Influencer Marketing — Do I Go Managed or Self-Serve?
Now that you have a better idea of how much Influencer Marketing costs, let’s dig in deeper to talk Self-Serve or Managed Services. Your budget will help dictate which you choose. Here’s a quick breakdown of the two:
For starters, Managed Services tend to be a little more expensive, offering more amenities for those looking to run a high volume of campaigns, while Self-Serve Services tend to be more cost effective and to the point or for those looking to test the waters with one-off campaigns. Let’s further understand the differences and benefits of the two:
Managed Services: A complete end-to-end service and solution for your influencer marketing strategy. A company will act as an extension of your team, building out and executing a strategy pertinent to your goals. Services will include recruitment, daily communication with influencers, review of all content, payment servicing, and reporting. The company may or may not use an in-house technology to complete these services.
Self-Serve: A hands-on approach to strategy and execution. Self-serve tends to require persons willing to specifically devote hours to the campaign. You are provided with a technology to aid in recruitment, management, and analytics. Some tools will also have influencer communities within which you can tap into for influencer connections. Minimal to more enhanced services for technical or managed support may be available.
Let’s break down the advantages to each of these strategies:
Managed Services:
- Provide you an additional resource (or more)
Managing campaigns with influencers will require multiple touch points and human elements which even the best technology cannot replace. A campaign manager will still need to forge relationships with influencers creating or sharing content, review content created, and answer campaign related questions. Hours of your team’s time will be saved, as an expert in the field will handle this work. - Give you an edge
Companies offering managed services with well-defined communities and established influencer practices may have on-going relationships and access to influencers not normally available. These companies may also be in-tune with unique and innovative strategies as they crowdsource information and ideas from potentially hundreds of campaigns, running across clients, verticals, and social channels. - Mitigate risk
Experts in influencer marketing are keeping up-to-date with FTC compliance regulations, do’s & don’ts of the trade, and best practices in genuine relationship building. This extension of your team has probably seen the good, bad and ugly of influencer marketing and can ensure you maneuver through your campaign and solve problems easily.
Self-Serve Platforms:
- Provide you cost-efficiency and scalability
If you have or plan to build an established influencer practice in-house with experts in the field, an influencer platform will allow you to efficiently scale the number of campaigns you may execute as you tap into a community and recruitment, management, and reporting tool. - Give you complete control and transparency
As you execute the full campaign end to end, you will have total control over the process and transparency with every selection, communication, and report. - Mitigate delays due to multiple parties
With you in the driver seat, direct access and communication with influencers happens instantly as there is no back and forth with a middle-man, allowing you to be nimble in your campaign.
What to choose? — Why have one when you can have both!
There are clear benefits to both approaches. The most sophisticated and experienced influencer marketing partners actually offer their clients both managed services and self-serve platforms to allow them to allocate budgets wisely. This allows a brand or agency launching a more intricate campaign with additional budget to outsource to a managed services team, while smaller budgets and campaigns can make good use a self-serve model.
Many thanks to Samone Wheeler for her contributions to this article.
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