Influencer management 101: Key tactics for brand growth

Whether you work with five influencers or a hundred, keeping track of content and communication gets messy once an influencer marketing campaign is live. But the chaos starts way before the live campaign—from influencer discovery to onboarding, contracts to payments, and strategy to briefs.

This is where influencer management helps.

Influencer management is the process of handling influencer relationships, including relationship building, briefing, content approvals, campaign performance tracking, and more.

Why is influencer management important?

How many times have you had an influencer not follow the brief, or have confusion around payment terms? Worse, how often does your best-performing influencer pause the partnership?

An influencer marketing campaign goes beyond just identifying the right influencers. Suppose you have the perfect influencer marketing strategy with star influencers who align with your values and brand goals. If you fail to establish a good relationship with them, the results won’t live up to your influencer marketing efforts.

Here are four more solutions that influencer management provides:

1. Efficient communication

Influencer marketing is influencer relationship building at its core. Influencers don’t want to be treated as a small cog in your marketing machine. They need personal attention and regular communication, just like your customers.

The problem isn’t building a relationship with them, but building relationships with hundreds of influencers, and making each one feel great about the working relationship.

This is where an influencer management tool helps you. Whether you use a spreadsheet or a tool like MightyScout, the goal is to keep track of all your influencer communications.

2. Organized campaigns

Have you ever forgotten to send a product sample to an influencer? Or maybe you’ve lost track of who’s posted about your brand and who hasn’t? You’re not alone: Managing influencers and keeping track of them isn’t easy.

Influencer management helps you avoid this lack of organization. You need a system to keep track of the sent samples, the posted content, the results from each social media influencer, affiliate links conversions, and more. Without an influencer relationship management system, the campaign might fall apart.

3. Never miss an opportunity

Not all your influencers will get you the same result—some will be better than others. Failing to identify such opportunities can result in lost sales and engagement.

You need to manage your influencer marketing campaign in a way that keeps track of all the results your influencers get—and quantify a sales amount, if possible. For example, this is how MightyScout attributes sales to your influencer marketing efforts:

4. Prove your return on investment

Tracking UTM links and unique codes gives you only so much insight. Like any other content campaign, influencer marketing campaigns should have relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) that track attribution with important indicators such as engagement rate, views, clicks, and more.

The problem doesn’t end at attribution. The next step is collecting the data in a concise dashboard to help you make business decisions. Otherwise, the data is just numbers on a spreadsheet. Influencer management is tracking the results and pivoting based on them.

How to manage influencers and influencer campaigns

Managing an influencer campaign is a five-step process:

1. Set clear campaign goals:

Influencer marketing is a means to an end—the end being your current business goals. So, break down your overall business goals and align them with your influencer marketing campaigns. Those goals might be increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or generating a buzz around an upcoming sale. This will also help you choose your influencers wisely.

2. Identify the right influencers:

Find good-fit influencers based on your goals, taking into account follower count and engagement rates. For example, if your goal is to increase sales, prioritize influencers with a track record of driving conversions through their content. Or if your goal is to raise awareness about a new product, choose influencers known for their educational content and an engaged audience.

3. Create partnerships:

Once you have a list of influencers, reach out to them for a potential partnership and collaboration. This step will involve an outreach invitation and potentially a contract.

4. Brief the influencers and approve content:

The influencers’ social media content will be as good as your brief. Make sure you share your campaign goals and a clear direction to take, leaving space for creativity and ownership.

5. Nurture relationships:

Check in with your influencers regularly—not just to keep an eye on how the campaign is going, but to get feedback on the partnership. This can be tricky if you’re juggling hundreds or thousands of influencers at once, which is where an influencer management platform comes into play. It can help you organize your processes and answer questions like:

• Which influencers have we sent a product gift to?

• Which influencers have we invited to become affiliates?

• What type of agreement does each influencer have?

• Where is each influencer in the “relationship lifecycle”?

With an organized management system, you’ll be able to strengthen relationships by segmenting out affiliates and sending them a personalized message, ranking affiliates by lifetime value (LTV), and reaching out to influencers who haven’t posted in a while.

6. Track and report:

Once the influencer marketing campaign is live, track the clicks, engagement, and target audience response. Make sure you also track the difference in results as the content format changes to figure out the best content types for your brand.

What to look for in an influencer management tool

Your team can end up spending hours every week on tedious tasks that can easily be automated. An influencer management tool helps free up time so you can focus on tasks that move the needle—like having real conversations with your influencers.

An influencer management tool allows you to work with more influencers and, as a result, get more exposure and content for your brand. Here’s a checklist you can follow when selecting an influencer management tool:

1. Centralized communication:

Communication is the most time-consuming—yet most important—aspect of influencer management. Some influencers prefer email outreach, while some prefer a direct message on social media platforms. This gets complicated when you onboard each influencer and the conversations are in silos. Make sure the tool integrates with your communication apps and brings all your messages into one place.

2. Central dashboard:

Scattered data is difficult to analyze. A single dashboard with all the influencer profiles, current status of partnership, and campaign performance metrics can change how you view data.

3. Tracking and reporting:

The amount of data from your marketing campaigns can be overwhelming. There are often multiple links, affiliate codes, and other KPIs. While your team can keep track of each separately, human error happens, and it’s easy to miss an important piece of information.

4. Automated workflow:

Outreach, follow-ups, contracts, payments, tracking—many repetitive tasks can be automated to free up your time. A good influencer relationship management (IRM) tool can take the pressure off your team through powerful automation workflows.

5. Flexible payments:

You don’t want to sign a one-year contract for a tool you won’t need in a few months. Influencer campaigns are time-bound and not necessarily yearly, so look for a tool that offers flexible payments based on how many campaigns you run or how many influencers you work with.

The best influencer management platform for your campaigns

As is evident from the number of tasks required for a successful influencer campaign, it’s tedious and time-consuming for your team to spend hundreds of hours copy-pasting spreadsheet details. Even the most diligent manual tracking can see some tasks slip through the cracks, which can impact your entire campaign and reporting.

Leveraging an influencer marketing platform (also called influencer CRM) gives you multiple hours back, which you can spend on big-picture tasks.

This is where the best influencer management platform, MightyScout, comes in. It meets all the criteria for comprehensive influencer management and more.

Here’s how it can help you manage your influencer campaigns:

1. Track product seeding, product gifting, paid campaigns and events

Most influencer management tools track only paid influencer campaigns. The problem is, that relationship-building doesn’t happen with a one-off campaign. There’s a warm-up time for most influencers, which includes product seeding and product gifting.

Whenever you send a free product sample to an influencer, there’s a chance they might post about you and your brand. MightyScout tracks every kind of campaign—be it paid or unpaid.

2. Automate influencer discovery

The bottleneck for a lot of marketers doing influencer marketing is finding the right influencers. With MightyScout, your best influencers are only a click away. The lookalikes feature finds a list of similar influencers based on the stats and profiles of your five favorite partners.

3. Manage multiple brands

An influencer marketing agency often has to create multiple accounts for different clients. With MightyScout, you can manage all your clients in one place.

4. Automate tracking and reporting

Imagine this: You have a great roaster of influencers and approved content, and now the campaign is live. You need to track who posted what and when, the conversion rate, the engagement rate, and UTM links, and align them with your KPIs. It’s a lot of work.

MightyScout automates this tedious task for you. All you need to do is download your report, which contains all of your KPIs in an easy-to-read format.

Influencer management FAQ

1. What is an influencer management platform?

An influencer management platform is software that helps you manage your influencer campaigns and relationships in a centralized place. It simplifies everything from tracking campaign performance to managing communications and automating workflows.

2. How do I select the right influencer management tool?

If your decision is guided by a tight budget, make sure the tool you choose lets you scale as your brand gets bigger. A lot of platforms can’t handle the increase from a handful of influencers to a hundred. Use our checklist above to make the right decision for your brand and campaigns.

Streamline your influencer campaigns with influencer management

Influencer relationship building is a long and slow process. The biggest problem is not having enough time to focus on relationship-building because you’re spending hours bogged down in countless spreadsheets, manually tracking influencer campaigns.

The right tools give influencer managers and teams the best leverage: time and headspace to focus on influencer marketing strategies and business decisions.

With MightyScout, you can manage influencers without getting overwhelmed, as the tool does the heavy lifting for you. Book a demo today to see how.