Thinking About Building Out an Influencer Marketing Team In-House?
Things to Consider, from Organizational Structure to Tools to Setting Up That Initial Strategy
Agency vs. In-House (or Both)
There are a lot of things to consider in deciding whether to work with an agency or build an influencer team in-house. There are some great efficiencies to working with an agency — assuming you’re working with an agency with a true depth of expertise, you have access to emerging strategies that are working for other brands, agency relationships with select influencers, as well as a (well-trained) team to really flex with your needs (big holiday push, major influencer events, etc!) without your needing to bring on additional hires. Some brands like to rely on an agency as they may already be handling social, paid media and PR for them. Moreover, many brands may just not have the headcount to ever truly bring this function in-house.
The brands that decide to bring it in-house usually feel that they have already developed an initial strategy around influencers, want to build more direct relationships with these influencers, and perhaps see influencers to be core enough to their marketing mix that they want to start building their own proprietary strategies rather than to share intel via agencies. We do see many emerging direct-to-consumer brands building an influencer team in-house, and generally housing many other marketing functions in-house as well (performance, creative, social etc.) as they want to have fuller control, and more seamless connections between their various marketing channels.
That said, it doesn’t need to be an either or! We have found many brands to be running core influencer programs internally, while continuing to test with agencies — indeed, you can have your cake and eat it too.
Team and Reporting Structure
A major consideration is where the influencer team will sit — who will they report to? Should they be part of the brand team? Social or Content/Community team? Communications/PR team? Or is it the Performance/Growth team?
It is tricky, as influencer marketing can really touch all of those teams. Influencer marketing has traditionally been an extension of PR initiatives so we often see the influencer team as part of the Comms/PR team — but today influencers also can deliver robust content libraries that can be re-purposed for a brand’s social account, they can help build the community around a brand, and performance/growth teams are finding greater efficiencies in putting paid spend behind influencer content — in our own internal tests, we found influencer content to perform 3–5X better than brand content when boosting in a native social environment. And beyond all of this, we see brands tapping into influencers to be early testers of product to provide feedback.
Where we see it make the most sense is for the influencer team to report up to the VP of Marketing or Consumer Engagement, and be the go-to for all teams when they touch upon influencer, so that influencer relationships, vetting and process efficiencies can all be housed in one place within the company.
Tools & Training
For an in-house team, building efficiencies so that the team can focus on the influencers and content strategy is key — the goal is not to find an intern to manually collect influencer metrics (as this certainly does not leverage resources appropriately to develop a true influencer strategy)!
While you certainly will be saving on services fees by going in-house, you will need to invest in hiring and training the right influencer strategists internally. And like any other hire, continual training and development of an in-house resource, along with clear goals and KPIs are crucial to keeping an employee engaged and motivated.
It is also important that your team (usually of 1 or 2, for most teams, in some cases we see teams of 3–4) is equipped with the right tools to be able to quickly evaluate, vet, recruit and pay influencers (as well as distribute to them 1099's), and proper workflow, reporting and analytics to understand impact of each program. Again, the team’s focus should be about content strategy, influencer relationships, and testing and iteration.
The goal is to hire individuals that are adept at maintaining great relationships with influencers, guiding content strategy (ex-bloggers or journalists can be great!), and analytically minded to constantly test and seek proper measurement of ROI.
Budgets, Strategy, Goals and KPIs
In talking to brands and agencies, we find that influencer budgets as % of overall marketing spend can really vary quite widely. For some brands, influencer spend can be core to their marketing mix and make up an outsized portion of overall budget, while for others it may be as small as 2%.
We are finding in our research that influencer marketing budgets are growing YoY and certainly not slowing down, but we always recommend for brands to start small. It is important to set clear goals and KPIs —Are you looking to drive qualified traffic to your site? Are you looking to build brand awareness and buzz? Are you looking to drive consideration of your product, or are you looking to drive conversion?
Depending on your goals, you may seek to tap different influencer archetypes, publish on different social platforms, and incorporate an element of paid amplification into the program.
Test, Optimize, and Test Some More
Finally, as with any other channel of marketing, strategy is built through testing, optimizing, and more testing. As a brand finds a certain type of influencer, content strategy, social platform to work particularly well for them, double down on spend and continue to devote a portion of overall budget to testing new strategies.
Continual discovery of influencers are also important — a creator that may work well for you today may become less effective (or even decide to stop publishing!) a year from now, so continual monitoring of your roster and incorporating new talent into a mix is key — we offer some tools like My Lists and ACTIVATE Insights that can help keep this process efficient.
Anecdotally, we have found that some influencers can be great content creators that drive superior engagement, but it may often be a different set altogether that drive traffic and conversion! It is only through continual tracking, discovery and indexing can a brand figure out where to double down for future activations.
ACTIVATE is a fully end-to-end influencer marketing platform, covering influencer discovery, program workflow, measurement, and analytics. Our ACTIVATE Studio team also helps brands build out and execute their influencer strategy. Last year, the ACTIVATE platform enabled over 75,000 influencers to collaborate with brands.
Want to learn more about Bloglovin’ or ACTIVATE? Just drop us a note at research@activate.social.
