What Is Needed For An Influencer Marketing Automation Platform?
Three statements about how an Influencer Model-Platform can help brands to reach their goals taking into account that a qualitative job is needed for profiling and vetting the right voice to drive specific messages to your audience.
Automation in influencer marketing helps our companies save time and costs involved in the communication strategy. However, this is not a solid argument in itself, company and communication goals must be structured and well defined to guarantee a good management and execution of campaigns. When a campaign is focused on reaching the combined goals, there are three important considerations when starting an influencer marketing campaign. First, influencers vetting have to answer business needs in order to get better results and see effectiveness and proficiency. Second, influencers are part of the digital strategy ecosystem as creators, they use their own voice and their social media to help boost your brand’s message, so let them be an important part of the creation process. And last but not least, measure is always the key of improvement. Results, adjustments and even future campaigns depend on the right tracking of actions according to the strategy. By taking into account the three mentioned points let’s go through each of them in order to why an influencer marketing platform can automate an inefficient operation.
I have worked with influencers since 2014 for different consumer goods and entertainment brands. Business and communications goals depend on the season, company launches, tent poles, and of course the assigned budget for each initiative. Sometimes large companies only think about increasing their numbers without having an idea about what they want to build up, it’s way more important to do the same that their competitors are doing, or jump into a trend before starting to think about what are the benefits, pros and cons about running an influencer marketing campaign. The big real challenge is for the Public Relations or Social Media Content agencies, they are under pressure of time, budget, planning and also the campaign success. So that is why many agencies around the world are creating their own influencer model or platform as well as the entrepreneurs are creating startups to attend this fast growing need of the last decade.
Getting back on track to our first statement, profile vetting. Some tools out there are offering a pool of influencers who are selected by brand audiences using AI. These AI tools provide an instant match of an influential profile with an estimated number of people to be reached according to their interest, the same tools are also equipped with calculations that allow agencies to set the assigned budget for the most accurate influencer profiles selection. So in terms of time, resources and budget, the automation can be a good ally to select the influencers faster.
Our second statement is related to the digital strategy and its ecosystem, and here is where the problem gets magnified. When communication objectives are isolated from the business objectives, an influencer marketing campaign turns more difficult to run. The automation cannot be set when the goal is not clear at all, and here the biggest challenge is faced by the campaign strategist, who has to determine in which part of the journey to include an influencer voice. Is it needed to reinforce the brand’s message? And, what does the brand want to communicate by using a powerful and influential voice? The key is to connect what our brand is aiming to get, what is communicating and what are the main goals to be achieved. So this way to draw an ecosystem will be easier by integrating channels, medium, resources, content and of course influencers. Once the influencers have a place in the ecosystem, the final decision on whether the brand should collaborate with a specific influencer can be made only after thorough research considering the audience to be impacted and the affinity, which involves examination of the influencer’s content, their bio, interests, and values that must be according to the brand ones. That may take lots of time, so ideating an influencer model that can support a qualitative analysis of possible influencer profiles according to the content they create, and identifying who are the most influential people who have talked about the brand or shared an experience prior to a campaign with influencers is ideated, is a good resource for defining the right methodology to match profiles with goals. This hard work would facilitate the strategic communications planning and this will be done in a matter of minutes or even seconds with automation, which means that selected influencers and brands have a lot of time in hand to conceptualize new ideas or simply move on to the next big campaign.
A final point for considering to automate an inefficient operation by creating an influencer platform or model, is probably the most important one, to measure. As a first step, the influencer marketing platform should be tracking before the influencer’s very first appearance in the campaign. This is crucial to make sure that the influencer fits the brand’s positioning and helps determine if they will be an appropriate ambassador too. The big first step to jump into an influencer marketing campaign is to measure their community size and its quality by analyzing their interaction rate, then there must be a close relationship with the selected influencer to have access to more insights directly from the source, that will allow the brand to have actionable learnings during the campaign. It’s important to have well tracked KPIs related to each one of the actions that our selected influencers are doing when the campaign is airing.
As marketers it is important to know that every single campaign is different, digital users are constantly asking for brand new experiences so content strategy must be aligned with our consumers expectations. Automating a marketing influencer platform evidences the brand’s lack of empathy between the audience and the products, it also evidences an isolation of business objectives and benefits of the products or services that a company is offering. That is why it is really important to consider that influencers are part of the content strategy and its creative process of ideation, they are also the voice that the brand can not be by itself, they bring personality and help the brands build a strong relationship with the audience to become potential customers.
Bonus — You can be bigger if you create together! Celebrities are good for getting brand exposure, micro and nano influencers are great resources for sharing experiences. Internet Celebrities or Social Media Influencers can make a brand stands out from the crowd. Try features as linked content to get a direct purchase from the reached audience and make them your frequent buyers or even advocates that you can use for further campaigns.
Have you ever heard about Baby Ariel? Well, after her success on social media as Tik Toker, she started her own music and acting career, she has been the voice of huge brands such as Sour Patch Kids, Burger King and Disney. Here is the most famous song that is part of the soundtrack of Zombies 2 movie — “The New Kid in Town”.
