How to Manage Your Influencer Campaign Like a Pro

Published in

GRIN Influencer Marketing

9 min readOct 12, 2021

Marketers since 2019 have increased their influencer spending by more than 50%. Experts predict this spending to increase over the next few years as social commerce features grow and the creator economy matures.

But achieving high ROI through influencer marketing doesn’t work quite the same as setting up automated email sequences or PPC bids. Creator endorsements must come from strong brand-influencer relationships to create authentic and genuine content.

“Influencer marketing is the most effective way to build a valuable brand — IF it’s done well. What’s the secret? Trust. When people trust someone’s endorsement of your brand, when they can sense the relationship is real, they believe it — and they’ll buy.” — GRIN, Authentic Influencer Marketing

Great brand-creator relationships don’t start and end with recruiting. The way you manage your influencer campaigns will demonstrate to your creator team how committed you are to their success and long-term partnerships.

What you need to build an effective influencer campaign strategy

Before you initiate a campaign, you’ll want to establish a strong foundation so that you know what you want to accomplish and how you’ll achieve it.

Ideal influencer profile

It’s not enough to find a good influencer or a creator with thousands of followers. Because there are so many excellent creators to choose from nowadays, you can get specific about the kind of influencer you want to invite into your program.

A great place to start is to examine your ideal customer profile (ICP) or buyer personas. These tools help you pinpoint your target audience and audience segments.

Your influencer team should either mirror your target audience or have an audience that mirrors your ideal customer. That way, you can feel secure knowing that your creator’s audience is also your audience.

In fact, many brands build Influencer Persona Worksheets to help them identify which influencers are a perfect fit for their brand.

With each new campaign, you can get more selective with your creator team. By focusing on your top performers, your ideal influencer profile will grow more targeted and your influencer recruiting efforts will foster a thriving brand community.

Influencer management support tools

Your influencer management support tools are any docs, spreadsheets, analytics, or team members that help you keep track of your campaigns. If your program is new, you’ll most likely be creating your own manual system of support tools.

But if your program includes a handful of influencers, and you run several campaigns a year, you’re probably using an influencer marketing platform that integrates with your ecommerce store and owned media analytics (website, social media, etc.).

As you take stock of your influencer support system, don’t be afraid to note where you have holes in your tool stack. Creating a wish list of influencer support tools will help you pitch your boss for a bigger budget as you grow your team.

Campaign goals & KPIs

One of the most crucial elements of any campaign planning is setting your marketing goals and KPIs.

While your goals provide a high-level overview of what you hope your influencers will accomplish for your brand (i.e., sales, brand awareness, website traffic, increased followers, UGC, etc.), KPIs break each goal down into actionable milestones.

With each key performance indicator, you will achieve best results if you assign a deadline and campaign metric. That way, you will know at all times how well your campaign is working in relation to your marketing objectives.

Ideal workflow for successful influencer campaign management

Arranging your campaign management steps in chronological order will ensure that you don’t let key tasks fall through the cracks. If you don’t already have a clear process for launching your campaigns, consider the following approach.

1. Set up a campaign according to your objective(s).

Your content ask (the type of post or campaign you want your creators to provide) should line up with your pre-established program objectives. For example, if your goal is to produce user-generated content, your influencer posts should incentivize follower replies, questions, tags, hashtags, etc.

Similarly, a campaign with the goal to drive website traffic should include published hyperlinks to key pages on your website.

2. Invite influencers to join your campaign.

Equipped with your goals, KPIs, and campaign set up, you’re now ready to invite creators to participate in your campaign.

If you already have working relationships with influencers, you should pick from that group first. For greater participation, you can use various influencer discovery tools to help you find prospects to join your campaign.

When reaching out to a creator for the first time, consider sending them a short direct message over their primary social channel. Once you’ve made contact and confirmed that they are interested, you can transition that creator to email for better productivity and official business.

“We love to get to know somebody, and we want to get to that point where we talk about our product second or third. We want to get a feel for who this person is, because it is a working relationship. You want to give unlimited resources to the right person.” — Greg Tetzlaff, Head of Product Content and Industry Influencers at Nutrabolt

3. Negotiate with your influencers and come to terms on compensation, content usage, and campaign parameters.

It’s critical that you come to agreement with your creators on what your campaign entails (what you are asking them to do), as well as how they will be compensated for their participation.

If you want input from your influencers on campaign planning, make it known from the beginning that you want their help in developing your campaign. Creators are great strategy partners, and it’s not a bad idea to bring in your top-performers early on in the process.

But once you’re ready to launch, everyone will feel much more at ease if you put your agreement and deliverables in writing, including:

Content type (image, blog, video, etc.)
Required tags, hashtags, links, branded assets, etc.
Compensation (gift, pay per post, commission, etc.)
Content usage rights
Campaign timeline

4. Take and fulfill product orders with your influencers.

Most influencer campaigns involve shipping products to your creators with enough time for them to feel comfortable with the product before posting. In order to generate the best campaign results, make sure you’ve confirmed the following:

What product customizations (color, flavor, etc.) your creators prefer
When your creators receive their product gifts
That each creator genuinely loves your product

Because product gifts means coordinating with your warehouse, shipping, and/or ecommerce teams, be sure to connect with the right people ahead of time to prevent any delays.

5. Provide the support your creators need to be successful.

While you should never micromanage your influencers, they will still lean on you for things like campaign guidelines, product use, and best practices. This is especially true for new creators on your team.

By sending out clear campaign briefs, you can anticipate most of your influencers’ questions, outline essential tasks, and make yourself (or your team) available for questions.

6. Establish campaign timelines and track influencer content.

Unless everyone understands that a campaign is always-on (aka, “evergreen”), make sure that you’ve set a clear start and end date for your campaign.

Your campaign timeline helps your creator know when and how often they need to post in order to meet campaign requirements.

Additionally, your campaign will run much smoother if you create a process for gathering influencer content. For example, you can ask your creators to send you screenshots of their posts or you can take screenshots yourself.

If you plan to reuse influencer content for paid ads, make sure that your influencer provides you with the main image/video files so that you have high-quality content for repurposing.

For those using an influencer marketing platform like GRIN, you can utilize tools that help you pull content automatically so that you don’t have to manually dig for posts during your campaign.

7. Confirm influencer ROI and disburse payments.

Depending on the compensation method of your influencer campaign, you may need to confirm sales/engagements before sending payment. This is especially true if you are paying your ambassadors/affiliates on product commissions.

For flat fees or retainers, you should establish a reliable process payments dates are clear to your creators. This approach ensures trust and cooperation between you and your influencers.

8. Create a process for influencer campaign reporting.

Your campaign reports help evaluate the success of your campaign. Not only do these reports prove influencer ROI, they also give you and your team insights on what works, what doesn’t work, and what new tactics you should try.

The more accurately you can tie performance back to dollars and cents, the better. For example, you can reverse engineer your buyer’s journey by factoring how many clicks becomes a sale, how many engagements turn into clicks, and so on. From there, you can attach monetary value to each performance metric and compare those results against your influencer costs.

9. Reflect, update, & repeat!

As a marketer, your work of improving on past performance is never done. That’s why it’s a good idea to reflect on how a campaign went, discuss results with your team, and then implement strategies to fix process glitches and increase results.

Managing influencer campaigns — Manual vs. Automated

Studies show that direct brand-influencer relationships consistently outperform influencer networks. The reason for this is because when a creator genuinely loves your brand, they demonstrate love for the brand authentically.

Brands who manage their influencer relationships manually must build and maintain a system for keeping track of their creators, product gifts, and campaign performance. That said, many brands have found automated solutions to help them take their campaign management to the next level.

Who should manage their campaigns manually?

For brand new influencer programs, the manual approach works best.

In an episode of GRIN’s Brands Talking Influencers fireside chat with special guest, Andrea Faulkner Williams (Co-Founder of Tubby Todd), the infant skincare company owner shared what it was like building an influencer program from scratch.

“At first, we felt like we were giving over half of our product away, and so we really needed to keep track of who we were giving it to, and did they like it, and did they talk about it, and what was their address… We had that information on Google Docs.”

For newer programs on a shoe-string budget, you’ll want to bootstrap what you can and lean on the value that your product delivers. That means offering free product to brand champions and tracking its success. Andrea continues,

“We had a really careful Google Sheet that had a column for name, email, their handle, how many followers they had, and we broke them into tiers from the very beginning.”

Spreadsheets and cloud drives will help you stay organized with your product gifts. Additionally, you can use spreadsheets and drive folders to help you track:

Influencer/creator prospects (those you are vetting or are inviting to join a campaign)
Current campaign performance
Total program performance
Content library

When should you automate your influencer workflow?

Brands with a creator team of 20 or more recurring influencer partners should seriously consider investing in automation. These brands typically have the numbers to prove influencer ROI to justify investing in a robust platform.

“The spirit that we were looking to support was ‘automate, automate, automate’ so that we could personalize what we wanted. We know that if we are able to automate a lot of these processes, then we can give that personal time [to each creator partner], and that’s what’s going to differentiate us.” — Greg Tetzlaff, Head of Product Content and Industry Influencers at Nutrabolt

Manual vs. Automated influencer campaign management — Pros & Cons

The manual approachThe automated approachPros:Cost-effective (free)More control for new programsPros:Do more in fewer clicksOne person can do the work of multiple peopleMore time to personalize the partnership experience to each creatorRun more campaigns more oftenEasier & more accurate performance trackingIntegration with multiple software toolsCons:Time intensiveNon-intuitiveDifficult to maintain with influencer teams of 20 or moreCons:Med-high upfront costs

Conclusion: The more you track, the easier it is to define & improve influencer program ROI.

Particularly if your program is new, it can feel overwhelming to keep track of all the key campaign data, such as content, reactions, shares, sales, etc. There are many ways to simplify tracking by using branded hashtags, affiliate links, and coupon codes. You can also ask your influencers for help so that you can properly attribute results to the right creators.

If you’re diligent to track campaign performance, you’ll quickly spot ways to refine your program and increase your ROI. Additionally, keeping tabs on those metrics will help you when selecting the right solutions for your influencer marketing tech stack.

Spend less time jumping from one software to another and more time increasing results. Do it all in one place with GRIN.