Influencer management strategies: building successful brand partnerships

Working with the right influencer can help skyrocket your brand’s visibility and build trust with your target audience. But securing a partnership is just the first step. From defining your goals and objectives to developing and executing a campaign, a lot of strategic planning goes into managing an influencer marketing campaign.

Whether you’re a seasoned vet or new to influencer management, you might have some questions. How do you maintain control over your brand image while trusting an influencer’s creative expertise? How do you measure success and prove return on investment (ROI)? In this article, we’ll cover how to manage an influencer marketing campaign. You’ll learn about the benefits and challenges of influencer management, how to identify the right influencers and tactics for building long-term partnerships.

What is influencer management?

Influencer management involves discovering, selecting and collaborating with influencers to help promote your company. ‌Brands can have specific goals, but generally, the objective is to work closely with influencers to create attention-grabbing campaigns that engage your audience, generate buzz and amplify your brand’s reach.

Influencer management also involves tracking the performance results of these campaigns to maximize ROI and maintain strong relationships with right-fit influencers for future collaborations.

The benefits of effective influencer collaboration

What could a meaningful influencer collaboration do for your brand? Here are the top benefits.

Enhanced brand visibility and reach

Influencers earn their titles by garnering thousands or millions of engaged fans. When you partner with an influencer, you get instant exposure to their audience, boosting brand awareness. There are benefits to working with popular influencers. Still, a Q1 2024 Sprout survey of 2,000 consumers shows that a third of participants say an influencer’s follower count doesn’t impact their likelihood to engage. For example, nano and micro-influencers tend to target niche audiences but have higher engagement rates because they have strong relationships with their followers.

Increased credibility through association with trusted influencers

Influencers strengthen brand trust because consumers have confidence in their recommendations. Partnering with one can enhance your brand’s credibility through association and help encourage people to try your brand. According to The 2024 Influencer Marketing Report, nearly half of all consumers trust influencers just as much as in 2023, while close to 30% trust them more.

For example, influencer Kyshawn Lane (@weeklyhomecheck) is known for his home maintenance content. Since people trust his expertise, they’re likelier to trust his product recommendations. In this sponsored post with Lysol, he recommends adding the brand’s sanitizer to their laundry routine.

Improved audience engagement and interaction

People follow influencers because they’re relatable, and according to our influencer marketing report, they align with their values and seem authentic. Influencers are highly skilled at driving social media engagement, so partnering with them can get more people talking about, liking and sharing your brand.

Higher conversion rates and sales

When influencers rave about your brand, their followers are likelier to jump on board and buy what you’re selling, boosting social media conversion rates. Our influencer marketing report shows that nearly half (49%) of consumers make purchases at least once a month because of influencer posts, and almost all (86%) make a purchase inspired by an influencer at least once a year.

Access to fresh, creative content ideas and perspectives

Influencers are tuned into the latest social media trends since their work revolves around creating highly shareable, engaging content. They know what their audience loves, so they can develop original sponsored content ideas to make your brand stand out. It’s like inviting a talented chef to cook in your kitchen. They introduce you to new recipes and techniques you might not have considered.

How to identify the right influencers

There are influencers for every industry, social media platform and budget. Still, finding the best fit can be challenging. Here are a few ways to identify the best influencer for your brand.

Choose influencers aligned with your brand objectives

First, you must clearly understand your target audience and brand to know what you want in an influencer. Then, evaluate potential partners by reviewing their past work (previous collaborations and organic content), engagement metrics and follower demographics to find your perfect fit.

Use an influencer management tool

Influencer management tools, like Sprout Social Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger), have large databases with advanced search filters to quickly identify influencers who meet certain criteria. For example, Sprout Influencer Marketing’s profile discovery tool has over 50 search filters.

On top of these discovery functions, Sprout Influencer Marketing offers:

• Find influencers: With a comprehensive database of over 10 million vetted social profiles, Sprout Influencer Marketing helps brands identify influencers who align with their target audience and campaign goals.
• Whitelisting: Enables brands to access influencers’ social accounts to manage and reply to comments or direct messages (DMs) tied to sponsored posts, ensuring consistent engagement.
• Boosting posts: Amplify influencer content by boosting posts with paid dollars via a brand or agency ad account, reaching wider audiences.
• Comprehensive data analysis: Source posts from over 10 million vetted social profiles across multiple platforms, providing valuable insights to measure campaign effectiveness and ROI.
• Sprout Social integration: Sprout Social enables you to track and report key performance indicators (KPIs) such as reach, click-throughs, lead generation and sentiment analysis.
• Tagging infrastructure: Organize, track and report influencer activities to help you prove ROI and improve strategic planning.
• Adaptability: Keeps pace with rapid changes in social media so brands can quickly adapt to new trends and technologies.

Search keywords to find relevant influencers

If you’re searching on Google, you can use keywords like “[region] [niche/industry] influencer” to find local influencers. You can also try looking up keywords and hashtags related to your products or services on social media. Social listening is another way to find influencers with keywords, as it helps brands discover influencers already creating relevant content.

For example, if you’re a skincare brand for older women, you might look up hashtags like #MatureSkin or #Over40Skincare.

Building long-term relationships with influencers

Like any vendor, building long-term influencer relationships has benefits. An ongoing partnership means they consistently promote your brand, creating more trust and loyalty with their audience than with a one-off campaign. They’ll better understand your brand over time, leading to more impactful and authentic content.

According to our influencer marketing report, shared values, transparent budgets and payment structures and audience alignment are the most critical factors influencers consider when evaluating a potential brand partner.

If you want your influencer to stay for the long haul, pay them fairly (and on time) and try to involve them as early as possible. Including them in creative ideation and even product and service development conversations will get them more invested in the campaign and help ensure their audience loves it, too.

For example, clothing brand Smash + Tess recently collaborated with influencer Alicia Mccarvell (@aliciamccarvell) on a collection of rompers and dresses. In a promotional Instagram Reel, Alicia shared behind-the-scenes footage of her trying on early iterations of the collection’s pieces and wrote in the caption she was grateful to the brand and its founder “for their eagerness to listen, learn, adapt and create with me.”

Since Alicia was involved throughout the process, the partnership (and her promotion) feels more authentic and trustworthy.

Challenges of influencer management

Influencer management involves frequent coordination and communication. Everyone has their own schedules and preferences. It’s your job to manage expectations, get everyone on the same page and keep track of all the moving parts.

Here are several common issues that can come up with influencer marketing and how to handle them.

Not following the campaign brief

If the influencer doesn’t understand the brief or misses essential details, they might create content that doesn’t fit your brand’s needs. To avoid this scenario, be crystal clear about what you want. Share a detailed campaign brief, have regular check-in calls to answer questions and provide examples of what you’re looking for.

Timing issues in campaigns

Timing can make or break a campaign. For example, if an influencer posts about a product launch too late, the campaign won’t generate enough attention. An influencer posting too frequently or infrequently can also impact the results. These issues are why setting clear deadlines is essential. Use scheduling tools to keep everything organized and communicate regularly to adjust if needed.

Poor content quality

If an influencer’s content isn’t up to par, it might be because they didn’t have enough resources or understand what’s required. To avoid this, have the influencer submit content drafts well before the campaign goes live and offer feedback to help them refine it.

High reach but low engagement

This issue often arises with macro and mega-influencers with broad audiences. These influencers may have millions of followers, but their audiences aren’t the most engaged. However, this challenge can also occur with smaller creators if the campaign doesn’t resonate with their audience or feels too sales-y, low-quality or rushed.

Avoid low engagement by partnering with influencers with demographics similar to your target audience and high engagement rates. Influencers know their fans best, so work with them to make content that really interests their followers.

Inadequate reporting post-campaign

Without good reporting, you miss out on learning what did or didn’t work. One way to avoid this is to identify the critical influencer marketing metrics and results you’ll track from the start. For example, Sprout Influencer Marketing offers link-tracking that enables users to add UTM parameters and platform pixels to gather full-funnel performance insights.

Choosing an influencer management tool

Ultimately, the best way to manage an influencer marketing campaign is to use influencer marketing tools. These platforms are designed to streamline and organize every part of a campaign.

They help you find the best influencers, manage contracts, communicate and collaborate with their teams, track campaign performance and stay on top of deadlines. Centralizing these critical tasks saves you time, reduces stress and helps your influencer campaigns run smoothly.

Here are three of our top recommendations.

Sprout Influencer Marketing

Sprout Influencer Marketing is an end-to-end influencer campaign management tool. It has many time-saving features, from custom landing pages that attract, qualify and capture prospective influencers to social listening, competitive analysis and reporting templates. The platform also has in-app portals for real-time communication and integrations with Shopify, Dropbox Sign, Meta Advertising, PayPal and Okta.

Heepsy

Heepsy offers tools for discovering and working with influencers. It provides access to influencer data like engagement rates, growth trends, follower demographics, and interest and behavior data. The tool allows users to analyze influencers’ past posts to predict future campaign performance and check if an influencer is legitimate.

Pitchbox

Pitchbox helps users save time on influencer outreach with customizable pitch templates and automated follow-ups. It allows users to track their progress with campaign performance reports and custom data analytics.

The key to efficient influencer management processes

Influencer management is a highly collaborative process with a lot of stakeholders involved. From your marketing team to your influencer and their team, getting everyone on the same page can be challenging.

Fortunately, you don’t need to build a process from scratch. With their built-in capabilities and templates, an influencer marketing tool can do much of the heavy lifting for you. Discover which influencer marketing platform can best help you manage your influencer marketing.