In our recent influencer marketing survey, almost 40% of brands said they work with over 10 influencers per month. It shows that rather than blowing an entire budget on a celebrity influencer, brands are appreciating the higher return and targeted product visibility that working with multiple influencers can bring. And it’s not just the big brands that have come to play – smaller brands are also benefiting from this added exposure to new audiences.

But in spite of all the positives, working with multiple influencers can present a number of challenges. Managing campaign and influencer operations is tricky, especially while trying to ensure the best content is created and your relationship with the influencer(s) and brand reputation are maintained.

As we have observed campaigns between brands, agencies and influencers we tend to come across similar pitfalls – regardless of the size of the business running the campaign. With that in mind, here are our core takeaways for effective influencer management:

1. A Clear Brief Goes A Long Way

Never underestimate the power of your campaign brief. A clear and concise campaign brief will save you a lot of time going back and forth with influencers and will protect your relationship with them as everyone understands what is to be expected and when. As a rule of thumb, we advise you to always include:

• Campaign guidelines

• Content deliverables

• Posting deadlines

• Campaign hashtags & handles

• Whether you will require any screenshots of analytics / content after its been posted (and when)

• Do’s and don’ts i.e. don’t include any competitor brands or do have the product packaging clearly in shot

Though you may have shared separate t&c’s with the influencer, the reality is they are unlikely to read though pages of legal terms. In your campaign brief, it’s always best to reiterate rules around how long the post should remain on their feed, and content usage rights. You can get our complete eBook on setting influencer campaign guidelines below.

 

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2. Respect The Influencers Creativity

If you want someone to create content to your precise specifications, get a designer – not an influencer. While it’s important to set clear guidelines, you should avoid having too great a creative strategy.

We asked 1000 influencers how they feel about heavily branded content, 41% said they try to push back, 19% said they would charge more for a brief like that, and 18% would reject the collaboration all together.

Be selective about who you choose to collaborate with i.e. influencers who have good brand affinity, engagement and reputation; put together a solid campaign brief; and leave the influencer to create. The end result will be content that engages both your audience and theirs.

3. Influencer Management Requires Organisation

When working with multiple influencers, it’s especially important to stay organised. Influencer marketing timelines can move at a rapid pace, and as we all know – fee’s from one influencer to another can vary greatly. Keeping track of who should be paid what and when, the date content has been posted, links to the live content, download of the files, and usage rights for specific content across multiple influencers, for multiple campaigns can be logistically challenging.

If you’re still managing your influencer marketing campaigns manually, ensure you have a spreadsheet to record this information set up before your campaign begins so you can record as you go along.

Influencer Management Tools

While managing campaigns via email and spreadsheets may appear cost effective, unless you have already passed the testing phase, you should think about investing in a robust technology.

When scaling your influencer usage, manually checking influencers profiles for previous brand associations, authenticity of followers, engagement rates and growth stats is time consuming. Maintaining the high level of organisation required to ensure the team stays on top of influencer posts, people get paid on time, and no one accidentally mixes content that has usage rights with content that doesn’t is prone to human error. Using an influencer management tool will mitigate these risks and save an enormous amount of time (therefore money).

At ZINE we believe in building technology that improves effectiveness and can be adapted to suit companies of any size running influencer campaigns of any scale. To see how our influencer management technology can help you to effectively manage your influencer campaigns, get in touch here.

 

Read Next > 5 Questions To Ask Before Selecting Your Influencer Marketing Platform

 

 

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Maeve Sugrue

I’m Marketing Director at ZINE where I am helping peers and customers who want to revolutionise their influencer marketing strategy. I love food, fitness and Min Pins.