It might take days, it might take weeks, or maybe you might even last months. But, eventually, if you’re a marketing or PR agency trying to scale up your influencer marketing offering in an overtly manual way, you’ll reach an inevitable conclusion: you’re going to hit a capacity and productivity ceiling that you can’t break past. 

So it’s no surprise that technology has come to the rescue in the form of influencer marketing platforms.

There are three simple questions you can ask yourself to determine whether it’s time to start thinking about integrating technology into your influencer marketing operations:

• Are your internal resources maxed out to the point where every new client creates an overwhelming amount of new admin?

• Are you struggling to find an effective way to report on multiple influencer marketing campaigns in a productive and efficient way? 

• Does running influencer marketing for clients feel like a constant business risk because you don’t have a reliable system in place to find and vet influencers at scale? 

If you can answer ‘yes’ to just one of those questions, it’s probably time to consider how an influencer marketing platform can help to transform your service. If you answer ‘yes’ to all three, there’s no doubt that influencer marketing platforms are the missing piece in your agency’s puzzle.~

What is an influencer marketing platform?

An influencer marketing platform is a specialist piece of software designed exclusively to streamline, accelerate, and ease the entire end-to-end process of managing an influencer marketing campaign. They are used by brands managing their own campaigns, and marketing and PR agencies managing influencer marketing campaigns on behalf of their clients. They are also used by influencers to find and attract new work.

The very best influencer marketing platforms are built around three core pillars: discovery (finding influencers you can work with), management (payment, content approval, rights negotiations), and analytics (campaign results and impacts).

The power of influencer marketing platforms

Influencer marketing platforms are capable of transforming your ability to scale your service by bringing automation, AI, analytics, and trusted relationships in a single, easy-to-use system and interface.

These platforms provide operational support; consolidation of end-to-end processes; and ultimate transparency when compared to involving talent management agencies in the recruitment of influencers. 

Key features of influencer marketing platforms

Here are some of the most important capabilities of a typical influencer marketing platform (like Sway Me Good) that agencies can take advantage of:

• Manage the entire influencer marketing process. Instead of relying on disparate processes and software that makes internal collaboration challenging, influencer marketing platforms provide a single source of truth and a comprehensive, easily accessible record of all communication, contracts, briefs, deliverables, approvals, and payments.

• Manage multiple brands and products. No more creating new files and spreadsheets for each new campaign or client. Everything is collated in one software and performance can quickly be viewed at a macro or micro level. Simply create a new brand profile, including a brand name, website URL, primary and secondary categories, brand bio, brand logo, and brand banner image. From there, you can add new products to the brand and quickly create and manage new influencer marketing campaigns.

• Ensure buyer protection and mitigate the risk of brand damage. Influencer marketing platforms enable you to use templated contracts that detail deliverables, payment terms, approval processes, licence ownership, and more. With all components clearly agreed, this increases the chances of a successful campaign and reduces the chance of a misaligned influencer being recruited.

• Manage multiple campaigns efficiently. You’ll no longer have to run multiple windows, screens, or tabs to simply try to see all the relevant data for your campaign. A specialist platform gathers everything in one place and presents it in a way that enables you to dive into any campaign in detail. On Sway Me Good, you start each campaign by creating a job listing that details the brand, product, timeline, influencer preferences (age, price, follower count, gender, location), target audience, content preference, media, brief, dos and don’ts, hashtags, and budget size. All you’ve got to do is work through those steps.

• Consolidate budget management. For each campaign, you can immediately set an overall budget. As influencers are accepted into the campaign, the available budget reduces. When the campaign is approaching full budget spend, you’ll receive a notification that your spend is almost complete. It couldn’t be easier.

• Centralise communication. Instead of relying on DMs, emails, or telephone calls, all of which can be difficult to track and record internally when they are spread across different systems and potentially handled by different members of your team, an influencer marketing platform stores all influencer comms in a single place. So your agency always has a single source of truth on everything discussed and agreed as part of the campaign.

• Take advantage of intuitive workflows. Whether you’re trying to start a new campaign, recruit influencers, filter influencer applications by a range of different criteria, provide feedback, leverage one-click approvals, or receive notifications of when content is posted, everything is made simple in a single influencer marketing platform.

• Streamlined processes for creators. From applying to be part of your campaign through to receiving your product, submitting their work, and receiving their payment, your influencers benefit from a streamlined process that makes them much more likely to want to work with your agency in the future. Influencer marketing platforms also make it much easier for agencies to ship any products to the influencer.

• Fully transparent experience. If you’ve ever tried recruiting influencers through a talent management agency, you’ll know how opaque and frustrating it can be. You rarely receive visibility on which influencers are available beyond those recommended by the talent agency. You don’t know what it’s like to work with those influencers, what the data is around their performance, and sometimes you might not even receive an influencer-by-influencer cost breakdown. In contrast, platforms like Sway Me Good allow you to play around with your filters and see the impact it has on the influencers available to you and the potential results you could achieve. This helps you devise a much more nuanced and mixed approach, bringing more micro influencers into your budget. This level of transparency won’t just be appreciated by your team. Your clients will love it, too!

• Performance clarity. For every influencer or overall campaign, you can drill down into a range of performance metrics that give you all the information you need to accurately assess your campaign and master influencer marketing ROI. CPM, likes, comments, reach, and engagement rates are all easily accessible. So you can always detail to your clients exactly how their campaign is performing.

• Real-time optimisation. If your campaign is slightly off-track, it’s easy to make changes and optimise things for improved performance. Sliders allow you to quickly tweak budgets and new influencers can be recruited at speed. 

• Advanced reporting. At the click of a button, you can download a campaign report branded with your agency’s logo that can be presented to your clients with absolute confidence. Every data point is available, helping you to build trust and long-standing relationships with your client base.

  
  

Start building your service with an influencer marketing platform

If you’re looking to break through the ceiling of running manual influencer marketing campaigns, innovative technology is the only way to unlock your growth. In fact, our research has shown that platforms like Sway Me Good reduce the typical time needed to manage an influencer marketing campaign by an estimated 75%.

Choosing to use an influencer marketing platform saves you time, provides ongoing efficiency in all your processes, and helps to protect both your agency and your clients from any of the potential pitfalls involved in a typical influencer marketing campaign.

Learn more about the benefits of the Sway Me Good influencer marketing platform for agencies.

QUIZ

How many of these tools/systems are available in your influencer marketing campaigns?

1. Management. Can you manage all of your campaigns in a single platform, with disparate information scattered among your team and different software?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

2. Contracts. Do you have an effective way of providing buyer protection and mitigating the potential risk of reputational damage for your client?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

3. Communication. Can you house all influencer comms on a single platform that your entire team can access at will?

Yes (1 points), No (0 point)

4. Creators. Is your process designed to make things easy for your agency, without giving consideration to whether you’re also making it easy for the influencers you work with?

Yes (0 points), No (1 point)

5. Transparency. Are you able to choose from a wide pool of influencers for your next campaign and understand the precise budget impact of your decisions?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

6. Reporting. Do you have access to branded reports created and downloaded with a single click?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

Scores:

0-2 points: You’re stuck in a manual nightmare. If you’ve any ambition to scale, you need to invest in an influencer marketing platform – fast!

3-4 points: Some of your system is working, but other parts of your process could definitely benefit from the use of technology.

5-6 points: When it comes to influencer marketing, your agency is one of the leaders. Brands are likely impressed. And your competitors are chasing your shadows. Keep it up!