Technology
When it comes to technology, there are a variety of tools that can make the preparation,
implementation, management, and measurement, of an influencer campaign easier and more
efficient.
Such tools are increasingly important because the regularity and complexity of such campaigns can
make handling them manually a headache, leaving the business in a position where it must rely on the
professionalism and transparency of the influencers for information, making it a bit tricky to gain a
realistic review of the results, and ultimately, your return on investment.
It’s imperative to make use of a tool that enables you to search for, and connect with, the right
influencers that suit your brand, and the campaign’s intended objectives.
It should also enable you to communicate directly with the influencers, educate them about the
campaign, and clarify what’s expected of them, while also allowing you to put forward a contract that
stipulates the terms of the agreement.
A benchmarking function, that gives you a line of sight on the influencer’s rates, will also help to save
time – and money – by ensuring everyone goes into the agreement fully aware of what’s expected
from everyone else.
Two final considerations on the technology front are that it should be able to make automated
payments to the influencers at scale as the campaign progresses, and it should be able to monitor
and measure the campaign’s results in a real-time “live” environment.
Influencer stock
When it comes to technology systems, there is incredible value in its ability to assist your business in
finding the right influencers, while finding the right influencers is dependent upon its influencer stock.
Gone are the days of agencies offering up suggestions based on a spreadsheet of influencers they
most like to work with.
The reality is that the driving force behind the success of an influencer campaign is its authenticity.
That means that the influencers who are employed to represent your brand and advertise your
products or services, need to be an authentic match based on actual valuable data.
To this end, the influencer stock that exists in the technology you use should be vetted from an
audience and content engagement perspective.
The integrity of the data that is collected on each influencer goes towards ensuring that the pairing of
the right influencers with the right brand is not just a stroke of luck, but a quantifiable objective.
The larger the stock of influencers registered to, and vetted by, the technology you use, the better the
results you can expect when it comes to taking your influencer campaign from idea to activation.
Collaboration
Paul Solarz once wrote that: “Collaboration allows us to know more than we are capable of knowing
by ourselves.”
When it comes to bringing a successful influencer marketing campaign to life, collaboration is a
necessity.
The reality of such collaboration isn’t always pretty. It can take a lot of hard work, long hours, and late
nights – but the effort is always worth it because it always pays off in the end.
The human involvement is what sets great work apart, because the more IP and skills you’re able to
gather around the table when it comes to collaborating, the better the output will ultimately be.
Strategy
The strategy behind an influencer campaign is a defining factor of its success. It’s not enough to
simply send influencers free products and hope for the best.
Rather, the strategy needs to inform the who, how, where, when, what and why of the campaign, from
the training of influencers to the consideration of which platforms the content will live on to the
decisions on what the objectives of success are and how best to achieve them.
The more detailed and considered the strategy, the more likely it’ll achieve what it's designed to.
It's not enough to know that you need to include influencer marketing as part of your strategy.
If you want success – and we know that you do – you’ve got to equip yourself with the right elements
and expertise to handle the campaigns effectively.
These elements may be all the difference between money well spent (and that’s money that makes
some sort of a return on investment) and money wasted. So, let’s do it smartly.
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