Influencer marketing has become a critical component in many companies’ marketing mix. As brands increase their budgets, they must decide on the best approach to manage this powerful channel in order to achieve optimal effect.
Many companies choose to collaborate with an influencer marketing agency while others choose to do it on their own, in-house. In this blog post we highlight some of the things that are important to keep in mind if you choose to manage your influencer marketing internally.
In-house influencer marketing
If you want to do influencer marketing in-house as opposed to hiring an influencer marketing agency, there are some things you need to keep in mind that will make-or-break your success. Here are four things you must do if you are going to be working with in-house influencer marketing:
1. Ensure the influencers reach your target group
As the number of influencers is growing rapidly, it is becoming more and more challenging for businesses to understand which ones to collaborate with in order to reach their exact target audience. Nano, micro and macro influencers – what is the best fit for your brand? To be able to properly navigate in the jungle of influencers, you need to define your target group and your influencer marketing goals right from the start – only then you can go searching for the most suitable profiles.
When evaluating different profiles, it is important to keep in mind that an influencer’s follower base does not necessarily reflect the profile itself – an influencer who is based in London and is in his thirties could have a follower base that mainly consists of women in their 20’s – living in another part of the world. Thus, if your target group is men in their thirties living in UK, there is a risk that you reach the wrong audience if you do not do a proper background check on the profile’s follower base – this must be a match with your specific target audience.
2. Allow the influencer to be the Creative Director
One of the keys to successful influencer marketing is to give the profiles that you collaborate with space to be creative. Let’s not forget, the influencer marketing business is a creative one – brands use influencers for their ability to communicate with their target group in a way the brand can not do by traditional means. Think of influencers as content creators – their job is literally to be creative with content and they know best how to engage with their followers – that is the reason why these people follow them. This does not mean you should not create a reasonable framework, but make sure it allows for creative freedom within certain boundaries. Followers are smart and they will notice if their favourite profile starts communicating in a new way, that does not feel credible.
3. Set up measurable and relevant KPI’s – right from the start
One of the most common challenges related to influencer marketing is knowing how to measure and evaluate the efforts. Which KPI’s are most important and how do you keep track of them? First of all, you need to define the exact goals of your investment – both for the short and long term. Do you seek to increase brand awareness in a new market, or do you want to drive traffic to your website or increase sales of a particular product? We recommend you to acquire a measurement tool where you can easily keep track of your influencer marketing efforts, so that you can optimise the result. And just as important – so that you can draw lessons for future campaigns.
4. Build a dedicated project team – with 100% focus on influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a time-consuming process and a full-time job. To fully understand how much time and resources you will need to assign to make it work, you should consider how you want to scale your influencer marketing efforts in the long term: Do you plan to do smaller collaborations with single profiles every now and then, or do you want to work always-on with various profiles in different countries?
To succeed with your influencer marketing in-house, you need to build a project group that is fully dedicated to influencer marketing. In short, you will need an influencer strategist, an analyst and a project manager who coordinates all the operational and administrational tasks. The more you aim to scale your influencer marketing, the more resources you will need – but this goes probably without saying.
If you want to deep dive into the subject and find out what’s the best influencer marketing approach for your business, you can download our guide below!
