In a world where influencer marketing is becoming one of the tactical norms of the marketing industry, managing your relationship with influencers is the need of the hour.
Collating social media handles and phone numbers, alongside managing your relationship with these individuals, can be quite a tedious task. Read below to understand the significance of influencer relationship management and all things related.
Who is an influencer?
An influencer or creator is someone who, quite literally, “influences” their large followers of people across social media. This can also be in different spaces – fashion, sports, travel, lifestyle & life hacks, finance, etc.
Influencers have and hold large volumes of followers on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and so on. They are celebrities in their form, and they often capitalize on their fame.
What is influencer marketing?
It is practical for companies to make use of the large following that these internet celebrities have. It’s similar to celebrity endorsements, where the concept is that if a popular figure promotes a product, their fans are most likely to purchase it.
Companies hire creators on contractual or other bases to promote their products or services online via social media. Companies can do it in many ways – either the company creates the content and hands it over to the influencer to post online, or they create the content themselves and post it themselves.
To take an example of influencer marketing, a company that sells protein powders and the like can hire a sports or fitness influencer to promote their product. Another example is stock trading apps for which brands can engage finance-related influencers to inform their followers of these available resources.
In this way, companies can leverage the influencer’s popularity to build a following for their products. A relatively less established company can reach out to an established influencer in the same field to effectively do so. This is why influencer marketing is among the most popular tools in the industry today.
What is influencer relationship management?
Influencer marketing is more than merely reaching out to a creator and paying them to advertise your product for you. It requires effort on the part of the company and the influencers, which is why it’s essential to establish a fruitful and consistent relationship between the two.
As a company, you must keep track of all the relevant information, such as the creators’ social media handles (on various platforms), phone numbers, email addresses, the fields they belong to, and so on. This can make for extensive Excel sheets for tracking the same, and also a lot of research to find suitable influencers in the first place.
This can be rather tedious and often requires large teams within companies to manage the same. In this world of never-ending technology, however, some organizations allow you to manage the same very effectively. These agencies not only provide you with influencer databases but also with cost-effective ways to manage your relationship with them.
The significance of influencer relationship management
Influencer relationship management is also significant in showing the famous figure that they are more to you than mere money-makers. Companies must reshare creators’ posts, feature them on the company pages, and give them the space to grow their following even further.
Many companies also offer influencers commissions on each sale or exclusive discount codes and coupons to customers who purchase via influencer ads. The agencies mentioned before only make this process manifold easier for you.
Conclusion
All in all, influencer marketing is an incredibly effective tool to promote products and services, but it requires a lot of human resources to manage it well. There are cost-effective agencies that can help you and your company figure out how best to go about it, and it’s a good idea to use them to grow your business.
