Influencer Marketing is Not PR

In a global brand study by Relatable last year, of the 351 companies polled, 94% of marketers agree on the positive effect of influencer marketing, yet only 23.1% said they were actively working on campaigns with influencers.

Most brands want to integrate influencer campaigns and advertising into their marketing strategy, but the discomfort of its novelty stops them. What equipment or resources are needed? Is there a specific template to use when corresponding with influencers? How do we handle split responsibilities? What in-house team is responsible for handling the logistics?

Managing influencer marketing, on any scale, is a multifaceted project, with tasks poised between PR and marketing. Unless companies have a designated influencer marketing coordinator, strong communication and synchronicity are imperative to properly execute strategies with an upward trajectory.

Before influencers, celebrities were used for ads, but social media has enabled an accelerated rate of media consumption, rendering long-term high-budget marketing projects more work than they’re worth. Influencers allow the opportunity for companies to quickly diversify their content by selecting online personalities based on their compatibility, as the subjects of ads change, the responsibility of the facilitating departments needs to shift as well.

With influencers, brands can take the inch-wide, mile-deep approach to their marketing strategies, which requires double the effort that celebrity campaigns called for, but comes with returns to match. Being able to pinpoint specific influencers whose attributes complement that of their own is of way higher value to a brand than any other current marketing strategy. The public’s general disposition towards celebrities falls short of marketing needs in the current climate. Influencers are a novelty, but they are also ubiquitous, which poses a rare opportunity for any company’s growth strategy.

Influencers are running their own freelancing marketing business. The issue today is that in-house marketing teams are unsure how to handle influencers because of that reason, so they involve the PR team. When the lines are blurred like this it further contributes to the disjointedness of the process.

A PR team should be most involved during the backend of influencer marketing deals. Finding and maintaining relationships is the priority, not constructing plans for execution. The marketing team should be focused on immediate concerns like ad performance, mapping strategic plays and fine-tuning the details.

Though both Marketing and PR teams play an instrumental role in the success of a company, downplaying the importance of keeping the two thought processes entirely separate can result in confusion, frustration and bad practice. The influencer market has completely reshaped consumer behaviors, so brands must respond with an adaptable internal team that knows how they can and cannot help. Influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere, so rather than operating in chaos just to get the job done, brands must provide structure in an already fragmented trade to build a sustainable social media strategy.