Is Your Brand Ready For An Influencer Management Platform?

Are you simply dipping your toe into influencer marketing or are you ready for an influencer management platform to scale your program? Whether you just sent out your first tweet to an influencer you'd like to work with or you're searching for the perfect influencer marketing platform vendor partner, we can agree on one thing: The importance of including influencer marketing in your overall marketing strategy.

In a recent Nielsen Harris Poll conducted on behalf of Ambassador, 67% of Americans said they’re at least a little more likely to purchase a product after a friend or family member shared it via social media, email, or text message. Furthermore, 92% of 18-to-34 year-olds say they seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a product purchase.

And in today’s digital world, these recommendations come in the form of social media posts from popular bloggers, micro-influencers, as well as customer referrals.

So maybe your brand’s strategy is set, influencers are in place, now you’re just sitting back and waiting for the steady stream of new business to flow in. And that’s awesome. Unless, of course, you’re not prepared to track and manage the activity generated by your influencers, measure results in real-time, and actually deliver the incentives you promised.

Quite frankly, this is where many influencer marketing programs fall apart or have difficulty scaling. Without the right systems in place, tracking and rewarding influencer activity can be a nightmare. Without a clear approach to measurement and optimization, you’ll fail to gather critical insight about customers and prospects that could improve your broader marketing strategy.  

To avoid that fate, you need to implement processes that allow you to:

Attribute new customer activity to the correct influencer

If you’re generating new customers from brand ambassadors, you need a way to accurately connect which new customers came from which influencer. If you can’t do this, managing your influencer program will be a nightmare. 

Automate rewards and/or payment in a timely fashion

If you’re generating hundreds (or thousands) of sales from influencers a month and don’t have a way to automate conversion payments, your influencer marketing strategy will become a drain on your marketing resources. You’ll spend more time managing reward payouts to influencers than investing in activities that acquire new customers.

Continuously learn, observe, and iterate

At scale, an effective influencer marketing program should generate incredible insight into customer behavior, prospect motivations, and channel preferences. It’s absolutely critical to have systems in place that can process and leverage that insight from Day 1.  

Ultimately, influencer marketing is most valuable when you’re able to easily amplify results without also proportionately amplifying internal resources. Without the right tools, capabilities, and systems in place, achieving that efficiency at scale is virtually impossible.

The Importance of an Influencer Management Platform

Developing measurement, management, and analytics functionality in-house for your influencer programs is certainly possible, but it requires a herculean effort that typically involves (and distracts) internal technical talent. Luckily, there’s a simpler way to absolve yourself of those logistical and analytical headaches.

With an influencer management platform, you can easily attribute new sales activity to the appropriate ambassadors, fully automate campaign logistics (i.e., issuing payment, re-engaging disengaged ambassadors, creating/sending emails, etc.), and quickly integrate other third-party systems to seamlessly sync data between platforms.  

Why is this so important?

By automating the influencer marketing process, you remove much of the complexity, tedium, and guesswork from running multiple campaigns with many influencers. Ultimately, this frees you up to focus on the things that really matter — executing efficient, measurable, and profitable campaigns that, over time, positively influence every aspect of your marketing strategy.