Hire an experienced influencer marketing agency to run your digital ad campaigns
If you’re considering engaging in influencer marketing for your brand, you may be wondering if hiring an influencer marketing agency is really worth it. After all, you know the ins and outs of your brand the best, right? If you’re on the fence about involving an influencer marketing agency, there are definitely some benefits you can’t overlook when making your decision to work with influencers.
Building Relationships with Influencers
Finding the right influencer or influencers is often considered the biggest challenge of embarking on your influencer marketing journey. A lot rides on choosing the right influencer, because essentially your entire marketing campaign hinges on reaching the right audience for the job by means of, you guessed it: the right influencer. You can have the best content that puts all the best aspects of your brand in the spotlight, but it literally means nothing if it’s not reaching the right audience, which is oftentimes a niche within a niche!
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If you are just getting started with influencer marketing for your brand and want to do it without the help of an influencer marketing agency, you’ll have to do hours of research to come up with some prime influencer candidates. As with many things in life, the less experienced you are with the process, the more time-consuming and resource-intensive finding the right influencer or influencers can be. That being said, this is really only the first step of many.
Many brands looking to get into influencer marketing often underestimate the amount of time they need to dedicate to influencer relations. Reaching out to influencers can be an involved task and preparation can take a lot of time. Consider the following steps that most people go through to get in touch with (and stay in touch with) influencers in their niche or industry for a typical ad campaign:
- Cast a wide net to contact influencers in your niche or industry
You’ll likely need to reach out to quite a few influencers, bloggers, or journalists in your niche or industry to even get the ball rolling. - Keep an open line of communication with responsive influencers
The fact is that not everyone you reach out to will respond, meaning that what was once a large pool of prospective influencers will thin out considerably. While some influencers will want to jump straight to business, others will want to get a feel for you and your brand to see if they’re interested in working with you. - Get down to the nitty-gritty negotiations
Once you and an influencer (or influencers) decide you’d like to work together, it’s time to talk business. This is the point where you’ll work out details with respect to compensation, expectations, and other important matters. - Convey your brand’s message
Succinctly communicating your brand’s message for the influencer to represent in their content is essential. Let’s be honest: you probably have a lot to say about your brand. But that fact is that if you’re too verbose, an influencer may get lost in the details. If you’re too vague, an influencer might not understand your brand enough to accurately represent it to the masses. - Give feedback during the content creation process
You may even be called on to participate in an involved back-and-forth exchange during the content creation process. The influencer may need your feedback to make sure their representation of your brand stays on-message. - Communicating with the influencer during the campaign
You shouldn’t go silent once your campaign goes live. Many people assume influencers are just too busy to give them the time of day, but the fact is that if an influencer has made the decision to go to bat for your brand, positive feedback and communication are key in forging a lasting mutually-beneficial relationship.
This doesn’t even include maintaining a relationship with influencers after your campaign is over with. The fact is, influencer marketing is all about building and leveraging relationships. If you want access to an influencer’s audience and the relationship they have with their following, you’ve got to put your cards on the table too and develop a relationship with that influencer. Part of that relationship is continued communication after ad campaigns and can include following their social media accounts, blogs, or website. At the end of the day, reciprocal relationships in influencer marketing yield high returns!
An experienced influencer marketing agency knows how to cut to the chase. They’ve been around the block a few times, which means they know the best and most efficient way to go about finding and communicating with the right influencers for your brand’s ad campaign. In fact, any reputable influencer marketing agency will already have contacts in the influencer world, meaning established relationships you’ll instantly gain access to the second you decide to partner with that agency. Working with an experienced influencer marketing agency cuts out the bulk of the work in building and maintaining relationships with influencers, which brings us to our next point.
Saving Time and Money
In the words of a popular quote by a certain J.R. Rim, “Many people make the mistake of saving money by wasting time.” That’s right, if it hasn’t become painfully obvious to you yet, working with an influencer marketing agency will save you quite a bit of time. Building and maintaining relationships is no small feat, but it’s one of the cornerstones of influencer marketing. Hiring an established influencer marketing agency takes all that tedious work off your hands.
With the established relationships any worthwhile influencer marketing agency is bound to have, you may also be able to cash in on extra savings. By leveraging these existing relationships with influencers they’ve worked with in the past, influencer marketing agencies may be able to get you reduced rates or fees associated with working with a particular influencer. By partnering with an influencer marketing agency, your brand can not only capitalize on the relationship an influencer has with their audience, but you can also get great deals by getting the most out of an agency’s relationship with those same influencers!
Returning to the time factor: a full-service influencer marketing solution is an all-in-one service that saves you time by taking charge of every step of the influencer marketing process, from start to finish. Instead of outsourcing different aspects of your advertising campaign to different teams, only an experienced influencer marketing agency that boasts a full-service package can save you additional time (and money) by eliminating the inefficiencies resulting from teams not being on the same page. Worse yet, multiple teams can sometimes have overlapping responsibilities, meaning you’re paying even more for the same work and often running around in circles.
We could go on and on about the time-saving, and therefore money-saving benefits of teaming up with an experienced influencer marketing agency. It’s one of the biggest advantages of working with an influencer marketing agency that really knows what they’re doing. Rest assured that almost every point mentioned from here on out is likely also a time-saver!
Experience Working with Influencers
As they say, experience is the teacher of all things. Only an experienced influencer marketing agency can get you the most out of your partnership with influencers. After working with countless influencers, an influencer marketing agency is privy to specialized knowledge in how to smoothly run the show like a well-oiled machine. They’ll ask the questions you wouldn’t necessarily think of and put the necessary framework in place to ensure a successful advertising campaign.
The wealth of experience an established influencer marketing agency has isn’t just a wellspring of lessons and knowledge from past campaigns, but rather an ongoing, active process. Experienced marketing teams specialized in influencer marketing will keep their finger on the pulse of trends in varying industries and niches across platforms. The internet is constantly in flux and each niche has its own ebbs and flows. By having pre-established relationships with influencers that they are constantly cultivating, as well as experience in a variety of niches and industries, a seasoned influencer marketing agency will naturally know how to best manage your ad campaign to yield maximum results.
Robust Analytics
You’re going to want feedback on your influencer marketing campaigns, and not just after it’s all said and done with. Campaign analytics are an essential part to any marketing strategy, but it should involve monitoring and data collection even before you hit the post-campaign analysis stage. It’s a lot of work that not everyone is cut out for, and as the ambassador of your brand, your time could be better spent elsewhere. When it comes to monitoring the progress of your influencer marketing campaign, leave the heavy lifting to the pros.
An experienced influencer marketing agency will collect and analyze data on your campaign from start to finish, which will provide useful information that can be used going forward on other influencer campaigns. This also allows for responsive influencer marketing while a campaign is ongoing. If an ad campaign is found to be underperforming, an influencer marketing agency, backed with detailed data and intuition that only comes from experience, will be able to not only figure out what’s wrong, but perhaps even tweak the campaign to boost performance. On the other hand, if something is working really well in another campaign for your brand, an experienced influencer marketing agency can pinpoint exactly what that “something” is because they have the data to back it up. All of this will enable you to create and run the optimal influencer marketing campaign. At the end of the day, detailed analytics is the backbone of any successful advertising campaign, whether it be ongoing or upcoming!
Multifaceted Approach
Everyone seems to have their own ideas about when influencer marketing as we know it came into existence. The rise of what we now consider to be “influencers” began some time during the social media boom between 2010 and now. Whereas influencers of the past were celebrities and sports stars, modern-day influencers are more likely to be regular people who gained fame and traction on the internet, usually through social media. This means these influencers we often turn to nowadays for product and brand recommendations are far more accessible than ever before, which ultimately makes influencer marketing possible.
Some more experienced influencer marketing agencies will likely have had their beginnings as online or digital marketing agencies that changed with the times and alongside the emergence of modern-day influencers. Influencer marketing isn’t an isolated phenomenon; it borrows principles and techniques from other marketing practices. While any experienced influencer marketing agency should have at least a cursory understanding of these commonalities, only an online marketing agency that has experience and know-how in other areas of online marketing in today’s digital age will have that extra edge. Without understanding these overlapping techniques and principles, the influencer marketing agency you choose to work with isn’t getting the full picture, and may be missing the mark.
Take for instance SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO has been a driving principle behind online marketing since the 90’s, though optimizing your search rankings is a far cry from where it was back then! While it’s true that influencer marketing can do wonders for your SEO strategy on its own, only an experienced influencer marketing agency will make sure your influencer ad campaign will take full advantage of its SEO potential by prioritizing high-authority backlinks, optimized keywords and hashtags, among other key factors.
An influencer marketing tactic that many brands fail to engage in is using content an influencer has created for their brand in other advertising campaigns. Not only can an experienced influencer marketing agency connect you with the best influencers in your industry or niche to jump-start the creation of this content, they can give you guidance on how to incorporate that engaging content into your overarching marketing strategy across advertising campaigns. Not all influencer marketing agencies are created equal, and your influencer marketing campaign should take full advantage of a multifaceted approach headed by a knowledgeable marketing team.
The Experience Advertising Edge
If you’re looking for an experienced influencer marketing agency to run your ad campaigns, you’ve come to the right place! Experience Advertising is an established online marketing agency that specializes in influencer marketing and offers full-service influencer marketing solutions. We have over a decade of experience in digital marketing and have been around since the inception of influencer marketing, which means we have long-standing relationships with many influencers, bloggers, and journalists across a wide array of industries and platforms who we’d love to connect you with. Together with our extensive influencer database and wealth of online marketing knowledge, we can help propel your brand into the limelight. Reach out to us today for a free evaluation!
