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Looking to scale your influencer program? This blog will help you with that crucial decision: agency or influencer platform.
You’ve had success using influencers, but you no longer have the internal resources available to scale your program. Generally speaking, there are three options to help solve this problem:
This blog will explore each of these options while considering key aspects of your influencer campaign. This includes access to top influencer talent, selecting the right influencers for your brand, management and resources, reporting, expertise, and costs.
Your creative brief is only as good as the influencers you pitch it to. If it ends up in the hands of the wrong influencer, authenticity will be lost and your investment will be at risk.
Most influencer platforms operate on an “opt-in” basis. This means you’ll only have access to influencers registered on that platform. While these influencers have been vetted, the mechanics are limiting. Naturally, platforms will have a selective bias toward their own influencers. This narrows the influencer pool available to you and introduces a compromise into your creative brief from the start.
In contrast, while agencies will have a data set on the influencers they’ve collaborated with, they don’t put a number on their network. They operate with the mantra of brief first, talent second. With no limit on influencer availability, if needed, agencies can access creators of all shapes and sizes to ensure your brief reaches the influencer it deserves.
Finding an influencer agency that leverages tools with built-in discovery features will help streamline this process of discovering influencers outside of an existing network. This provides a perfect blend of the agency’s preexisting influencer knowledge and the efficient discovery of new talent.
When it comes to your campaign, agencies have extensive experience identifying, researching, and selecting influencers. This takes into account both quantitative data (reach, engagement, audience insight) and qualitative data (content quality, resonance, and relevance). Adding to this mix, agencies can also leverage their in-depth performance data from past campaigns.
Platforms can perform a similar function when it comes to quantitative and performance data, however, this can be limited and lacks nuance. Again, all data points are limited to the influencers on the platform itself. Added to this, you’ll simply be presented with a set of quantitative data points without additional information about what the numbers mean and why they’re relevant to your brand. Agencies can bridge this gap by sharing customized insights and knowledge.
Platforms also rely too heavily on quantitative data rather than qualitative data. Platforms don’t tell you anything about creative considerations like content quality. Since content is a critical factor determining the success of your influencer campaign, an agency will be able to leverage its expertise to separate the good from the bad, ensuring that all influencer-generated content is high-quality and on-brand.
You don’t have the resources to manage a large-scale influencer campaign in-house without help. An influencer platform can be a solution to bridge the gap before you hire an agency. With a pre-designed workflow that runs from influencer selection to reporting and results presentation, an influencer platform can streamline and simplify these processes. This will help maximize team efficiency and capacity.
The perceived efficiencies of influencer platforms generally have a limit; remember that a self-service platform will always require significant internal resources to manage your campaigns. This is particularly true when you deal with more than a handful of influencers on an ongoing basis. You won’t save significant internal team resources this way, but you’ll be more efficient in your delivery.
Despite platforms’ best efforts to semi-automate workflows, influencer marketing ultimately relies on human interaction and relationships. Communicating with influencers, who all have individual needs, will remain a significant responsibility for you. As your campaign scales, a lack of experience communicating, informing, negotiating, and hiring influencers can quickly cause your workloads and costs to spiral out of control.
Many self-service platforms offer a managed service to help alleviate this workload. This helps clarify the type of expertise required to scale your program while maintaining the required quality due to the hands-off nature of the services.
By using an agency, you eliminate the burden of learning, strategizing, coordinating, and managing your influencer campaign. Better yet, by using an agency that leverages the best tools to assist with campaign management, you’ll maintain all the platform’s benefits of a streamlined workflow.
In general, platforms will help you scale internally, to a certain extent. However, if you want your investment to go further, you’ll need the help of an agency to manage influencer relationships at scale, negotiate the lowest rates, and ensure quality.
With any influencer campaign, data is king. As reporting and data points become more robust, it’s critical that you have complete visibility into your campaigns’ performance.
Most of the time, platforms will sync with the influencer’s account and automatically aggregate all important campaign data (e.g., reach, impressions, and engagement). This avoids the tedious task of requesting screenshots from influencers for effective reporting—a common pain point for agencies. Screenshots not only require manual data entry (which increases the likelihood of human error), but they also transfer ownership of the reports to the influencer. This situation is far from ideal.
With this in mind, if you want accurate data with minimal effort, a platform is a clear winner. However, if you want data combined with knowledge and expertise, partnering with an agency that leverages technology presents a win-win situation. Not only will the reports be accurate and efficient, but the agency will also be able to break down the data and offer insights so you can truly understand the true impact of your campaign.
By leveraging their experience, influencer agencies can offer a more robust service that can be tailored to meet your specific objectives. This expertise covers all aspects of your influencer marketing campaign, from influencers to content and messaging.
Additionally, agencies are trained to stay informed about the FTC’s ever-changing rules and regulations for sponsored content. This will ensure your brand doesn’t receive unwanted negative press.
In contrast, with self-service platforms, the responsibility remains with you to drive your influencer campaign. With this in mind, if you don’t have qualified in-house expertise, your campaigns will be subject to repeated learning curves. Even with a managed service, in-depth expertise is secondary to basic administrative functions. In an increasingly competitive influencer landscape, this lack of relevant information has the potential to negatively impact your campaign’s performance.
At first glance, platforms may seem like a more cost-effective option. With self-service platforms, you’ll typically pay a fixed annual or monthly fee (e.g., a fixed fee of $1,499 USD per year / Whaler 2019). In addition to this, you’ll also have to account for influencer spending.
However, when you dig a little deeper, additional costs can add up. Most platforms charge an initial setup fee and then take a percentage of the influencer’s spend (e.g., 5% of influencer spend / Whaler 2019). Additionally, many platforms set their influencer fees, leaving little room for negotiation. When you factor in the resources required to manage the platform itself, the end result can start to look less attractive.
If you choose to opt for a managed service through a platform, this will typically involve additional management fees (e.g., 20% for Whalar). However, this fee typically covers basic management with a basic level of expertise and strategy.
By working with an agency, you’ll receive a customized quote based on the precise details of a campaign. Additionally, agencies can reduce the cost of their influencer engagement by negotiating with influencers due to their strong pre-existing relationships.
When deciding to scale your influencer work, it’s worth considering all of the above costs, ranging from required resources, influencer costs, and service fees.
If you want to scale your influencer program to 100, it’s clear that some form of technology is a prerequisite. This may naturally lead you to an influencer platform. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that the platforms themselves are limited.
Most of the time, their influencer selection process relies on natural bias, and their data analysis places a heavy emphasis on quantitative measures. All of this is done to the detriment of any meaningful experience or knowledge, leaving the responsibility for implementing and driving your program on you.
At Influeto, we leverage all the best technology on the market to select the best parts of the platforms. We then combine this with experienced hands and a creative eye to enable you to scale your influencer work with precision and quality.
