There’s no doubt about it: right now, influencer marketing is a huge growth opportunity for marketing and PR agencies looking to expand their services.

Brands are desperate to get in on the action. They’ve seen the ability of influencer marketing to drive engagement and sales across several different social media platforms. And they’re increasingly willing to put significant budgets behind influencer marketing campaigns.

That’s the good news – and the reason why many agencies are trying to start and scale up an influencer marketing service.

But as many agencies are quickly realising, as the clients and campaigns start to grow, the compounding effect of all the manual tasks associated with managing influencers starts to put teams and internal processes under real strain.

It’s an incredibly difficult challenge. Understandably, as an agency owner, you need a solid pipeline of business before you commit to hiring new members of staff. But if you suddenly win lots of new business, you also need to have the processes and systems in place to support that and scale up without imploding.

If that sounds familiar, and you’re starting to understand why scaling influencer marketing is often a headache for agencies, this article is designed to help you get unstuck. 

It contains seven key strategies for effectively and quickly scaling influencer marketing in agencies, so read on to find out what they are.

1. Map and Document the Optimal End-to-End Process

A good starting point is to spend time methodically mapping out what your optimum influencer marketing process would look like, from start to finish. 

Your aim is to understand exactly what it looks like to deliver an end-to-end, agency-side service for influencer marketing. From there, it’s all about a continuous evolution, iteration, and improvement.

If a bottleneck occurs, you need to find a way to resolve it and enable the rest of your service to continue at pace.

If there’s a repetitive task that’s accounting for a considerable number of manhours, is there a way to use automation or artificial intelligence (AI) to keep things moving quickly?

Once you’ve got your process documented, your internal team can always understand what’s necessary at any stage of your client service which will immediately improve efficiency..

Key tasks

- Identify inefficiencies: Regularly review and update your processes to eliminate bottlenecks.
- Optimise workflows: Implement continuous improvement strategies to ensure the process remains smooth and efficient.

2. Implement Standardised Workflows and Templates

Moving your focus beyond service design, to the actual management and delivery of your influencer marketing service, is next on the agenda.

Here, standardised workflows and templates are your best friend.

By mapping your end-to-end process, you’ll have a clear framework of what you’re doing. Then it’s a case of seeking the areas where you can use automation to drive productivity.

The templates and checklists you’ll devise here – everything from selection criteria and initial outreach through to contracts, brief forms, payment terms, shipping processes, and more – helps accelerate every element of your process.

These standardised workflows help to ensure consistency and quality control, productivity, scalability, and ongoing compliance. They also support internal training and onboarding, and give clients a valuable perception of a structured and considered approach.

If you want to set the wheels in motion for innovation and improvement within your influencer marketing service, templates and checklists are an essential first step.

Key tasks

- Develop templates: Create templates for outreach emails, contracts, and briefs to save time and ensure consistency.
- Use checklists: Implement checklists to ensure all necessary steps are followed for each campaign.

3. Designate Responsibility for Influencer Marketing

Like any substantial task, managing influencer marketing campaigns requires specialist skills and knowledge.

When you assign a point-person for this at your agency, they see the same issues arise day after day. So in almost any situation that might cause a delay with a less experienced member of staff, they instinctively know how best to solve things and keep the show on the road.

If you’re using an influencer marketing platform to centralise your day-to-day management, this person can keep an eye on all your influencer campaigns and ensure each one is running smoothly.

Your social media lead is likely to be a good contender for this role.

However, if you’re looking to handle influencer marketing entirely manually, you may need to consider bringing together an entire team dedicated entirely to influencer marketing.

Key tasks

- Hire specialists: Look for individuals with experience in influencer marketing and relationship management.
- Continuous training: Invest in regular education to keep your team up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices.

4. Develop Standardised Pricing and Valuing for Influencers

Valuing influencers is both complicated and risky. For most agencies, that means it’s a significant problem – and potential mistakes could eat into the client’s budget or the campaign’s effectiveness.

Your challenge is to ensure maximum bang for your buck with every agreed influencer fee. So an accurate, data-based system for pricing up influencers holds incredible value.

Imagine this situation: at some stage, you’re going to take a selection of proposed influencers to your clients and say, ‘We’d like to pay this person X amount’. Your client is almost certainly going to ask ‘why them, and why that much?’

If you’ve got a clear pricing matrix in place, you can have that conversation with confidence. And because this is an industry-wide challenge, tackling it immediately places your agency at the forefront of influencer marketing.

The one thing to avoid is simplicity. We recommend a four-tiered approach.

At the most basic level, you could value influencers entirely based on their follower count. If you wanted to become more sophisticated, you could look at the influencers follower-to-accounts-followed ratio. A more detailed assessment would consider follower numbers, average likes, average comments, and an overall engagement rate.

The most comprehensive assessment would involve all of the above, as well as looking at the influencer’s post frequency and removing posts that are huge anomalies in the data (i.e. if one of the influencer’s videos has 10 times the likes or views of the average).

If you’re only valuing a handful of influencers, it’s possible to create a spreadsheet and manually sift through this data. But for five or more influencers (i.e. valuing influencers at scale), we recommend working with a platform that will do this for you.

Watch our webinar on the art of influencer pricing.

Key tasks

- Create pricing guidelines: Establish clear criteria for pricing based on various metrics.
- Transparency: Communicate your pricing structure clearly to both clients and influencers.

5. Develop a Centralised Influencer Database and Management System

When it comes to managing your influencer marketing service, you might still be operating in a complex, messy, and unclear spreadsheet.

But that’s not a scalable system. It’s not particularly collaborative. And it’s open to errors that could prove very costly further down the process.

If you want to scale any service, including influencer marketing, a highly accessible and user-friendly single source of truth is a critical part of the picture.

The database should include all your workflows, templates, and checklists. It should contain records of any communication with influencers. Campaign goals, performance metrics, and payment tracking should also be held.

In short, you’re looking for every possible advantage. Having all your activity stored in a central, easily accessible hub unlocks so much potential.

Key tasks

- Use technology to centralise data: Implement a CRM system tailored for influencer marketing.
- Maintain up-to-date records: Ensure all information is current and easily accessible.

6. Use Influencer Marketing Platforms for Automation and Efficiency

Leveraging technology is key to scaling influencer marketing.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, more than 60% of brands and influencers plan to use AI or ML in their influencer campaigns. So keeping on top of the available tools is going to become essential for client recruitment and retention.

Tools and platforms create new opportunities for collaboration and streamline workflows when working at volume. You can manage the entire influencer marketing process in one place which gives you the capacity to manage multiple brands and products with ease.

Our research suggests that influencer marketing platform’s like Sway Me Good can typically save you 75% of the time it needs to oversee an influencer marketing campaign.

Key tasks

- Automation: Use platforms that automate outreach, contract management, and reporting.
- AI Integration: Consider AI tools that can help identify the best influencers and predict campaign success.

7. Develop a Robust Reporting System for Clients

Almost 84% of brands and agencies say influencer marketing attracts high-quality customers.

But if you’re wanting to scale your agency’s influencer marketing service, clients need to be able to see the value of their investment.

Consolidating a range of different metrics is a huge challenge. Asking influencers for screenshots from inside their account leaves you open to fraud, creates more manual work, and doesn’t always give you the answers you need.

Somehow, you need to join the dots so that you can ensure your campaigns are performing well and that your chosen influencers are having the desired effect.

Developing a robust reporting system provides transparency and demonstrates the impact of your campaigns. You’ll need to look beyond simple likes and comments, and create a sophisticated way of tracking ROI across sales, customer sentiment, and reputation.

Key tasks

- Detailed analytics: Provide comprehensive reports on engagement, reach, and ROI.
- Regular updates: Keep clients informed with regular updates and insights.

Scaling influencer marketing requires process and systems

Scaling an agency’s influencer marketing service takes time and effort.

But once you’ve pinned down your processes, templates, systems, and team, you’re well positioned to move ahead of your rivals.

While they’re floundering with all the manual difficulties found in a typical influencer marketing process, you’re reaping the rewards with increased client retention and revenues.

Interested in learning more about how agencies use Sway Me Good to scale influencer marketing? Get in touch today!

QUIZ

How close are you to scaling your influencer marketing service?

1. Process mapping. Are the core steps of your agency’s influencer marketing processes documented and easy to follow for any member of your internal team?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

2. Standardised templates. Have you created a library of influencer marketing templates that will save you time and hassle with every campaign?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

3. In-house team. Is your influencer marketing service staffed by employees who also look after other parts of your business?

Yes (0 points), No (1 point)

4. Influencer pricing. Do you have a reliable and consistent approach to valuing influencers and pricing campaigns?

Yes (1 points), No (0 point)

5. Database development. Do you have a centralised place to manage influencer relationships and campaign assets?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

6. Influencer marketing platforms. Do you still think you can manage influencer marketing without investing in specialist tools?

Yes (0 point), No (1 points)

Scores:

0-2 points: Uh-oh. You’ve still got lots to do. But if you commit to action now, you’ll get there sooner than you think.

3-4 points: You’ve taken some initial steps – and that’s great news. Now you’ve got to double-down and build on that momentum.

5-6 points: Awesome! Your agency has almost all the pieces in place. Any final difficulties in scaling your influencer marketing service shouldn’t take long to resolve.