Influencer marketing is booming. If you’re a marketing or PR agency looking to the future, building a successful influencer marketing service could be one of the hottest tickets to delivering measurable client impacts and long-term agency growth.
But for many agencies, the reality doesn’t match up the hype. Those dreams of significant new revenues become a nightmare of admin and hassle faster than you can search for the next big hashtag.
Here’s what’s going wrong: every manual process, every system put in place that requires manual oversight – it’s all a trap.
Rather than tapping into a goldmine of new opportunities, any attempt to scale your influencer marketing service simply leaves you hitting roadblock after roadblock. You reach their capacity. You can’t grow any further. You’re stuck – and it only gets worse.
Why are agencies so set on scaling influencer marketing?
In short: revenue.
Influencer marketing is growing at speed. The industry is already worth $16.4bn. By 2025, that figure looks set to reach $22.2bn. And 60% of brands with a budget for influencer marketing intend to increase it this year (2024).
Brands know it works. They get bang for their buck. And agencies get their cut, too.
So, why does this promising opportunity turn into a headache for many marketing agencies? The answer lies in how influencer marketing is managed.
Spoiler alert: it’s not pretty.
The typical agency set-up is fatally flawed
In most agencies, just one or two staff manage the entire influencer marketing operation. Often, they’re doing it alongside other roles and responsibilities. It’s very rare that someone’s position is dedicated entirely to influencer marketing.
That’s the first problem.
Second, comes the management. Imagine a mess of spreadsheets tracking ‘To Do’ lists, tasks in progress, and complete projects. Communication spread across emails, DMs, and other project management tools. Throw in most client’s clear preference to work with small influencers, which are harder to find and trickier to deal with, and it’s no wonder the agency team is stressed out.
Here’s what agencies are typically handling:
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Account identification: Finding the right influencers who align with the brand’s values, target audience, and budget.
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Internal collaboration: Keeping different agency workers up to speed on a raft of different moving parts.
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Outreach: Contacting potential influencers, outlining the project, and overcoming initial objections.
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Negotiation: Discussing rates and trying to find a common ground between the influencer’s expectations and your client’s budget.
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Contracts: Drafting and signing agreements that cover payment terms, deliverables, timelines, compliance with advertising standards, and license ownership.
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Shipping: Handling and tracking product deliveries to influencers.
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Approvals/feedback: Reviewing content before it goes live and providing feedback where necessary.
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Payment: Managing payments to influencers in accordance with each agreed contract, as well as dealing with payment issues with individual bank and PayPal transfers.
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Measurement: Tracking campaign performance and reporting results both to agency owners and client teams.
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Ongoing comms: Maintaining communication with influencers throughout the campaign.
The consequences of scaling influencer marketing when you’re not ready
Inefficient processes, fragmented performance data, and potentially unreliable influencer partnerships: when everything’s done manually, all of these problems start to compound.
Some (although not all!) agency owners can mistakenly believe that overseeing an influencer marketing campaign will be a relatively light-touch task. But the sheer volume of tasks is overwhelming.
Some of these tasks are tiny, like asking an influencer for their address so you can ship the product. Resolving others can become much more messy, like if an influencer has produced content in the wrong format, or if they’re changed something they weren’t meant to after approvals were confirmed.
48 hours over a five-week period
That’s the average time agencies need to complete a £10,000 campaign involving 10 different influencers, each with 5,000 followers.
When things start to go wrong, the consequences for your agency can be severe.
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Reduced productivity becomes the first major internal issue, especially if one client wants to work with a large bank of different influencers. The more influencers are involved, the more complex the coordination becomes. If influencer marketing isn’t a full-time, dedicated role for a specified individual, then the impact on your overall productivity can get even worse.
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Poor client service is the next domino to fall. As your team maxes-out its capacity, it’s the quality of client service that inevitably comes under pressure. Delays become more frequent. Attention to detail diminishes. And previously-solid relationships soon begin to fray.
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Under-performing campaigns almost inevitably follow, as the impact of incomplete tasks, rushed processes, and a lack of thorough oversight all start to take their toll. As processes begin to fall apart, the quality of influencer content, engagement rates, and the campaign’s overall ROI can all take a hit.
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Reputational damage and revenue threats are the icing on this particularly unpleasant cake. Word soon starts to spread when you deliver subpar results and poor client service. Brands talk with each other. And once they hear about your service, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to land new clients or even retain existing ones.
