Most brands go about influencer marketing in a pretty casual way as they begin. They reach out to a creator they like, send them some product, and see what happens. This works just fine when you only have a few activations on hand or you’re testing the waters. However, as you grow, it’s complicated to keep this casual approach for too long.
Transitioning from sporadic creator activations to a properly managed program does not have to happen overnight, but there does come a time when you need the systems in place to avoid being bogged down by the little things rather than focusing on your growth.
When The Status Quo No Longer Suffices
That first handful of creator activations seems easy. Perhaps you’re working with only three or four creators, maintaining a conversation via direct message on social media and logging results in an Excel file. Everyone’s excited about the collaboration, it’s a personal touch, and the entire activation takes a few hours a week to maintain.
Then expansion comes. You want to work with more creators across more platforms and suddenly twenty conversations are happening at once, too many notes are being taken in memory about who agreed to what, and there’s frustration about which posts actually converted potential buyers into customers. What works beautifully with five activations goes awry when you hit twenty activations.
At this point, many brands realize that they need expert help. An influencer marketing agency in London (or wherever your brand is based) can completely reshape how you go about creator relationships en masse with the proper infrastructure and skill sets to maintain dozens of partnerships all at once.
Getting The Basics Right Before You Need Them
The secret to successfully scaling influencer marketing is ensuring that with proper processes in place, they become second nature before you find yourself pulled in too many directions. For example, find a way to document who creators are and make access to contact information easily transferable for collaboration purposes. Ensure that outreach, negotiations, and results tracking are all simplified under a system to make accountability a breeze.
It may feel boring in comparison to the creative campaigns themselves, but you never know what will matter down the line, especially through documentation. When you’re working with five creators, chances are you can keep it all in your head. When you’re up to fifty, written agreements noting deliverables, timelines, rights associated with content created and payment due dates will save precious time and avoid treacherous miscommunications that can sour even the best partnerships. Contract templates save time when they’re already established.
Asking the right questions and tracking results properly matters as well. It’s one thing to know that this specific influencer is getting great engagement on their content; it’s another to know who made you money. Create ways to connect creator content to site traffic and conversion rates; otherwise, you’re wasting everyone’s time. Too often, brands decide not to track when it’s easy to implement these systems from the start and then have gut feelings direct decision-making down the line instead of sound logic based on facts.
Growing Your Roster Strategically
As your company grows, so should your influencer marketing strategy—but it should grow intentionally! This means knowing who works well for you and which types of creators will bolster your overall marketing efforts.
Micro-influencers tend to drive conversions better since they have less reach but more meaningful connections with their communities. Larger creators are great for brand awareness boosts and ambassadors make excellent long-term creators for consistent messaging for months on end. Campaign-specific creators work best for new audiences and testing new content. A developed influencer program successfully combines all types.
But you need the systems in place to accommodate effectively. Vetting processes need to be efficient yet effective, onboarding new creators without collaboration friction should be expected, as should easily maintained relationships over time without growing complacent. If you’re launching a campaign at the same time across multiple creators on the same day, every piece needs every other piece operating seamlessly—this takes planning and structure.
Maintaining Quality Amid Volume Increasing
This is where things get tricky; you want to work with more creators but don’t want what you have to offer to feel mass produced or worse, take away from what established good relationships in the first place. You cannot compromise quality for scale.
Therefore, brand guidelines become imperative while ensuring enough leeway exists for creators to feel empowered to create authentic content instead of cookie cutter rhetoric. Approval processes become necessary—but they need to happen with expediency so as not to stall creator timelines, so your brand remains protected at all costs. Building relationships instead of transactional arrangements—even if at a distance for many—keep quality high as well under these circumstances.
Brands that successfully scale influencer marketing understand that this is a viable marketing channel that comes with proper resources behind it—it won’t be something one already busy team member does when they have free time. So, this might mean someone comes on board full time to manage creator relationships from an internal perspective or an agency can help operate behind the scenes while the brand focuses more on high-level strategic endeavors.
Building A Program That Lasts
The goal isn’t just to scale a successful program once and call it a day—you want something built to adapt as your brand grows over years—through new platforms and shifting audience expectations every step of the way.
Typically long-term creators see better results than those who continuously rotate through new faces. When creators can authentically engage with your brand over longer periods of time and can promote consistently over months or even years down the line, their audiences pick up on that authenticity and it pays off for all parties involved.
Brands with successful results through influencer marketing are not necessarily those with the largest budgets; they are brands who put systems in place for scaling intently and successfully manage quality control while remaining flexible as things change down the line. Set up systems now and your influencer program can grow along with your brand for years!