Every year, marketing and PR agencies are introducing influencer marketing services to their clients, and it's clear why this trend is gaining momentum.
A 2023 survey of influencer marketing agencies found that 70% reported an increase in demand from clients wanting to use influencer marketing and nine out of every 10 marketers already using influencer marketing planned to maintain or increase their influencer marketing budgets.
The opportunity for agencies ready to dive into the influencer marketing space is substantial and rapidly expanding. Currently, one in every four influencer marketing campaigns is directly outsourced to marketing or PR agencies.
If you’re an agency owner, this guide will tell you everything you need to know about planning, managing, and delivering a full influencer marketing service. It includes the following sections:
What is influencer marketing?
Why is influencer marketing an opportunity for agencies?
What does an influencer marketing service involve?
Building a scalable team structure
Efficiently identifying and vetting influencers for client campaigns
Structuring and negotiating contracts to protect agency and client interests
Valuing influencer relationships and effectively costing influencer services
Creating and managing compliant content that resonates with target audiences
Streamlining campaign execution and agency workflow management
Tracking, measuring, and reporting campaign performance to clients
Navigating legal and ethical challenges in influencer marketing for agencies
Leveraging advanced tools and technologies to scale agency services
Training and upskilling your team for influencer marketing expertise
Now’s the time to scale up influencer marketing services
What should I do to start the process?
What should I do to start the process?
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a strategic approach where brands collaborate with social media creators who have a loyal and engaged audience. This type of marketing leverages the trust and credibility that influencers have built with their followers, effectively turning word-of-mouth recommendations into a commercialised advertising tool.
Smaller influencers may post specifically only about a very niche area, so they have generated incredible trust from their audience. Larger influencers could be global celebrities. What they lack in absolute top-tier trust, they make up for in millions of followers.
Influencer marketing is the process of paying these influencers as part of a campaign to create content about your product or service on their social media accounts. This puts your product or service directly in front of the influencer’s audience. The audience is likely to be much more receptive to the message because it is coming from someone they know, like, and trust.
Influencers are traditionally organised into five different groups:
Nano influencers: under 10,000 followers
Micro influencers: 10,000-50,000 followers
Medium influencers: 50,000-100,000 followers
Macro influencers: 100,000-1,000,000 followers
Mega influencers: over 1,000,000 followers
The larger an influencer’s following, the more they are able to charge brands for posting about the brand’s product or service. However, there isn’t always a direct correlation between spend and generated revenue. Smaller, more targeted audiences can sometimes prove to be more effective than simply reaching the largest possible audience. This is just one of many areas where an agency’s expertise can prove valuable.
Why is influencer marketing an opportunity for agencies?
Influencer marketing is a significant opportunity for agencies, because the market is still relatively immature. Very few marketing and PR agencies have successfully built and scaled an influencer marketing service for consumer brands, which means those that do can gain a significant competitive advantage.
Influencer marketing is proven to work: on average, consumer brands generate $5.20 for every $1 they invest in influencer marketing. And between February 2024 and May 2024, 37% of Gen Z shoppers bought a product directly as a result of an influencer’s recommendation. So, unsurprisingly, those same brands are keen to steer ever-larger proportions of their marketing budgets directly into influencer marketing.
Today, almost two-thirds of brands with a budget for influencer marketing intend to increase it.
Budgets are signed off and ready to be spent. Demand is increasing year on year. Influencers are keen to take on as much work as possible. Everything is aligned: all it needs is for an agency to manage the end-to-end process, leaving the brand able to focus on its own operations without the worry of overseeing what can be a complicated and fast-moving process.
What does an influencer marketing service involve?
An influencer marketing service requires huge amounts of organisation, communication, and collaboration. Marketing and PR agencies need to be clear from the beginning about all the different tasks involved in planning, managing, delivering, and reporting on influencer marketing campaigns.
Some agencies offer an influencer marketing service without fully appreciating the end-to-end requirements. This can lead to either internal problems with the agency’s systems breaking down, or external problems such as dissatisfied clients that can result in reputational damage.
If you’re thinking about launching your own influencer marketing service, here are the steps you’ll need to execute:
Winning the business. Influencer marketing campaigns won’t just arrive at your door. Like any new business, your team will have to market, research, and pitch.
Research and strategy. With your campaign given the green light, you’ll have to define your objectives, consider targeting and segmentation, and work on any creative messaging you want to include. When those pieces are in place, you’ll need to produce a full, detailed, and clear brief for your chosen influencers to follow.
Influencer identification, outreach, recruitment, and briefing. First, you’ll need to search and shortlist influencers that match your chosen criteria. You’ll then need to send personalised DMs to each, wait for their replies, and keep track of all comms in a place your wider team can access them. Influencers may talk to you themselves, or they may direct you to their management. They’ll want to see a brief before they agree to anything. They may come back with questions on the brief. And only when all of these pieces are in place can you move onto the next step.
Contract negotiation, fees, and compliance. Can you reach an agreement on the payments involved? How quickly and accurately can you produce a comprehensive contract detailing fees, delivery timelines, required work, compliance obligations, and future content licensing rights?
Shipping logistics. Next, you’ll need to get your product to your influencer so they can begin creating their post. Address collection is a dull but necessary first step. You’ll also need to coordinate timings to ensure your influencers are home to receive any scheduled deliveries. If they’re not in, have you made sure they can travel to any suitable pick-up location? Additionally, tracking deliveries is crucial, as some influencers might claim not to have received the product even after it has been sent out.
Feedback and content approval. As influencers begin to submit first drafts, each needs carefully reviewing. This may involve sharing it with other colleagues inside your agency. You’ll then need to provide detailed feedback. When you’re eventually happy with the post, you’ll need to formally approve it and provide a posting time and date for your influencer to follow.
Payments. You’ll need to collect bank details and an invoice from each influencer. As a security check, you should also ask for proof of their details. Next, it’s time to arrange each individual bank transfer and email each influencer to confirm payment has been processed.
Analytics and reporting. For each piece of posted content, you should gather, organise, and report as much data as possible. This can include: sentiment, likes, comments, views, impressions, and reach. You may need to liaise with each individual influencer to collect some of this data. You’ll need to present your findings to your client in a way that makes sense to them.
Creating case studies to win new business. If your influencer marketing campaign has proven a success, you should act quickly to secure a case study with your client. This will help to make it easier to win your next piece of business and continue your agency’s growth.
The challenges of scaling influencer marketing in agencies
Scaling influencer marketing in your agency is an exciting way to power your business’s growth. There are, however, several considerations that will need to be tackled.
Building a scalable team structure
Broadly, there are three possible ways to structure your delivery team for an influencer marketing service.
You could opt to delegate all responsibility onto a single person. This could be someone already working within your agency, such as your social media manager, or – if you’ve got the business to justify it – you could recruit specifically for this new role. However, this risks all knowledge and expertise being held by a single person. If they leave, you could be vulnerable. It also hugely increases your risk of an internal bottleneck, particularly if your chosen person is juggling the demands of influencer marketing campaigns with their existing workload.
The next option is to build a team of people who all contribute to your influencer marketing service. This prevents knowledge from being siloed in a single person, but it means you’ll have to develop robust internal systems, processes, and collaboration tools to ensure everyone on the team knows exactly what stage any campaign is at. As with the single person approach, this is also likely to be reliant on an entirely manual delivery method: every task is done by an individual, making it time-consuming and laborious.
The final option, and the one we would always recommend, is to combine a team of people with specific influencer marketing technologies and platforms. An influencer marketing platform can bring automation and efficiency to your influencer marketing campaigns, especially around influencer identification, outreach, contract management, and reporting. They also provide a single source of truth; streamline workflows; and make it easier to collaborate and manage multiple campaigns at once.
Efficiently identifying and vetting influencers for client campaigns
For each new campaign, imagine the amount of man hours required to trawl through social media accounts and hashtags, desperately trying to identify and then shortlist potential influencers you’d like to work with.
Beyond simply looking at follower numbers, it’s difficult to know which influencers to work with. You might not even be able to accurately tell if the account is real, or just powered by AI.
There are several risks at play: you could hire misaligned influencers, whose audience, style or values don’t match with your client’s brand, or you could fall victim to low engagement, because you mistakenly believe a high follower account is the most important metric by which to judge an influencer.
Your selection process should include a detailed engagement analysis, brand alignment checks, comprehensive account reviews that look beyond follower numbers, and in-depth vetting, such as determining if the influencer has a Stripe account that can verify their authenticity and confirm payment security for anti-money laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC).
However, if you attempt to do all of this identification manually, you’re risking a potential bottleneck before your campaign has even started. This is another area where technology is key to scaling.
Structuring and negotiating contracts to protect agency and client interests
A good contract protects your agency, your clients, and the influencers you work with. To help with scaling, you should invest in specialist advice to build a standard contract template on which all your agreements will be based.
Your contract should have clear sections outlining the responsibilities for both your agency and your chosen influencers. These include deliverables, timelines, fees, payment terms, briefing and approval processes, compliance with advertising regulations, the disclosure of any conflicts of interest, and ongoing licence ownership.
Valuing influencer relationships and effectively costing influencer services
Developing standardised pricing systems for influencer engagements is incredibly challenging. It requires years of experience running campaigns, assessing results against a series of metrics, and organising all the subsequent data into a clear pricing matrix that can be used for future campaigns.
Without this system in place, or an influencer marketing platform that can do all of this automatically, you can only ever operate on an ‘educated guess’ basis. This means that you are constantly risking inefficient campaign spend by overvaluing an influencer and overestimating the results they can deliver.
Some of the things to take into consideration when valuing an influencer include follower counts, follower-to-accounts-followed ratios, average likes, average comments, overall engagement rates, posting frequencies, and anomalous posts that could wrongly skew the data.
Creating and managing compliant content that resonates with target audiences
Ensuring your briefs and influencer content resonates with your target audience requires a significant piece of research. As with any marketing campaign, you’ll need to know your audience’s problems, desires, dream state, values, and emotional state. This is another lengthy task.
Beyond that, though, come a range of legal considerations. Influencer marketing is specifically regulated under the UK’s Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (CPR). It states that influencers must disclose that a brand has paid for their content either through direct fees, product gifts, product loans, or commission schemes.
CPR also states that influencers must not present themselves as average consumers. They must show clearly that they are being commissioned to produce each particular piece of content that carries a brand association.
Your team should also invest time in understanding the nuances of the influencer marketing guidance issued by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), and should monitor both the progress and detail of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act 2024.
Streamlining campaign execution and agency workflow management
Influencer marketing campaigns are complex affairs. Different parts of the process can often result in different pieces of software being used, or important information being siloed from other relevant details.
Think of the work involved for a single influencer marketing campaign. Now imagine trying to scale that manually across 10 different brands each running campaigns on five different products. Things can soon spiral out of control, and this is a major challenge for agencies looking to scale their influencer marketing service.
Implementing standardised workflows and templates is one of the most effective ways of minimising the time each campaign demands. Start by mapping your end-to-end process, then look for every opportunity to create templates, checklists, and anything else that can be created once and used repeatedly for each campaign you manage.
Templates for outreach, contracts, and briefs are obvious places to start. But there are many more opportunities, too.
Tracking, measuring, and reporting campaign performance to clients
Manually tracking, measuring, and reporting campaign performance is a tangled web of influencer outreach, vulnerability to fraud, and data collation and organisation. Once you’ve done all that, you’ve also got to find a way to present your campaign performance analysis in a way your clients will understand and appreciate.
In short, it’s a challenging task. But it’s also essential, especially if you hope to win more influencer marketing business.
The only reliable way to track, measure, and report campaign performance is by enlisting a paid tool or specialist influencer marketing platform. Without one of those two options, you’ll be relying on influencers sending you authentic screenshots of their account analytics. And that means you can never be 100% sure that the data you’re receiving is completely accurate.
Our recommendation is that you look for tools that provide insight at both an influencer and campaign level. Obvious metrics such as likes and comments are clearly important, but other details are also critical to understanding the full picture. Ideally, you’d want to know post reach, CPM, engagement rates, campaign reach, and average costs per creator.
Training and upskilling your team for influencer marketing expertise
Like every other service your agency offers, you should set aside a budget for ongoing training and development of your internal team. Without this, your ability to scale will be hampered by a static knowledge that doesn’t grow and develop as influencer marketing changes over the coming years.
Now’s the time to scale up influencer marketing services
Eighty percent of surveyed agencies expect influencer marketing budgets will rise in 2024. And 81% of consumers say influencer marketing drove their interest in an item during 2023. They’re just two reasons why launching an influencer marketing service is a huge opportunity for organised marketing and PR agencies that work closely with consumer brands.
Scaling that service is also possible, especially if you work with dedicated influencer marketing platforms like Sway Me Good. If you do things 100% manually, a typical £10,000 campaign involving 10 influencers each producing a unique piece of content, demands 48 hours of work over five weeks to manage and complete. If you use Sway Me Good, you can cut those hours by an estimated 75%; it could easily be more.
Getting on board with influencer marketing gives you the chance to develop your agency’s reputation, revenue, profitability, and growth. It’s time to take your chance and get ahead of the pack.
What should I do to start the process?
For more great information about influencer marketing, download our ebook Breaking Through The Ceiling: How Agencies Can Scale Influencer Marketing Services.
Then contact the expert team at Sway Me Good. We’ll be happy to help and advise on how your agency can best develop and scale its influencer marketing service
