10 Ways Influencer Marketing Network Partnerships Save You Money
Looking to know if Influencer Marketing Network partnerships are right for your agency or brand? At the end of the day, it all comes down to money. So, let’s go green and start talking how Influencer Marketing Network partnerships can help you save big.
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The Hybrid Approach: Influencer Marketing Network Partnerships
Minimizing expenses and maximizing profit while driving a return on investment (ROI) on Influencer Marketing-related campaigns is a win-win for agencies and brands. But the transition is often not as easy as one would hope. Prematurely taking Influencer Marketing in house can lead to higher costs as teams learn to navigate what can initially be very choppy waters. They often go at it without training while doing more with less and balancing their new role with their current PR or marketing assignments. As a result, they end up spending more of their time researching, vetting, and following up with influencers and less time on strategy and ensuring quality campaigns. Can you relate?
What’s the answer to saving money on campaigns and exceeding your boss’ or client’s expectations? A hybrid approach where agencies and brands remain at the helm of their Influencer Marketing efforts while forming Influencer Marketing Network partnerships. This direction helps digital teams improve their bottom line while avoiding unenviable and time-wasting tasks such as the all too common (and dreaded) 63-message email threads (and that’s just with one influencer). We’ve all been there, right?
10 Ways Influencer Marketing Network Partnerships Save You Money
When you add up time spent on managing Influencer Marketing-related campaigns, you’ll find that outsourcing much of your to-do list saves you money. In short, Influencer Marketing Network partnerships can help your bottomline in the following 10 ways when they:
1. Offer strategic input.
The key to every good digital campaign starts with a solid foundation. The very best Influencer Marketing Network partners know this. They prove their value by strategizing with you at a campaign’s outset as well as serving as an important checks and balances throughout the campaign. When you take them up on their offer to lend a strategic hand, it can help ensure your plans will not only resonate with influencers and their followers before you enlist their help or market to them, but also will guarantee you hit your success measures.
2. Ensure your campaign activations are aligned with your objectives.
Whether you are new to the Influencer Marketing game or a seasoned pro, all marketing professionals have one thing in common. They aim to execute campaigns that produce results. By checking that campaign activations are in line with measurable objectives, Influencer Marketing Networks deliver results that drive specific calls to action. This gets you one step closer, if not directly to, sales.
Check out these 5 Critical Components in Creating Results-Driven Influencer Marketing Campaigns.
2. Allow you to increase capacity and offer more robust packages.
By acting as extensions of agencies and brand teams (whether in a public or a white labeled way), Influencer Marketing Networks help agencies and brands scale up or down as needed. This presents a larger team perception. The ability to meet client demands, even at the last minute, instills client confidence, achieves results, helps you score campaigns, and drives repeat business. Cha Ching!
3. Provide a process-oriented approach that saves you time.
Influencer Marketing Networks recognize that one of their huge value-adds is to take tasks off of their clients’ already very full plates. The very best networks have streamlined processes to make moving through the strategy, proposal, and contracting to the vetting, execution, and reporting phases seamless for all involved. You never have to worry about all that’s involved in campaign management, including but not limited to influencer management. Forming Influencer Marketing Network partnerships wit networks who embrace a process-oriented approach saves you time, thus saving you money. It also helps you breathe a huge sigh of relief knowing that all of your digital campaign i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.
Scroll down on this page to see our Forward Way, outlining our proven streamlined process.
5. Connect you with just the right target audience.
Influencer management tasks include researching, vetting, negotiating, contracting, communication, ensuring quality content, verifying FTC compliance and contractual obligations, paying, and preparing/sending tax information. Performing such tasks, even using leading edge technology platforms, can eat through budget faster than fast. Influencer Marketing Network’s sole focus on these types of tasks ensure you don’t blow through your budget.
Check out our 6 tips to building successful influencer partnerships.
Click here to learn more about our community, including a sampling of our influencers and the variety of niches we represent.
6. Assure quality, contractual, and FTC compliance.
The best Influencer Marketing Networks set up campaigns with processes in place to guarantee posts meet high quality standards, contractual obligations (including brand messages), FTC compliance, and social media terms and conditions. As long as quality assurance (QA) is a top priority and is handled with precision, it doesn’t matter whether a network follows an automated or a manual QA process or a hybrid (we follow a hybrid process with a mix of third-party tools and manual checks). The goal? Ensure quality and compliance, which helps avoid legal battles or fees down the road.
7. Make proving ROI with solid metrics quick and easy.
Campaign tracking and reporting is always a hot topic in the marketing industry. Unfortunately, the tasks associated with them can be arduous and time-consuming with ever-changing algorithms, privacy issues, and API availability. Influencer Marketing Networks that keep their finger on the pulse of tracking and reporting trends, subscribe to leading edge tools, and have processes in place to prove ROI make great partners. They often are willing to either educate you on said information (if you want to track and report on your own) or include tracking and reporting in their campaigns. As with other tasks, most networks embrace a “mi casa es su casa approach” and will allow you to white label their reports, saving your team time and money.
Discover 5 Reasons Why You Need Comprehensive Stats Reporting.
8. Meet custom campaign requests.
While Influencer Marketing Networks vary in company size, most of them are flexible and willing to meet specific campaign requests. For example, you may want a network partner to use your tools or meet your tracking/reporting requests. Or, perhaps you’d appreciate it if they reached out to your favorite influencers who aren’t subscribed members of their network. Or, maybe you need a last-minute turnaround. The best networks will view you as a partner and embrace a “we” versus “I” mentality. This flexible approach is just one more way they are an extension of your team, giving you both bandwidth and time savings which results in better ROI.
9. Keep their finger on the pulse of industry trends.
Fake followers. Impressions versus engagement. Data breaches. FTC Compliance. Artificial intelligence. These are just a handful of hot topics piquing brand’s curiosity. And that’s just this month. Topics change faster than you can search the internet. When you’re trying to juggle a variety of tasks, staying on top of the trends is important but also can be time-consuming. Because of their dedicated focus, Influencer Marketing Networks make it their business to be in the know on industry hot topics. As they propose programs and campaigns, they can share, based on their industry knowledge, whether something is in line with the trends, may pose a problem with a company’s terms and conditions, won’t jive well with new algorithms, or could be a miss altogether based on the PR pulse, etc.
Learn How to Avoid Fake Followers: The Top 10 Tips for Vetting Influencers.
10. Rely on Relationships to Ensure Real Numbers and Authentic, Quality Content.
Saving the best for last, Influencer Marketing Network partnerships not only save you money; they provide you with trusted resources on whom you can depend. These partners look for the win-win-win-win among you, a campaign’s participating influencers, third-party vendors, and themselves. They recognize that treating the relationship as a transaction doesn’t result in positive campaign results. Because of that, you can rely on their integrity. You can trust their numbers. If you have a campaign crises, even in the middle of the night, they will have your back. Quality content? It’s a given. FTC compliance? Of course. In short, your success is their success.
Should You Form Influencer Network Partnerships?
Trying to decide whether Influencer Marketing Network partnerships are right for you? This infographic quiz makes it quick and easy to decide.
Summary
After taking the infographic quiz, you determine that a hybrid approach to Influencer Marketing Network partnerships or outsourcing it completely is in your agency or brand’s best interest, look forward to saving time and money in one or more of the 10 above-listed ways.
What are your top tips for partnering with an Influencer Marketing Network?