Looking to get better results from influencer marketing? Well, influencer relationship management may be the answer to that. In order to maintain successful partnerships through the years, you need to connect with influencers on an almost personal level.
When trying to collaborate with influencers, it’s important to think of them as your coworkers. These people are working alongside you, and not for you. Maintaining that mindset can help get more out of your collaborative efforts. So let’s take a look at what IRM is and what your top software choices are.
What Is Influencer Relationship Management?
When you’re collaborating with content creators, you are counting on these influencers as your strategic partner. Treating them accordingly is influencer relationship management. A good influencer relationship management program helps make the right choices and say the right things.
CRM for influencers can build your brand’s reputation and help you be known as a good player in the field, both among customers and influencers. There are many benefits to influencer relationship marketing management. Let’s explore some of these benefits together.
Benefits of Influencer Relationship Management
When working with a new partner of any kind, working out the kinks can get challenging. That’s why maintaining influencer relations can be so helpful. By building an amicable relationship with content creators, you give your brand the chance to grow and make use of affordable, efficient marketing. Let’s get into the specifics.
1. Deeper Understanding of Products and Values
One of the first things that comes to mind is an influencer’s understanding of your brand. In short-term partnerships, influencers may get a good grasp of the specific item you’re selling, but it would be impossible for them to recognize your brand on a deeper level.
Long-term partnerships allow for a reliable understanding of your company’s values and products, leading to a more accurate campaign and better brand visibility.
2. Improving ROI
When an influencer gets to know you, so will their audience. This means you get more value per dollar spent, with higher engagement, increased conversion rates (sales, leads, sign-ups), and stronger brand lift compared to one-off transactional deals.
3. Improving Content Quality
Once an influencer knows your brand better, they also know you better. This allows an opportunity to foster open communications and mutual respect, leading to ultimately better content that resonates well with the audience and meets your brand goals as well.
4. Reducing Risks with Better Vetting
Each new influencer brings you the risk of a new controversy. With good influencer CRM, you can:
- Keep working with the same safe creators again and again,
- Get better results from vetting due to the place in the community.
While working with influencers you already know, you can avoid fake followers, poor engagement, conflicting values, or creators who might violate disclosure regulations such as FTC, and ASA.
5. Long-Term Strategy Building Opportunity
A long term partner allows you to adopt a long term strategy. Brands build equity with both the influencer and their audience over time, which leads to better storytelling, deeper audience connections, and sustained brand presence, avoiding the “spike and fade” effect of one-off campaigns. You may even choose consistent social media takeovers for a better long-term effect.
6. Building Brand Reputation
Last but not least, influencer marketing CRM gives your brand a good reputation in the field. This means your company will be sought after by influencers, making it easy to get good connections.
Now that you know the importance of influencer relationship management, it’s time to learn how to effectively manage these relationships.
Step-by-Step Guide on Effective Influencer Relationship Management
So we’ve learnt the benefits of influencer relationship management, but how is it done best? The following part of this article teaches you how to start these relationships and how to maintain them for maximum return on investment.
1. Set Clear Goals
The very first step is setting clear KPIs and goals from the first moments of your partnership. Knowing exactly what you want from your collaborations helps you and your partners simultaneously. You may even find influencer whitelisting to be a better fit than other forms of collaborations.
2. Choose Your Audience and Brand Fit
After setting general goals, you need to map your audience as well. This can help you find the right creator whose audience matches your goals. For example, if you’re a beauty brand trying to advertise to an older audience you may need to choose an older beauty influencer.
3. Make a Clear Outreach Plan
Now that you know what you want and which influencer works for you, it’s time to plan out your outreach. Decide on channels and timing for reaching out. Personalize initial messages, then schedule follow-ups. Influencer relationship management platforms can automate drip campaigns while keeping each message personal.
4. Onboard and Begin
So you know what you want, who you want, and how you can get it. Now is the time to start onboarding influencers and start your collaborations. Share brand guidelines and product information, but also encourage them to infuse their creativity, and make sure to offer access to all necessary resources for your influencer.
5. Monitor and Support
Regular check-ins, constant monitoring, and interactions with created content can help your brand build good relationships online. Offer support when necessary and make sure to interact with both the influencers and the content.
6. Analyze and Make the Right Changes
Last but not least, make sure to analyze the whole process, regardless of failure or success. Knowing what went wrong and what went right can help you change towards the right direction, and improve your overall ROI.
So you’ve learnt how to manage influencer relationships as a brand, but it’s good to know that there are influencer CRM tools and software that make your job easier. So let’s take a look at the most popular influencer relationship management tools right now.
Top Influencer Relationship Management Software
It’s always important to know the tools at your disposal. There are many different software and platforms that offer IRM services. In this section, we’ll take a look at the largest influencer relationship management software, starting with what is undoubtedly your best choice.
1. Ainfluencer
As a full-service influencer marketing platform, Ainfluencer gives you the tools to take care of all of your marketing needs. That includes IRM. With a dedicated messaging platform inside the software and years of expertise in the field, Ainfluencer can help you build long-lasting and fruitful relationships with more than 5 million influencers worldwide. Let’s take a look at this platform’s features:
- 100% Free: The platform includes zero fees, hidden or otherwise.
- Massive Database: Over 5 million influencers are active on Ainfluencer.
- Multi-platform Support: Ainfluencer’s database spans across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Instant Video Translation: Instantly translates all video content with the help of AI.
- AI-assisted Discovery: Find the right influencers with more than 20 optimized filters.
- Direct Messaging: Connect with creators via in-app chat, eliminating the need for third-party messaging software.
- Secure Payments: All financial transactions are guaranteed with the Escrow system.
- Multi-Lingual Support: Up to 6 languages are supported on Ainfluencer, with more to come.
- Direct Platform Reports: As opposed to competitors, this platform offers reports of influencers’ audience data, engagement rates, and key metrics straight from the social media platform of choice.
- Authentic Insights: You can access organic data on any influencer’s collaboration history, allowing you to choose influencers worth building a relationship with.
- Automated Outreach: Invite influencers directly within the app (no cold emails), boosting conversion rates.
So what’s the holdup? Sign up on Ainfluencer now and enjoy everything the platform has to offer!
2. InfluencerHero
As a campaign management platform, InfluencerHero can also act as an influencer management software. This platform can help you communicate, track those communications and make your brand a successful influencer marketing campaign example.
3. AspireIQ
Formerly known as Aspire, this platform is well-known to e-commerce and DTC brands. The platform streamlines collaboration by automating content reviews and payments, and is consistently ranked among the top influencer marketing platforms for its campaign management services.
4. Klear
If a platform that’s all about numbers grabs your attention, then Klear may be the answer. Klear has a large influencer database and in-app CRM, letting brands search using audience demographics and analytics. The platform also provides contract management and campaign tracking.
5. Traackr
Traackr is a massive enterprise that covers all marketing services, including influencer marketing. It offers CRM-style tracking of influencer contacts and collaboration history, with strong points being its analytics. Brands can see spend vs. impact per influencer and optimize budgets accordingly.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve covered what influencer relationship management is, how important it is, how it’s best done, and the best influencer management software in the business. CRM for influencer marketing can build or break your advertising efforts.
FAQs
1. Why Do I Need IRM Software or a Program?
Manual management with spreadsheets and emails doesn’t really work for scaled influencer marketing. IRM software can help you by offering centralized contacts, automated workflows, tracked performance, and providing ROI insights, saving time and preventing errors.
2. What Is an Influencer Relationship Management Platform?
Influencer relationship management platforms are tools dedicated to helping you build stronger and more beneficial relationships with content creators. These services include automated messages, consulting agents, and more.
