5 Advantages of Working With an Influencer Marketing Agency [instead of going in-house]
Just like the once-new idea of reality television that came before it, influencer marketing is here to stay. What some imagined might be a fleeting trend has grown to become one of the most creative, impactful, profitable—and yes, measurable—channels in performance marketing.
According to eMarketer forecasts:
- The share of US companies using influencer marketing will climb to nearly 68% in 2021, and 72.5% in 2022
- Influencer marketing spend in the US will grow by nearly 34% in 2021, and is expected to surpass $4B in 2022
But creating, executing, and measuring an influencer marketing strategy can be a lot of work — especially for smaller teams or businesses. If you find yourself scrambling to keep up with influencer marketing (or aren’t sure where to even start), working with an experienced influencer agency like Tinuiti can help take the nitty-gritty of influencer marketing off your plate.
One thing to note before we dive in is the ongoing, adapting shift in social media culture and engagement – specifically for advertisers. Thanks to advances in the technical capabilities of click-through commerce, coupled with its increasing adoption by shoppers, today we are able to much more accurately measure influencer marketing’s impact not just on awareness, but across all stages of the funnel, top-to-bottom.
“The industry is changing—we are seeing more marketers and brands expect to understand how their investment in Influencers impacts their bottom line. No longer can we rely on vanity metrics to tell the story of success in Influencer Marketing; we need to hold ourselves accountable and have the infrastructure in place to track through to more impactful metrics like conversions.”
— Crystal Duncan, SVP of Influencer Marketing at Tinuiti
Here are five reasons to hire an influencer marketing agency to manage and grow your campaigns:
- Save time (and money)
- Leverage their expertise and relationships
- Find the right platforms
- Access to consistent reporting
- Amplification of the right content
1. Save time
Done in-house, influencer marketing requires a lot of time and resources, and as we all know, time = money. The influencer marketing process usually involves:
- Determining goals and KPIs and crafting a smart strategy
- Tracking down, reaching out to, and vetting influencers
- Negotiating, contracting and payment
- Briefing Influencers
- Sending them the product
- Coordinating and reviewing content
- Monitoring content
- Measuring content success
- Maximizing investments by distributing content across other owned and paid channels
If you have the resources and time to build out an influencer marketing team, you may be able to scale your influencer marketing strategy internally — but most companies don’t have that option.
Working with an agency can be a more cost-effective, less time-consuming way to build and execute your influencer marketing strategy. An experienced agency can help you set up a strategy and align on campaign goals, find and vet influencers for you, and do the hands-on work of building a campaign and working with each influencer. An agency provides ongoing campaign support and takes a lot of the guesswork out of the influencer marketing process.
2. Leverage their expertise and relationships
Influencer marketing agencies eat, sleep, and breathe influencer marketing 24/7. While influencer capabilities and reach extend beyond social media, that is still where the majority of people consume influencer content. And it’s a very busy place. Social media evolves more quickly than any other platform; you can rely on your agency to stay on top of algorithm changes, new social media tools, and updates in commerce abilities within our favorite social platforms, so you don’t have to.
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Working with an agency also allows you to tap into their expertise in the space; these folks (like Tinuiti!) work with thousands of Influencers a year, so if you’re looking for the best Vegan micro-Influencer who lives in Dallas and has 2 kids and a dog, your agency has probably worked with them in the past! They serve as an extension of the brand and can take the manual work out of searching and vetting, due to the fact they are so immersed in the space daily.
Additionally, because they spend most of their days talking to agents, they will most likely be able to get you the best deal for your programming. Because they buy Influencers and talent so frequently, they often are the most experienced at negotiations, know how to work with agents to get the best rate, and sometimes get deals because they are able to purchase in bulk across several campaigns.
3. Find the right platforms
Agencies know which audiences respond to which types of influencers, campaigns, and social media channels. An agency can help you bring your campaigns to life by pairing the right creative with the right campaigns — and posting on the right platforms.
For example, Facebook is typically a stronger option than TikTok for brands aiming to reach a middle-aged audience, as it is one of the most popularly used platforms for that demographic. If you wanted to sell to a Gen Z audience, on the other hand, TikTok might be your best bet.
The goal of influencer marketing is to organically get your product and brand in front of your target audience; to do that, you need to show up on the platforms where they spend the most time.
4. Access consistent reporting
An experienced influencer agency knows what makes an influencer marketing campaign successful—results. Agencies like Tinuiti can monitor each post and share reporting with you, so you don’t have to refresh the ‘like’ count on every post over and over, trying to determine your true reach and how your brand is being received. Most importantly, they can offer expert insight into how effectively each campaign is working toward reaching your business goals, and which adjustments might offer a better return.
Tinuiti approaches influencer marketing as a full-funnel tactic, which means that influencer content born from partnerships we help facilitate and manage is designed to reach brands’ KPIs at every stage of the customer journey, from “What’s this?” to “Bought that!”
We are able to look at Influencer content through both an organic and paid lens. Understanding what Influencer is driving our KPIs organically is important, as those would be the Influencers to tap for future campaigns. Additionally, being able to understand what pieces of content are converting via paid gives us more direction on what to create in the future.
Influencer content allows quick and nimble testing of paid assets; you can have Influencers highlight different aspects of products (pricing, quality, shipping, etc.) within their content and see what resonates most in the paid environment.
5. Amplify the right content in the right locations to turn engagement into revenue
Amplification drives more engagement — and turns engagement into revenue.
Here’s how Tinuiti amplifies content for our influencer marketing clients:
1. During contracting, Tinuiti will negotiate usage rights with our Influencer partners, so once we get to the amplification phase, we can move quickly.
2. Identify top-performing organic posts and influencers.
3. Boost the top-performing posts using the influencer’s handle. To do this, we connect the influencer’s post with the best-performing audiences within a brand’s ad account. Then, we create custom and lookalike audiences from the influencer’s most engaged followers. Finally, we add a CTA button and update the copy on the post as needed.
- Something to note: Paid Social is the more natural place to boost or amplify Influencer content, but it’s not the only place. When working with an agency (like Tinuiti) you can uncover other places (both paid + owned) where Influencer content can be amplified. From owned websites or social media, to Programmatic, OTT or Out of Home, Influencer content can really travel anywhere your traditional branded content lives
4. Based on the results, we test, iterate, and measure the impact of each campaign on a client’s bottom line.
While each agency has its own process for amplifying top-performing content, the goal is always to turn those impressions and engagements into revenue. Working with an agency can help increase your ROI for influencer marketing — and see results faster.
Tinuiti Influencer Marketing Services
As a performance marketing firm, Tinuiti experts within every division understand the importance of bottom-funnel activation. Influencer marketing has its roots in top-funnel awareness tactics—and to be certain, is still among the strongest channels in that vein—but the end goal of almost every campaign comes down to real dollars and cents. And the increasing array of shoppable influencer options, including on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, is helping us to measure which specific content is driving the highest conversions.
When you partner with Tinuiti as your influencer marketing agency, some of the strengths and differentiators we bring to the table include:
- Our team is led by an influencer marketing expert with 15+ years of experience in the space, and collectively has extensive experience across all major platforms
- We are talent-agnostic, working with influencers at every level to accomplish different goals at every stage of the funnel, from credible experts with a few thousand followers, to celebrity influencers who reach millions
- We are also platform-agnostic, giving your influencer content legs by working smarter. Our team ensures the highest quality, best-performing, most well-received influencer content reaches the maximum number of viewers—beyond the platform on which it was originally shared—through strategic cross-channel distribution
- We’re strong believers in offering the ‘total package.’ Our experienced team and the insights, connections, and capabilities they bring is our greatest strength, but we also have the advanced tech necessary to help them research, vet, contract, measure, and optimize
- Because Tinuiti is a full-service digital agency, the larger team can also advise and execute on the amplification piece of Influencer programming. Instead of working with multiple agencies to run this integrated programming, Tinuiti has experts to help save time and money, by leveraging this all in one place
Want to learn more about our influencer management services? Reach out today to chat with an expert!
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published by Tara Johnson in January 2020 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.
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