THE RIGHT INFLUENCER MARKETING MANAGER – The influencer market’s size is expected to reach around $22 billion by 2025. This is a massive increase from its previous size of $13.3 billion in 2021. It’s clear, then, that influencer marketing is a valuable and consistently increasing new approach to marketing.
But influencer marketing isn’t something that happens by itself, you need to manage influencers for sustained success.
What is influencer management?
Let’s begin with the basics. Influencer management basically involves managing, supervising, and directing influencer-based marketing strategies.
This means that influencer management strategies are designed to ensure that your influencers produce high-quality content and support your company’s goals.
Management of influencers also involves balancing their needs with those of the company. You may also partner up with appropriate agencies in the first place using versatile Indian influencer platforms.
Practically, influencer management means regularly communicating with influencers in order to make sure everything is going the way it should. In this sense, influencers can be viewed as an extension of the native marketing team of a company.
What is the importance of influencer management?
If done in the right way, influencer marketing can be a powerful tool for achieving your company’s goals. The majority of influencer marketing companies find it highly effective in increasing brand awareness and sales.
However, these fantastic influencer marketing results do not happen by chance. That is where influencer marketing management steps in.
Even the best influencer in the world can’t be able to increase sales if they don’t know what products they should advertise, who their target audience is, and what type of content they should produce. This is where influencer management comes in.
You can make sure that your brand’s influencer marketing strategy is consistent across all channels by actively managing it. This allows you to send a consistent message regardless of the medium they use.
It is essential to manage your influencers because it allows you to ensure that your company responds quickly and appropriately to any changes.
Market trends and marketing strategies change over time. Influencer Managers need to be able to adapt and keep their influencer marketing strategy on track.
What does it mean to be an influencer marketing manager?
The best way to manage a campaign or project is with someone who can do it all, and that’s what an influencer marketing manager does.
These managers usually oversee all influencer-related policies, processes, and campaigns. This means they will be involved in selecting the right influencers and creating influencer marketing campaigns. They seek to give influencers the right conditions they need to perform in order to do their jobs properly.
Influencer marketing managers are often available to give real-time feedback to influencers and provide guidance to them. This is especially important when the influencer may not be familiar with your products at the beginning of the collaboration.
What are the responsibilities of an influencer marketing manager?
1. Campaign management
Managing an requires many of the same tasks and workflows as managing a conventional project. Campaign management, or project management, is a crucial responsibility of influencer managers.
Influencers must be given creative freedom and the right direction for their content. Technical skills are the ability to understand a new marketing strategy and then convert that information into actionable insights that serve as the basis for influencers’ content.
Influencers must have creative freedom and be guided in the right direction by the brand. This balance requires strong leadership skills as well as technical skills.
In short, influencer managers must have a solid understanding of the requirements and demands of different social media platforms. They must also be able to evaluate the quality of the influencers’ content.
2. Building relationships
Collaboration software was the second most popular source of spending for companies in 2021.
Companies are keen to budget for tools that encourage effective collaboration, which is why effective collaboration is such a priority.
In influencer marketing, relationship building is a key component of successful collaborations. It’s easier to work with people and groups with whom you have a strong relationship.
That is why your influencer marketing managers must be skilled at building relationships.
Managers need to be able to connect with influencers on a personal level which will make both sides feel valued and encourage collaboration.
3. Influencer communications
Effective collaboration is only possible when there are strong relationships. A good influencer marketing manager must be able to communicate with influencers. Communication is the key to ensuring that influencer programs produce great results. It reduces the chance of misunderstandings and speeds up collaborations.
What makes influencer communication different from other forms of business communication?
The channel through which the communication occurs is a major difference. Social media is the most popular channel for influencers to reach their audience.
Important to remember that influencer marketing managers must be able to adapt and evolve their influencer communications in order to benefit from the new collaboration. Although reaching out via social networks is great, planning detailed campaigns on Snapchat and Twitter will create unnecessary difficulties.
Your managers must be able to shift communications to professional platforms and help influencers to make that change.
4. Coordinating with the marketing team
The ideal scenario is for influencers to integrate seamlessly into your marketing strategies and efforts. This is what influencer marketing managers do.
It is inefficient to ask your marketing team to coordinate marketing programs with every influencer you want to partner with. Instead, your influencer marketing managers handle the cross-team coordination.
Managers must be able to discern the information from both groups. Managers need to identify which sections of the report should be highlighted to the marketing team when influencers provide updates on progress. They must also know which information they should give to influencers in order to continue working towards the overall marketing goal.
Influencers must also have a clear understanding of the brand image. The image should be consistent across all channels and targeted at the right audience. The marketing team would communicate this image to influencers through the manager of Influencer Marketing.
Managers can streamline the coordination process. This allows your company to implement influencer-friendly marketing strategies much faster.
The characteristics of an effective marketing manager
Now that we know what influencer marketing managers need to do, how can you tell if someone has the right qualities to do these things well?
These are the top characteristics to look for when looking at potential candidates.
1. Essential knowledge of social media
Social media marketing is a crucial component of many influencers’ outreach strategies. Many influencers are content creators on multiple social platforms, tailoring their content to each platform’s requirements.
Marketing managers need to be familiar with each social media site.
Managers can also benefit from social media skills that help them assess the quality of influencers’ content. Managers must understand why certain content is more popular and which hashtags can make them go viral.
2. People skills
A good influencer marketing manager must be able to connect with people for several reasons.
First, they must locate influencers and convince them to partner with your brand. Someone with good people skills will easily connect with influencers and collaborate with them, which increases the chances of a successful collaboration.
It’s also important to remember that managers will engage in influencer relationship management daily. A good relationship with influencers will open the door to future collaborations and encourage their followers to buy your products.
3. Master communicator
Influencer marketing managers must be able to communicate clearly with marketing teams and influencers, which is easier if they are master communicators.
The top influencer marketing managers need to see the needs of each team and what they want. Effective communication ensures that the marketing teams work together with the brand’s influencers.