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Is Influencer Relationship Management a Thing?
Yes, Influencer Relationship Management is a thing. It’s actually a very important thing that a lot of brands and marketers are missing out on.
One of the most important elements of influencer marketing is having an effective influencer relationship strategy. This concept is very similar to Customer Relationship Manager: What do you know about your influencers? How do you organize these pieces of information? How do you use relevant information to nurture beneficial relationships?
We are happy to announce our latest feature, the Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) tool that will help solve these problems. This flexible system, integrated with our many other software features, will allow brands to build strategic and long-term relationships with their influencers for better campaigns. Upfluence IRM will include:
- Cross-campaign dashboard view of all the influencers you have worked with or are working with
- Filter your influencers by campaign, list, emailing, location, and more.
- Bulk actions: select influencers to add them to an existing campaign or build a list for a new campaign, send them an email or add them to your analytics dashboard.
So, how can an Influencer Relationship Management help scale your influencer marketing strategies, exactly?
What is an IRM and why do you need it?
Influencer marketing has grown and expanded exponentially in the past few years. This means that brands are increasing their influencer marketing efforts on all fronts: More resources dedicated to influencers, more refined business practices, more time towards relationship nurturing, and more robust tools to scale their successes.
An IRM is the tool to tie it all together – so that brands and agencies can save time and resources while staying on top of organization, learning about influencer relationships, and growing their influencer marketing in ways that benefit them the most.
Here are vital elements of an effective IRM for any brands or agencies:
Keep track all of your influencers
Do you know how many influencers you’re working with? Do you know what campaigns they are in? Or which lists they are a part of? Although you don’t need to know all of this information off the top of your head (and you shouldn’t have to), you still need a system to store and organize them.
A lot of brands and agencies are tracking these pieces of information manually: Spreadsheets, influencer rosters, checklists, etc. At best, these systems are a simple way for bookkeeping, but at worst – they are messy, outdated, and insufficient.
In reality, influencers’ data are tied to large sets of insights – including vital information like social media sizes, locations, audience demographics, etc. These data points are dynamic and ever-changing, which means they need frequent and accurate updates – a necessity that manual bookkeeping doesn’t satisfy.
An ideal IRM system is automatic: As soon as you select an influencer for a campaign or list, all of their information – like email, social media handles, which lists they are in, location, and even personalized details like dog’s names or favorite colors – are automatically imported into your IRM. The Upfluence’s IRM tool was built based on this notion: An IRM that’s native to where you do everything else.
Prioritize relevant information
Although having a robust dataset is important, you will quickly see that not every single influencer detail is relevant to your campaign. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, you will require different pieces of information.
For example, when directly working with influencers, you are most interested in their emails, lists, campaigns, etc. Whereas when you’re running a report, it’s important to include information like social media platforms, audience sizes, audience demographics, etc. Prioritizing relevant information saves you time, effort, and headaches.
Each company is unique, and each campaign is different as well. This is why our IRM gives you the tool to prioritize and sort which information you value the most. You will be able to quickly see influencers sorted by Instagram following sizes, or their emails alphabetically sorted, or how much you offer to pay each for a campaign, whether you have worked with an influencer or not, etc.
Understand long-term relationships
We get it. In Upfluence’s data pool alone, there are almost 3 million influencers that you can search for, so it’s very easy and tempting to have a one-off engagement with an influencer and then move on to the next.
However, long-term partnership is where it’s at, and having an IRM encourages this.
We’ve all heard about “The Rule of 7”: It takes a person to see and/or hear an ad 7 times before they could form a meaningful engagement with the brand or product. Although you most likely don’t need to collaborate with an influencer all 7 times, in general, repeated messages are heard more clearly. Instead of reaching out to 300 influencers, why don’t you reach out to 100 influencers for 3 separate campaigns?
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- Long-term partnerships save time. You won’t have to introduce yourself over and over again. You already know which influencers perform the best for your brand, and they’re already familiar with your products.
- Long-term partnerships increase customers’ attention, trust, and engagement. Plus, it will also increase the influencers’ authenticity towards your brand (as compared to a one-time promotion.)
- Long-term partnerships save money in the long run. Most influencers offer a lower partnership fee for long-term relationships. On top of that, you’re saving your resources in finding new influencers.
Build a strategic relationship with influencers
At the end of the day, influencer marketing is still very much a people business. You can have all the information you want, but nothing moves along if you fail to facilitate connections.
Relationships begin with effective communications. This means utilizing all the data points you have on hand to turn into meaningful exchanges – who are you recurrent influencers? Who have you worked with only once? And who haven’t you worked with before?
Influencer outreach or follow up shouldn’t be a burden, but it tends to be without an efficient management and mailing tool. With and IRM integrated into your mailing system, you can quickly understand which groups of influencers need reaching out to, and do so with just a click.
As an agency, you contact hundreds of influencers for several brands. Why not capitalizing on the successful collaborations you did to introduce other brands of your portfolio to influencers? With the Upfluence IRM, keep track of all influencers cross-brands, cross-campaigns, cross-clients. Do you need to have only one client view: then sort and filter by campaign name, do you need to have a view by influencer size: then sort by size and see them all in one place.
Explore all the possibilities of influencer marketing through Upfluence’s new IRM system. This completes the entire influencer lifecycle from start to end: search for influencers, organize and manage influencers, run email outreach, manage your campaigns, and measure your performance.
