Despite what some people think, technology isn’t a magic cure for every problem. The right influencer marketing technology solution can transform your marketing efforts. But, it only works if your influencer marketing efforts have some backbone behind them.
Using tech for the sake of using tech won’t necessarily help you, and might make you more frustrated. To successfully add an influencer marketing technology solution to your campaigns, you should already have goals, a team, a budget, and the right clients in place.
Prerequisites For Choosing an Influencer Marketing Technology Solution
Goals
Before you implement an influencer marketing technology solution, you need to consider what you want that solution to accomplish. What are your brand’s goals for influencer marketing in general, and how will using technology help you reach those goals?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, the following are some of the most common goals influencer marketers have:
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase engagement
- Nurture leads
- Improve sales
- Retain customers or improve customer loyalty
Finding the right influencer is often the first step towards achieving any of the above-mentioned goals. After all, your brand needs to work with an influencer your audience knows and trusts.
Who that influencer is depends on your target demographic. According to data from Twitter, baby boomers and older social media users tend to “click” with more established influencers or celebrities, while millennials and Generation Z tend to relate to influencers who are known more for their social media presence than for any other type of accomplishment.
Instead of conducting a manual search for the right influencer, a technology solution such as an influencer marketplace can streamline the process of finding the ideal influencer, helping your company achieve its influencer marketing goals more efficiently.
Appropriate Products or Services
Before you bring influencer marketing technology to the table, you need to make sure that the clients you work with or the products and services your brand offers make sense for influencer marketing.
More than three quarters of marketers in the US had past-year experience with influencer marketing, according to the 2017 State of the Creator Economy (SOCE) study. That suggests that influencer marketing can work for a wide range of clients, products, and services. You don’t need to be shilling weight-loss tea or lip-plumping cosmetics to take advantage of influencer marketing.
What matters more is choosing the right influencers for your campaign. One way to do that is to think about who people trust. According to Nielsen, people trust other people that they know the most. Just behind that are people they might know, but who post their opinions online (i.e., most influencers).
Another way to determine which type of influencer will work best for your clients or products is to pay attention to what you’re offering. According to the CMI, if your goal is to boost brand awareness, you might consider partnering with influencers who are well-known, and who have significant reach and clout on a particular platform. But if your goal is to increase sales, your current customers can often be your best influencers.
A Budget
Although some platforms and services are free, influencer marketing technology usually costs money. In fact, when it comes to influencer marketing tech, you very often get what you pay for. If you have a small budget and can only afford maybe a few dollars a day, you’ll be able to use an influencer marketing software platform, but the features available to you will be very limited.
On the other hand, the bigger your budget, the more feature-rich the platforms. Keep in mind that more features doesn’t necessarily equal success. You can throw money at what you perceive to be an issue with your influencer marketing campaign, but if you don’t have clear goals for a campaign, you might as well be tossing money into a hole.
A Dedicated Team
One of the advantages of implementing an effective influencer marketing technology solution is that it reduces the amount of human power you need to launch a campaign and see it through. Granted, you still need someone to managed your campaigns unless you spring for fully managed service. But the tech can be automated and utilized no matter how big or small your team is. Just be sure you have someone assigned to oversee it.
Training
Does the word “technology” give you the heebie-jeebies, or have you never met an online help desk you understood? Everyone has different comfort levels when it comes to using software and technology, whether for influencer marketing or any other project.
How much guidance or onboarding assistance will you need? You answer will influence the type of influencer marketing platform or software you end up using. For example, the lower-priced software programs usually don’t include much or any live assistance or training.
Typically, the more feature-rich a technology solution is, the more support you have. Occasionally, platforms provide in-person training. That gives each member of your team a clear sense of how to implement the program and use it. The more feature-rich platforms also typically provide account teams. They act as your point of contact if you have any questions about the product later on.
If you have a strong plan for influencer marketing, complete with measurable, concrete goals, an influencer marketing technology solution will only help to make your marketing stronger.
