Influencer Marketing 101

Guide to Influencer Marketing

A blueprint for your influencer marketing program
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From start to finish, get the essentials for enterprise-grade influencer marketing. Discover the case for authentic influence and learn how to establish and execute a successful influencer marketing program. After reading this new guide, you’ll walk away with the tools to build your influencer network, engage your influencers effectively, and measure ROI. With hands-on worksheets and real examples from the field, you’ll be set to scale for the long haul.

Influencer Marketing 101
Guide to Influencer Marketing
The ultimate guide for learning how to lay the groundwork, develop, and measure the success of your brand's influencer marketing program.

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The Blueprint for Building a Performance-Driven Influencer Marketing Program

Influencer marketing has earned a trusted place in the marketing strategies of brands big and small. Many marketers are interested in building an influencer marketing program, but aren’t sure where to start. 

This guide is a roadmap for creating a performance-driven influencer marketing program that will help your team move the needle on strategic metrics. 

Section 1 will cover the groundwork for influencer marketing: 

  • Influencer marketing definitions
  • Making the case for influencer marketing
  • What influencer marketing jobs include

Section 2 will cover influencer marketing strategies:

  • Aligning influencer programs with business goals
  • Finding the right influencers for your brand
  • Different types of influencer partnerships
  • Successfully reaching out to influencers
  • Tips on what to pay creators 

Part 3: Prepare to Grow the Program

  • Set yourself up for success
  • How to choose an influencer marketing platform
  • The role of influencer marketing agencies 

Section 1: Lay the Groundwork for Your Influencer Marketing Program

Helpful Influencer Marketing Definitions

What is an influencer?

A person or group of people who possess greater than average advantage potential to influence due to attributions such as frequency of communication, personal persuasiveness or size of and centrality to a social network.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is the process of identifying, researching, engaging, supporting and activating the people who influence your customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. The practice aligns marketing, PR, sales, and product around a common strategy.

In the words of Rachel Miller, “Instead of marketing to a large group of potential customers you collaborate with influencers who already have trust and rapport with your desired audience to help tell your story.”

What is performance-driven influencer marketing? 

Performance-driven influencer marketing refers to an influencer marketing program that is led by data and goals. The influencer marketing team is constantly making decisions based on the data they are seeing, combined with their expertise in the brand. 

What is influencer loyalty?

Influencer loyalty is a measure of how many times an influencer mentions your brand in a given time period.

What is always-on influencer marketing?

Always-on influencer marketing refers to the process of a brand continuously engaging with their influencers to build long-term relationships. Rather than only engaging influencers for a campaign or event, this method is intended to increase engagement with influencers by consistently partnering on content together.

What are spend efficiency metrics?

Spend efficiency metrics help you identify which influencers and strategies can act as levers for improving your return-on-investment (ROI).

Spend efficiency metric examples: Cost per post (CPP), Cost per (video) view (CPV), Cost per engagement (CPE), Cost per click (CPC)

The Case for Investing in Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing is now a fully-fledged industry worth $3.69 billion in the US alone, with 92% of marketers saying that they will be allocating budget towards influencer marketing in 2021. 

This increase in investment is the result of mounting data around the efficacy of influencer marketing:

  • 70% of consumers are more likely to buy a product from a brand if they collaborate with an influencer they know and trust.
  • 54% of marketers strongly agree that influencer marketing has successfully increased brand awareness.
  • 68% of consumers are willing to pay a higher price for a product made by a brand that aligns with their values.

Source: Traackr’s 2022 Influencer Marketing Impact Report

That being said, getting support and budget for any new program can be challenging. To build a business case that will unlock budget, resources, and/or support from internal stakeholders, it’s important to consider these points:

  • Tailor your approach: understand the challenges of the person you’re pitching to and tailor your approach to meet their needs. Your director may be mostly concerned with ROI and ensuring their P&L is healthy, whereas your CMO may be prioritizing brand image and messaging. 
  • Be prepared: have a clear plan in place for how you wish to use this additional support and prepare answers for anticipated questions.
  • Connect to the larger organization: find ways to connect your work to wider teams and strategies. For example, align your influencer campaigns with key event dates for your stores, discuss creator feedback with your product development department, or supply your newsletter team with usage rights to quality influencer content. All successful marketing campaigns are 360, including influencer marketing.‍
  • Use a whole lot of data: support your case objectively with plenty of data - avoid speculation or personal opinion. You can offer your stakeholders information on the prevalence and potency of influencer marketing programs, like the consumer data in Traackr’s 2022 Influencer Marketing Impact Report. Or you can show them the power of influencers through real examples, providing case studies or industry benchmarks like the ones in Traackr’s 2022 Engagement Rate Benchmark Study.  

What You'll Do As An Influencer Marketer

Before we get into how to build your program, it’s important for you to know what you’re taking on. One of the most exciting and challenging parts of influencer marketing is how cross-functional the discipline is. Influencer marketers need to work with teams across your organization, from product, to PR, to legal. They also need to be adept at a diverse range of tasks like:

  • Creating an influencer marketing strategy: This includes laying out the goals, means, and metrics for the influencer marketing strategy and aligning it with larger business goals. It’s also about creating a structure for how influencer marketing can amplify or interact with other marketing tactics like PR and paid ads. 
  • Finding, vetting, and partnering with influencers: Sourcing relevant influencers requires strategic decision-making, in-depth knowledge of content trends and platform uses, and strong communications skills to build relationships. 
  • Executing and managing campaigns: Running each campaign from start to finish requires a high level of organization and diligence. Your team will need to handle everything that comes after the contract is signed: seeding product, reviewing content, reporting on results, optimizing for future campaigns, and beyond.
  • Nurturing influencer relationships: Building healthy relationships with influencers can set you up for long-term success. So, it's crucial for the team to maintain active communication and nurture a bond with all influencers to get them on board for future campaigns. 
  • Tracking KPIs and performance: Once a campaign is executed, the team collects data through first-party and third-party tools to pinpoint what worked and tanked to make informed decisions about future partnerships and campaigns. 

Looking to advance your career in influencer marketing? Browse through 100+ open positions on Traackr’s Influencer Marketing Job Board!

Section 2: How to Build Your Influencer Program 

How to Establish a Successful Influencer Marketing Strategy

This section explains the four steps required to set up a performance-driven influencer marketing program. We’ll cover how to: 

  1. Set goals aligned to your business objectives.
  2. Find the right influencers for your brand.
  3. Master influencer engagement and lay the foundation for always-on influencer relations.
  4. Measure your program’s progress and impact on business results.

Align Your Influencer Program with Your Business Goals

Building an influencer marketing program starts with understanding your business goals. 

Establish what success looks like for your team

Especially when a program is new, you need to establish early indicators for success. Yes, increased sales are ultimately what we all want, but along the way, how can we tell if our efforts are moving the needle? 

Here are some metrics to help you measure success throughout your funnel: 

  • Top of the Funnel (TOFU) metrics: Look at KPIs like the number of impressions, video views, and engagements. These metrics are useful when you’re building brand awareness.
    Gifting campaigns and events are great awareness generators. 
  • Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) metrics: Look at click-through rates (CTR) for sponsored content, new followers or subscribers gained during your campaign, or pageviews on your campaign landing pages. The goal here is to strengthen brand loyalty.
    Sponsored content around tutorials, or product education are perfect for consideration generation. 
  • Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) Metrics: Check social commerce data like affiliate links, discount codes, or social platform shops. 
    Affiliate codes or one-off, limited time offer campaigns are a great way to capture the conversions at the bottom of the funnel. 

Think about your business objectives and how influencer marketing can make an impact at every stage of the buying journey. How can we grow our audience? How can we get our audience talking about our brand? How can we impact sales? 

Example: By using a range of influencers for different stages of the marketing funnel, Beekman 1802 was able to become one of the highest performing skincare brands on TikTok and sell out two product lines in Ulta.

Find the Right Influencer for Your Brand

There are many types of creators your brand can partner with. Finding the right influencer is key to the success of your campaigns and programs. 

As you’re getting started, avoid the temptation to focus on people with mass followings. Instead, here are 5 areas to consider when choosing an influencer. 

  1. What type of content will you use in your campaign?
    Some stories are best told in 30 second videos, some need a more in-depth video, others are great with a curated image. Most influencers are specialized and will be better suited to one platform and/or type of content.  
  2. Define your goals.
    Are you interested in brand awareness and need the message to be seen by as many people as possible? Your answer may determine the influencer tier that you partner with. Are you looking for the attention of a specific group of people? You may want to focus more on influencer's with small, niche followings. Are sales the main goal? You might want to focus on influencers who have a proven track record of driving sales.
  3. Know the audience demographics you’re looking for in your partners.
    You need to know your customer profile and ensure the creator’s audience matches. Things to look at include: income, gender, age, location, etc. This may matter more than you think! A common mistake we see in gifting campaigns entails brands sending an influencer free product, and then finding out later that the majority of their audience live in an area that is outside their market.
  4. Confirm the standards an influencer needs to meet.
    If you have an influencer marketing tool, you can look at historical data like, engagement rates, video view rates, follower count trends, fake follower data, engagement rates on ads vs organic posts, etc.. These statistics will help you decide if the influencer is a good fit, and what they should be paid.  
  5. Are they safe to partner with?
    You will always want to go through an influencer’s content to see if they have posted language or imagery that is not brand-safe. This process can be automated with an influencer marketing platform, but you can also check historical content manually. 

Pro Tip: Partnering with influencers who are organically mentioning your brand can be the start of a very successful relationship. This shows that the creator is excited about your products already, meaning their audience probably feels the same way. This can also open doors to a more favorable partnership filled with not just paid content, but also extra, organic posts for your brand. 

Example of how to select creative partners for a specific marketing goal: 

BFGoodrich, a Michelin brand, is well known in motorsport, but wanted to broaden its brand awareness by reaching a younger and bolder audience. The ability to reach audiences outside of a specific industry is something that many brands struggle with. Michelin’s marketing team knew social media was key, and set out to commission creative partnerships with influencers. 

They analyzed social media profiles using Traackr to select and validate their choice partners based on: 

  • Credibility and quality of the influencer’s audience - to ensure that they do not have too many influencers or suspicious accounts among their followers, for example. 
  • Evolution of the influencer’s engagement rate - to ensure that it is not declining or unstable. 
  • Audience demographic data and affinities - for sport and other brands in the industry. 
  • Insight on each influencer’s historical content - to ensure that the messaging and tone they typically produce are in line with the brand’s image and values. 
Read the full article here

Strategic Use of Influencer Tiers

VIP: 5M+ followers

Mega: 1M+ followers

Macro: 500K+ followers

Mid: 50K+ followers

Micro: 10K+ followers

Nano: 1K+ followers

Influencer tiers are based on a creator’s total follower count. These tiers should not be used in terms of “more valuable or less valuable”. Instead we would encourage you to use these follower counts in association with your goals and how you want to interact with that creator. 

You will typically pay more for a sponsorship with a VIP or Mega influencer, but if your goal is to get in front of as many people in your target audience as possible, this could be very valuable. 

On the other hand nano, macro, and mid-tier influencers have been proving their salt as efficient partners. In fact, recent data shows that these smaller influencers have been posting more sponsored content, they are earning high engagement rates and video views (source: pg. 21 Influencer Marketing Impact Report).

Choosing who is best to work with comes down to your goals and budget. If you are just getting started and have a sizable budget, it might be smart to pick a few influencers from each tier who have high potential and work with them for a few months. After your “trial” period, evaluate performance and look for trends in your data to follow.

If you don’t have a large budget (because who really does), don’t be afraid to focus on the smaller tiers. In the end, volume, or the amount your brand is mentioned (even by small influencers), matters. Think of it like personal investing — the worst thing you can do is wait, the best thing you can do is get started. 

All in all, there are two important takeaways when thinking about influencer tier strategies:

  1. There is no such thing as successfully copy pasting another brand’s strategy. For example, Kylie Cosmetics builds a lot of awareness from having Kylie Jenner (VIP influencer) post about the brand regularly. This is cost effective for them because she literally owns the brand. On the other hand, the hair care brand Matrix does not have a celebrity owner, and instead has built a successful program with nano and micro influencers. To do this it leaned into a trend in its industry — the tight community amongst hair professionals and salon owners!
  2. Use data to run smart experiments. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing exactly what will work at first as long as you have a plan for figuring it out. You picked three VIP influencers and 10 nano influencers to partner with? Great! What metrics will you use to evaluate performance? Do you have contingency plans for auditing why something didn't work? Setting up a framework for this from the very beginning will save you a lot of headaches.
If you’re looking for some interesting examples of influencer tier strategies check out:

Which Types of Influencer Partnerships Work with Your Strategy?

Always-On vs One-Off Engagements

Many marketers will partner with an influencer only for a specific campaign in a transactional format. We have a product to launch, we share a brief, the content is posted, we pay the influencer and we’re done. 

An always-on approach to influencer marketing is when you think of creators as long-term partners to your brand, continuously engaging with them to build the relationships.

Brand Ambassadors 

Ambassadors can operate either online or offline and usually have a deeper partnership with the brand in the form of a retainer. They don't always use specialized links, and their goal could be to build brand awareness or drive sales. 

Affiliates

Affiliate marketing can often be the first step to building an influencer marketing program. The brand will publish tracked links to their various products and the influencer will use those links when they post. This is a relatively low risk way to engage influencers because their pay typically comes from a percentage of the sales that are made using that tracked link. This is also a great way to connect your influencer marketing directly to sales. 

There is not one right way to partner with creators. You should think through the short-term and long-term influencer marketing goals and plan out how you would like to approach new partnerships, or build on existing ones. 

How to Reach Out to Influencers

The value of an influencer-brand partnership increases overtime as the relationship strengthens. The most impactful collaborations take effort to develop, but the results are worth the work. 

Here are some guidelines for ensuring you start on a solid foundation with some exceptional influencer outreach.

Give a genuine compliment. 

Sometimes it can be tempting to just cut to the chase when writing an outreach message. But it’s the personalized details that will catch their eye. Spend some time scrolling through the creator’s content and find 1 or 2 things that you genuinely like and then incorporate into your message. 

Research brands and products they like. 

Even the best written outreach message will flop if it’s sent to the wrong creator. Before reaching out, conduct keyword research to see if the influencer has connections to similar products or brands. Not only will this help you make a tailored offer/message, it can save you from spending time on folks that aren’t a good fit. 

Show that you care about what they care about. 

More and more influencers are expressing the desire for a deeper connection with brands. Your outreach message will have a better chance if it highlights a way that your brand is working towards a cause that the influencer cares about. But, remember that this only works if your brand is truly dedicated to that cause! 

For example, Beekman 1802 successfully partnered with VIP influencer, Kat Stickler, earning her attention because their products are insanely good, but also because their mission (kindness) aligned with her personal brand.

Continuously interact with their content.

When you are trying to get an influencer to partner with you the outreach message is important, yes, but so is regular interaction with their content. Make sure you are consistently dropping compliments, and leaving likes and (substantive) comments on their content. The more they see your brand on their screen the more likely it is that they’ll be interested in learning more. 

Create a great influencer onboarding experience.

The last part of a good outreach strategy is to make your partnership a smooth and well-branded onboarding experience. You could achieve this by creating a specific landing page for them to go to, sending them a welcome gift, or creating a fun quiz so you can learn about their preferences and personality. There are also influencer marketing platforms that offer branded onboarding experiences, like Traackr’s Brand Studio.

What Should I Be Paying Influencers? 

Negotiating influencer compensation can be extremely difficult. While there are no standard formulas to tell us what to pay creators, there are key metrics and data that can help guide you.

4 metrics that can affect influencer pay

Audience Quality

A creator’s follower quality is extremely important. Here are a couple areas to look into. 

  • Audience growth: Is their follower count trending up? 
  • Audience credibility: Do they have bots or suspicious accounts that are following? Are the people that are engaging authentic?
  • Audience alignment: Do their followers match the age, income, gender, etc.. of your buyer? 

Engagement Rates and View Rates

Engagement rates and view rates help marketers move away from paying influencers purely based on audience size, to a model that rewards influencers for the impact they have on your brand. Focusing on engagement will result in more value for your investment. 

Make sure you look at these rates on different platforms, and compare results for organic content vs sponsored content. 

Follower Count

Follower count is one of the most popular ways to determine compensation, but it should not be taken alone. I would encourage you to combine an influencer’s audience number with the other metrics in this list to get a full picture of the value their partnership could bring to your brand.

Past Performance

Past performance is an important indicator of how that influencer’s content will work for your brand. For potential partners, collect information such as:

  • Performance metrics for organic vs paid content
  • Performance metrics on past collaborations with your brand or competitors
  • Calculate cost per view for video content as well

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to budget room for usage rights, white listing and content amplification (or boosting). Make sure you understand the costs, and have a budget set aside to take full advantage of that content if say… it goes viral!

Section 2: Measurement 

How to Measure Your Influencer Marketing Program

Along with increased investment in influencer marketing strategies, there is increased pressure to align investment with impact and properly measure results.

This section will help you create a measurement framework to analyze the impact of your influencer marketing initiatives and help you gain the executive buy-in needed to take your program to the next level. 

With all the data now at our disposal, we are seeing marketing leaders organize their metrics into 3 categories:

‍Performance Metrics

Measure the impact of influencer marketing‍. 

Awareness
  • Activated Influencers
  • Posts
  • Reach
  • Impressions
Considerations
  • Views/Video Views
  • Engagements
  • Engagement Rate
  • Clicks
  • Traffic
Conversions
  • Sales

As there are many metrics that comprise Performance Metrics, it’s important to define your objectives in terms of which stages of the customer journey you’re seeking to impact. This will help you determine which Performance Metrics to prioritize.

Spend Efficiency Metrics

Measure the efficiency of influencer marketing investments‍. 

  • Coster per Post (CPP)
  • Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
  • Cost per View (CPV)
  • Cost per Engagements (CPE)
  • Cost per Click (CPC)

These metrics enable you to understand which influencers and strategies are delivering the most bang for your buck and, in turn, can act as levers for improving your return-on-investment (ROI) going forward.

Here is a resource describing how to optimize your influencer marketing investments.

Cost Equivalency Metrics 

Measure the efficacy of influencer marketing investments as compared to other marketing disciplines. 

  • Earned Media Value (EMV)

Earned Media Value (EMV) is a notorious metric in the world of influencer marketing, for several reasons. Chief among them, it has been misused as a Performance Metric.

Earned media value is an attempt to place a monetary value on exposure you gain on third-party sites or social media content through marketing and PR efforts. It provides a false sense of value on the engagement your company has earned through these channels.

We would urge you to read this article to learn more about the pitfalls of EMV and which metrics to use instead. 

If you’d like to get a sense for what results to aim for, we’ve created a benchmark analysis to provide a starting point for you and your team so you can set campaign goals and try out new platforms.

Examples of Data-Driven Influencer Marketing 

Beekman 1802

Build Awareness and Drive Sales

Beekman 1802 and Kat Stickler
Beekman 1802 x Kat Stickler

The beauty space is highly competitive, making it difficult for indie brands with smaller resources to break through on social media platforms. Beekman 1802, a goat milk-based skincare brand, needed a creative way to access millennial audiences to elevate brand awareness, build its authority in the skincare industry, and drive in-store sales at Ulta Beauty. 

They decided to focus on TikTok when their research found that authentic, unfiltered, and value-packed content resonated best with their audience. 

The company began expanding its influencer program, branching out to work with a diverse range of TikTok influencers that spanned tiers (VIP to nano) and disciplines. Beekman 1802 selected a mix of beauty and non-beauty influencers to create educational and entertaining content aimed at building their skincare credibility, representing their playful and creative brand personality, and featuring their core values - such as kindness and trust.

Beekman 1802 became one of the highest performing skincare brands on TikTok and sold out of two product lines at Ulta.

Read here

Colgate-Palmolive

Gain visibility & align with agency partners

Challenge: As Colgate-Palmolive accelerated its influencer marketing program, it needed greater visibility and coordination between country hubs and its agency partners.

Solution: Colgate-Palmolive implemented a system of record for influencer marketing, uniting regions, brands and agencies on one platform for discovery, campaign management and measurement.

Results: With streamlined workflows, data transparency, and standardized performance measurement, Colgate-Palmolive's personal care brands, including Sanex, have delivered significantly better results while reducing campaign costs by 40%.

Read here

Shiseido

Be data-obsessed & optimize initiatives

Shiseido x Hunter Schafer
Shiseido x Hunter Schafer

During the pandemic, Shiseido was able to defy the odds, and even saw a growth in influencer marketing success in 2020. The key? The team focused on building their VIT (visibility, impact, and trust) score amongst key influencer populations and audiences. 

Traackr’s VIT score is broken down into three categories that the Shiseido team tracks and actively sets goals against: visibility (reach of content), impact (engagement generated), and brand trust (quality of content on brand image).

See how Shiseido was able to increase its VIT by 54% in 2021, placing it in the 93rd percentile in regards to year-over-year growth.

Read here

Part 3: Prepare to Grow Your Influencer Marketing Program

Set Yourself Up for Scale

Although some of us might start small with influencer marketing, it is important to always keep in mind how your practice will scale. 

Write down your procedures, think about how you would roll the program out across teams and regions, understand how an influencer marketing platform could create efficiencies. This way, when you find success in influencer marketing and get the go-ahead to increase investments, you know what to do. 

Here are some other areas to be thinking about. 

Build the Business Case

Everything you do with influencers must be rooted in your business goals. Start with what matters most to your organization and envision what success looks like. Structure your first efforts as pilots. Even if you don’t have the resources yet, plan towards a larger roll out. 

Lay the groundwork for “always-on”

The most successful influencer marketers understand that the time between campaigns, events and product launches is when you build a deeper connection with your influencers.

The brands that see extraordinary ROI from influencer marketing are the ones that constantly reach out to their influencers with personalized communication - regardless of the immediate benefit to the brand.

Set the stage for cross-functional collaboration

The most advanced influencer marketing programs extend beyond one department.

Influencer relationships are key to your brand being viewed as customer centric, human-focused. Seek out other teams in your company that could benefit from or help cultivate influencer marketing. 

For example, your product team could partner with influencers to get product feedback, or test out unreleased products. Your sales team could learn from the way influencers are talking about your products. 

How to Choose an Influencer Marketing Platform 

As your brand grows its influencer program, finding an influencer marketing platform will help you gain efficiency, data, establish continuity across geographies, and most importantly, improve your impact.

However, choosing the right platform can be daunting because as the practice of influencer marketing grows, so has the number of influencer marketing technology solutions available on the market.

The reality of the situation, however, is that not all solutions are the same and some are better suited for particular organizations, use cases, and needs. 

To help you make an informed decision about the platform you choose, let's start with the 5 core influencer marketing technology use cases:

  • Influencer Discovery: Finding influencers for potential partnerships
  • Influencer Vetting: Evaluating influencers for performance, audience alignment, and brand fit
  • Campaign Management: Activating influencers, managing campaign workflows, and reporting on campaign performance
  • Program Management: Coordinating, scaling, and reporting on your influencer program across multiple geographies, brands, and teams
  • Market Benchmarking: Analyzing the performance of your brand and competition among the influencers in your market

These 5 core use cases provide a useful framework for defining the 3 categories of influencer marketing solutions. 

  1. Market Benchmarking Tools
  2. Campaign Management Tools 
  3. System of Record Solutions

Market Benchmarking Tools

These tools are designed to help you analyze the influencer marketing performance of your brand against that of your competition. They are insight-focused tools, so they tend to be most suitable for senior executives. While benchmarking tools provide useful high-level insights, they would need to be combined with other influencer tech with the capabilities to turn those insights into action.

Campaign Management Tools 

The campaign management tool category is by far the most crowded in the influencer marketing technology landscape. These tools are the opposite of market benchmarking tools. They are action-focused tools that are designed to facilitate the workflow of influencer campaigns. While these tools provide a lot of functionality for campaign execution, they lack the data, insights, and capabilities required to support large scale, global influencer marketing programs.

System of Record Solutions

System of record influencer marketing platforms are designed to address all of the 5 core use cases in one platform.

They provide the market-level insights for senior executives to inform strategy. They provide the action-oriented influencer discovery, vetting, and campaign management capabilities required by influencer marketing practitioners to put these insights to action. Finally, they provide a “bridge” in the form of program management capabilities that connect the various moving pieces of larger-scale influencer marketing programs.

Influencer Marketing RFP

The next step is to put together a Request for Proposal (RFP) questionnaire to send to your short-listed vendors and gather information on how their offerings align with your most critical requirements. To get started, we encourage you to check out this Influencer Marketing Technology RFP Guide which includes a downloadable RFP template.

Working with Influencer Marketing Agencies 

Scaling influencer marketing in-house is most often the only way a program will scale. You may find that agencies resist this because it challenges their position and existing business. However, brands are unlikely to significantly scale their influencer work with agencies until the core of their program is established in-house.

This being said, there is huge potential in partnering with agencies when you have established a core influencer strategy internally. You can see this exemplified by Colgate-Palmolive in this case study, where they achieved a 40% reduction in influencer campaign costs by combining Traackr's influencer marketing platform with an in-house strategy and an aligned agency partnership.

The most successful agencies are embracing their clients' efforts to scale; remaining confident that the role of the agency stands strong, while the nature of their work evolves.

Keep Growing 

Well, if you made it this far, you are clearly serious about influencer marketing. 

Join 40k+ of your marketing colleagues by signing up for Traackr’s newsletter. You’ll get invites to exclusive events, examples of influencer marketing strategies from top brands, fresh content on influencer strategy and more!

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