Everything You Need to Know About Influencer Management Agency

As interest in influencer marketing has grown in recent years, so does the number of agencies promising to assist brands in implementing it. Did you know that 82% of customers value recommendations of their social peers? As a result, more firms are teaming up with social influencers to market their products and services. Finding influencers, qualifying them, briefing them, negotiating contracts with them, paying them, and then ensuring they do their tasks may be time-consuming. It’s no wonder that some firms would prefer to outsource it to professionals. This is where the job of a social influencer management agency comes into play. However, there are a few things you should think about before employing one.

1. Relevant Prior Experience

At this time, influencer marketing has been around for about 15 years, so many agencies have a lot of expertise. Essentially asking for relevant case studies for your business (e.g., food, fashion, CPG, etc.) and intended effect (e.g., web traffic, in-store sales, etc.) is a solid starting point for determining who to have meaningful conversations with. Hiring an agency that works with pricey influencers may not be a suitable fit if you have a limited budget. Instead, go with an agency that has a network of micro-influencers in your field.

2. Selecting Influencers

A few years ago, identifying an influencer who published material relevant to your sector and seemed to “fit” the brand was typically all that was required. We can now assess the makeup of an influencer’s following to ensure it coincides with the brand’s audience. We may check their saturation rate — the percentage of sponsored material they produce — to make sure it isn’t too high. We can determine if they’ve recently referenced competitors in their posts. We can determine whether or not their language is brand-safe. With so many powerful filtering methods available today, relying just on “brand fit” is no longer an option.

3. Be familiar with their procedure.

Try to understand more about a social influencer management agency’s work practices before hiring them. This will provide you with a comprehensive image of what it would be like to collaborate with them. Inquire about how they begin a new project and the criteria they use to select influencers, platforms, and methods for various campaigns.

Inquire about the person who will manage your account so you know who to contact. You should be aware of their reporting frequency (weekly, monthly, etc.), working hours, and weekly availability. You should select an agency that is transparent about its methods and is willing to interact with you as frequently as you need. Furthermore, you can employ decision-making tools to arrive at the optimal conclusion.

4. Criteria for Content Evaluation

Influencers have created tens of thousands of pieces of branded content over the previous few years. In analyzing this information, we discovered that performance varies greatly from one piece of content to the next. Unsurprisingly, some content works and some do not, just as content developed by a business or its creative agency does.

Given the variety in performance, how does the influencer management agency evaluate each piece of content after it goes live to measure performance? Content should be graded based on its organic performance in terms of likes, comments, and shares, but it’s also crucial to check those comments for indicators of inauthenticity, off-topic behaviours, or paid comments.

5. Strategy for Targeting

Organic influencer material is distributed to a portion of the influencer’s followers (usually around 9 per cent in our experience, although that varies based on what social networks are utilized).

Given that neither the brand nor the agency can control which 9 per cent view the material, what is the agency’s approach for guaranteeing that the content reaches the brand’s specific audience?

6. Evaluate client feedback

Learn what their clientele has to say about working with them. Positive testimonials are more likely to be published on an influencer management agency’s website. As a result, you should look for more credible customer reviews on social media or other community platforms like Quora.

Sometimes, agencies would spread phoney reviews to boost the legitimacy of their business. As a result, you should consider soliciting feedback from their previous or current clientele. They can reveal a lot about their service quality, credibility, and client satisfaction levels.

7. ROI

Finally, what, if any, results will the influencer management agency promise to their brand clients? Are they assuring deliverables like the number of influencers and the number of kinds of content produced? Are they promising anything more, such as a certain level of visits to a specific website? What happens if they don’t meet their promises? What treatments are available to the brand?

While most agency arrangements make it extremely impossible to guarantee sales, influencer agencies should be able to promise particular outcomes such as real views, engagements, or site traffic.

As influencer marketing grows in popularity, brands will need more skill sets to effectively harness it. As a result, even more, brands will turn to social influencer management agencies to help them launch effective campaigns. Selecting an agency of any kind is a challenging task because one might begin to sound eerily similar to another. You ought to be able to filter the list to identify the subset most likely to create good outcomes for your brand if you enter the conversation with these eight particular criteria.