and “luxury beauty” in your interest search.
- Search by bio keywords. Search keywords that are likely to appear in an influencer’s social media bio. For a beauty brand, keywords that would make sense would be “MUA”, “hair colorist”, “esthetician”, etc.
- Search by content. You can also single out keywords that will appear in an influencer’s video title or post copy. In this instance, any content that utilizes keywords like “cleanser”, “skin”, or “skincare” would be aggregated.
You can even grow your influencer partnerships with automated recommendations of new influencers who are organically mentioning your brand, saving you even more time searching for influencers!
2. Efficient and thorough influencer vetting
“What I love about Traackr is that it aggregates everything about an influencer that you would need to know in order to make a decision about whether they would make a good partner.” — Haley Schluter, consumer and brand engagement expert
As you know, the work doesn’t stop after you’ve found and built a list of potential partners. Next, you have to evaluate whether they’re a good fit for your brand, an influencer marketing platform can make this process more efficient. As much as we might like to “lurk” in our free time, scrolling through different influencers’ social profiles and content to vet them is extremely tedious work.
A good influencer marketing platform can help you save time on influencer vetting by providing you with the ability to:
- Evaluate the fit of an influencer’s audience. How many of their followers are in your target demographic? Do they live in an area that you are targeting? Are they the right age and gender? Do they have affinities with brands that are similar to yours? Is the majority of their audience made up of real people, or is there a high percentage of bots and mass followers?
- Evaluate past performance. What type of engagement and video view rates do they typically get on posts? Are their average engagement and video view rates trending up over time?
- Evaluate the fit of past content. Are these influencers already posting about topics that are relevant to your brand? Have they talked about products that are similar to what you want to promote?
- Evaluate brand safety. Do these potential partners share the same values as your brand? A good influencer marketing platform can run automated brand safety checks that will flag potentially harmful content.
- Streamline inbound requests. If your brand is already well known, it’s possible that you receive a lot of inbound requests for partnerships. Some influencer marketing platforms (like Traackr) can help with vetting inbound influencer requests with custom questionnaires, onboarding flows, and more.
Having all of this data at your fingertips can help you make informed decisions at a faster pace. This type of data also gives you the information you need to negotiate fees when necessary. For example, if only half of an influencer’s audience is part of your target consumer then you might consider asking for a lower fee or a different partnership type.
Tip: Learn more about how an influencer marketing platform can help you find influencers that are brand safe.
3. Streamlined influencer onboarding and relationship management
Creators are crunched for time, so making their onboarding process as easy and professional as possible can help nurture long-lasting relationships. On the flip side, lack of time and resources can make scaling influencer marketing programs an obstacle for brands.
Luckily an influencer marketing platform can make onboarding and managing influencers fast and efficient. Some time-saving management capabilities that an influencer marketing platform can provide include:
- Relationship documentation. Much like a CRM, it’s important to be able to have one place that records the history of interactions. Which teammate owns the relationship? Which campaigns has the influencer been a part of? Has the influencer stated certain preferences (products, campaign types, communication style, etc.)? What contracts and expectations have been agreed upon already? Having this available in one place removes guesswork and time-sucking manual work.
- Optimized collaboration. A good influencer marketing platform is built to make your team more organized and aligned. Your platform should allow you to set custom workflows for organic, paid, and affiliate campaigns, and track relationships with notes, tasks, and custom data.
- Influencer groupings. It is likely that you will be working with cohorts of influencers, not just one at a time. A great influencer marketing platform will give you the ability to group influencer partners by campaigns, and by interests, location, and more.
- Streamlined influencer communication. Wish that you could cut down on back-and-forth emails? An influencer marketing tool that provides relationship management can streamline campaign coordination with influencers at scale where you send personalized emails to your influencers in bulk and track ongoing conversations for visibility across your teams.
An influencer marketing platform should also allow you to manage inbound requests and send influencers invitations to join your campaigns. For example, Traackr gives you the ability to create customized campaign briefs, send landing page links so influencers can opt-in to the campaign, and allow influencers to select their products of interest. This not only saves time in (goodbye emails!), it also gives you an easy way to track who opted in to the campaign (thus saving time and product waste). See how Ole Henriksen used Traackr’s influencer marketing platform to source new YouTube influencers for a recent campaign.
Tip: Traackr’s Studios offers branded onboarding experiences for influencer partners.
4. Better campaign organization and management
Managing all of the small details that go into an influencer campaign can get messy. No doubt, you’ve experienced a life with a million tabs and spreadsheets open. Sometimes just finding the information you need can be difficult and time-consuming.
This is why an influencer marketing platform can help you save time!
In addition to helping you expedite influencer discovery and vetting, and easily manage influencer relationships, an influencer marketing platform can help you organize, track, and manage:
- Historical influencer data. Data on historical engagement, video view rates, and audience demographics to evaluate whether your potential partners are worth the investment. You should be able to see if the influencer has worked with competitors or mentioned your product category, and gauge whether their audience is receptive to sponsored posts.
- Content performance analysis. You should keep an eye on how content is performing as your campaign runs (and after). An influencer marketing platform should provide you with info on total mentions, total engagements, engagement rates, number of impressions, video view rates, and more.
- Spend tracking. Stay on top of your influencer program spend across influencers, tiers, campaigns, brands, and markets and understand who is driving the greatest impact.
- Ecommerce integration. In order to track conversions, you should be able to embed your influencer marketing platform’s code on any ecommerce site.
- Link and conversion tracking. In order to enable affiliate and conversion campaigns, your influencer marketing platform should allow you to create, assign, and share tracking links with your influencers.
- Attribution modeling. You should have the ability to define attribution models and commission structures.
- Commission payment. Your influencer marketing platform should be able to calculate influencer commissions and allow you to send payments to partners (in any currency you need).
5. Real-time and transparent influencer marketing ROI reporting
Last, but certainly not least, an influencer marketing platform can make measurement and reporting easier for your and your team.
Whether you’re a team of two or a team of hundreds, reporting on influencer marketing ROI can feel like running through a long obstacle course. Do you have the right data? How easy is it to collect the metrics you care about? Where does everyone record their metrics and insights? Is it easy for everyone to find, and (more importantly) easy for everyone to understand?
A good influencer marketing platform will save you time by providing one central place for your team to go for reporting and insights (learn how Shiseido used Traackr’s influencer marketing platform to develop a hyper-focused strategy that increased its influencer marketing success by 54% in one year). An influencer marketing platform should include measurement features like:
Influencer marketing ROI. Imagine how much time your whole team would save if you could easily:
- Measure apples to apples across campaigns with transparent KPIs for reach, engagement, conversions, and more.
- Measure the cumulative impact of all campaigns and organic activations, and compare brands and regions.
- Analyze the performance and efficiency of your investments using KPIs like cost-per-view, cost-per-engagement, cost-per click, and more to guide future budget allocation.
Spend tracking and budget optimization. Where is my budget actually going? How efficient is my spend? Influencer marketing platforms can save you time by:
- Helping you track spend and analyze performance across influencers, platforms, and campaigns will help you optimize your ROI and invest in the right strategies.
- Calculating spend efficiency metrics like CPP (cost per post), CPE (cost per engagement), CPVID (cost per video), CPV (cost per video view), and CPSV (cost per story view).
Competitive benchmarking. How am I performing against my competitors? An influencer marketing platform could improve your ability to quickly shift strategies by:
- Providing you access to a ranking of your brand against competitors with a transparent methodology for tracking mentions among influencer content.
- Providing data that allows you to analyze your competitors’ strategies and performance including which influencers and content perform best.
If you want to learn more about how an influencer marketing platform can save you time, reach out to our experts. Alternatively, if you are not quite ready to invest and want to do a bit more research, here is an article that will give you some guidance on how to vet and evaluate an influencer marketing platform.
Get an RFP Template
If you're in the market for an influencer marketing technology, we’ve put together an RFP template that can be used for evaluating vendors. The RFP template includes a comprehensive list of influencer marketing technology capabilities.