Influencer Marketing vs. Celebrity Endorsement: Know The Difference
Influencer marketing is THE MOST trending marketing strategy amongst businesses these days.
But is it just a trending word or really an effective strategy? We’ll find out.
People nowadays spend most of their time on social media and what do they see? Content, content & content. Even after hundreds of brands upscaling their influencer marketing efforts and spamming users with ads, instead of feeling saturated, users still consume the content they like and can spend hours on it.
If you have a small startup or a big brand, there are two ways to go about it. You can either build an influencer marketing team in-house or hire an influencer marketing agency to do the work for you. If you want to save time from hiring an influencer marketing team, training them, and then working with them, an agency can be your powerhouse tool to success.
Whatever you choose, influencer marketing support can help you end-to-end with everything that’s needed for your business to grow. From understanding your business goals, using their roster of vetted influencers, or leading creative strategies, the agency can save you countless potential mistakes and hassle.
This isn’t enough, right?
One by one, let’s go through the services an influencer marketing agency can offer and how it can give direction for your business goals.
Services Provided by an Influencer Marketing Agency
If you already have a list of things mapped for your influencer marketing strategy and you are going to brief the agency on it, give it up already. Scrape out that paper and let the agency start on a whiteboard. You can just start by sharing your company’s goals and objectives and what you are trying to achieve through influencer marketing.
Leave the rest to them.
Like they say, if you can’t trust, you can’t win. To win over influencer marketing, it’s necessary to put trust in your agency. So feel free to be very particular when you scout agencies and interview them but give them the time and space to explore. To help you more on this, let us take you through the things you can expect from an influencer marketing agency.
1. Strategy Development
Start with sharing your overall business goals and objectives and your intent to utilize influencer marketing as a strong medium to grow. If you are thinking of utilizing influencer marketing, then I am sure you have a list of business goals you are trying to achieve through it. Go ahead and share those (brand awareness, conversions, engagement) with the agency. This can further lead you to a brainstorming discussion of what can be done to achieve your desired KPIs the same.
You can deep dive into the audience you are planning to target and decide the engagement and conversion goals together. Start with listing down the gender, age, location, and other metrics of your target audience based on your business, and create a chart that looks something like this.
Image
2. Influencer Discovery & Vetting
The second step is to wear detective glasses and search for relevant influencers.
This is going to be a long run, trust me.
With thousands of influencers on social media, you can easily get confused when you start searching for the quality of influencers you’re looking for. When you hand it over to the agency, they will start the search in your niche and find influencers who can contribute to the engagement you aim for. Let’s say you are a proactive worker and you already have a list of 10 influencers who can contribute to your business, the agency will then start verifying them by checking how authentic their content is and review their credibility, fake following, past sponsored post success, views vs engagement ratios, and so on.
Trust their judgment!
3. Campaign Planning & Execution
While the work mentioned above is in progress, the agency can also start working on crafting a content direction and messaging style for influencer marketing communications.
Given how saturated social media is, you need a smart strategy for your content to stand out. But we won’t directly jump into the strategy. Start with looking at the overall budget first. Post that only, you should freeze the campaign with the agency.
Start with thinking about how you want your brand to be portrayed. If you have a high budget, you can choose influencers with a higher reach but if you are working with a smaller budget, you can collaborate with micro-influencers. You can also engage in barter collaborations with growing influencers in your niche and get great content live in exchange for goods and services.
Here are a few examples of influencer marketing content for a beauty brand.
4. Contract Negotiation & Compliance
Once the influencers are finalized, agencies will reach out to these influencers, negotiate a certain price, and ensure all compliance formalities are done. This will also include background verification of the influencer, finalizing dos and don’ts, payment procedure, payment method, etc.
5. Content Creation & Management
Here comes the best part of the cake – creating content. Your agency will then collaborate with influencers and give their input on how they want to promote your business. The content idea should not just be unique but also align with the influencer’s content style.
For example, let’s see how one single product i.e. Granola, is promoted in two different content angles depending on the influencer’s brand tone.
Fitness Content Angle
Travel Content Angle
6. Performance Tracking & Reporting
As they say, the finish line is always the starting point.
Once the content is live and performing, the agency will keep an eye on the key performance metrics (KPIs) such as click-through rate, conversions, reach, impressions, engagement, replays, shareability, etc. as applicable for the respective campaign.
Once the agency has all the metrics with them, they will work on noting down data-driven insights that will further help them revise and optimize their strategies to aim for higher business growth.
Benefits of Working with an Influencer Marketing Agency
Nowadays, brands are utilizing influencer marketing efforts at it’s maximum. However, the whole process requires dedicated time and effort to make it successful.
Let us list down the core benefits of working with an influencer marketing agency and how it can help you give better direction to your business.
1. Saves Time and Resources
Once you have an agency working on your influencer marketing efforts, it automatically gives you more time to work on other things in the business.
Let’s say if you do it in-house, you will have to work on building a team and hiring the right people. Once you have the team ready, you will train them on the goals and objectives of the business. Only then, will they start making campaign calendars, reaching out to influencers, optimizing budgets and negotiations, ensuring compliance, documenting performance, and deriving insights through data. Now imagine the time, money, and bandwidth that will go into these efforts and compare it with when you outsource it. Easy-peasy, you have your answer!
2. Access to a Wider Network of Influencers
For a business to run a successful influencer marketing strategy, it’s essential to have visibility of influencers from all niches, vet your database, and then make informed decisions to achieve the right brand perception for your business. This is where an influencer marketing agency can enter your business as a game-changer.
With an agency, you will not only get access to a wider database of influencers but also smarter strategies. These agencies also have strong relationships with creators which can be leveraged for your business’s marketing. All these benefits and to state the obvious, you will simply eliminate the hard work and hand it over to the experts.
3. Expertise in Influencer Trends and Campaign Execution
You visit social media and new trends are going on every day, aren’t there?
Not just micro-influencers but celebrities also participate in it and roll with it. For a business to stay on top of these emerging trends, it can be challenging and highly time and energy-consuming. At the same time, agencies are trained to track these trends and stay ahead of the curve, as they manage multiple brands. They can keep track of audience preferences, trending reels, audio, and everything in between.
With the knowledge of data that they own, these agencies will help you with campaign structuring, content strategies, and planned execution. For example, this is how influencer agencies track audience preferences and trends and create content that can reach a larger audience.
4. Data-driven Approach for Better ROI
A data-driven approach starts way before you can imagine.
Starting from selecting influencers, and analyzing their reach and audience, to their past brand promotions and their performance.
Once influencers have been shortlisted, agencies can choose to run organic AB testing to understand which content format is working well for your product/service. Once there is a data-driven insight on content that works well, you can proceed with allocating the budget to paid promotions as well.
How to Choose the Right Influencer Marketing Agency
1. Industry Experience Matters – Big Time
Think of it this way- why would you select a coding influencer to promote your fitness clothing products?
If you hire an influencer marketing agency that has expertise in beauty brands and 90% of their client base are beauty brands, it might not be the best decision to hire them for your fitness brand promotions. An agency with prior experience in your industry will already know what connects well with the audience, the ongoing trends, data insights, etc. Whatever industry you are in, an agency with relevant experience in your niche can significantly uplift your performance.
Pro Tip: Some influencer marketing agencies hold expertise with micro-influencers while some work on celebrity endorsements. Choose wisely!
2. Case Studies and Success Stories
Have you ever bought something without reading reviews or asking people around? No, right?
The same goes for when you look for an influencer marketing agency. Don’t just trust words and promises, take a reasonable decision only after looking at their past work. If their work makes you feel confident enough for your brand’s success, go ahead and work with them!
If the judgment call is difficult to take, here is what you can look for in their case studies.
- The Pain Point
- The Strategy (Business + Content)
- The Success Metrics
3. Transparency in Pricing and Reporting
This is by far the most important aspect to pay attention to. Otherwise, you will end up spending a major chunk of the money you earn from influencer marketing to an agency. Be very curious and observant when you go through their pricing structure.
Hidden fees or vague reports? Not a green flag!
The right agency will always have clear prices and transparent ways of working. When you are shortlisting an agency, make sure they break down their costs into specific segments i.e. influencer cost, content creation cost, campaign execution cost, etc. depending on your brand requirements.
Here are a few questions you can ask the agency you are planning to choose:
- How do you audit your influencers to ensure they align with our values and KPI metrics?
- Are there any additional charges that are predicted but not mentioned here?
- Will there be any charges for feedback-based revisions?
Similarly, the reporting should also be clear and data-backed. Look for engagement metrics such as reach, impressions, shares, likes, etc, and get the agency to set up regular calls to explain these numbers and the progress achieved from them. You can also discuss the targets for the next campaigns during these calls.
4. Alignment with Brand Values and Objectives
Brand alignment is more crucial than you think!
It’s easy to get lost in what’s trending and aiming for higher reach. The influencer marketing agency that you choose should deeply understand and respect your brand’s tone of voice. Only then, will they be able to develop creative with influencers that closely align with your brands’ messaging.
Conclusion
Choosing the right influencer marketing agency isn’t as easy as it sounds. Many factors mentioned above go behind the strategy. The right agency can look different for varying brands, so try your best to not compare. Instead, look for agencies that are most relevant to your business and aim for a higher business impact through data-backed strategies.
When you start looking for an effective agency and not just a middleman between your brand and influencers, that’s when you’ll find an agency that not just commits but delivers.
Now that you have a list of things to refer to when you shortlist your influencer marketing agency, what are you waiting for?
Happy Influencing!