If you have an influencer marketing program in place, you are already well aware of the success that comes with partnering with authentic content creators. But to get the most out of your efforts, the time will come when you need to scale your program and invest in tools that enable you to do so.
For influencer marketing managers, the decision is a no-brainer. But how can you convince leadership that boosting the strategy is a worthy investment?
In this blog, we’ll walk you through how to sell influencer marketing software to your boss, discuss some brands for which the investment paid off, and provide you with a customizable pitch deck for when the time comes to make your pitch to your leadership team.
Influencer Brief Example Download:
The importance of getting executive buy-in
Getting buy-in from your leadership team is vital to ensure the future success of your influencer marketing campaigns. You want them to invest in action—not to let it get tabled and forgotten. Executives are busy people. You need to ensure they have all the information they need to get fully behind your influencer marketing plans.
Make sure they know influencer marketing is popular for a good reason—it works.
But marketing teams can’t just throw around a few buzzwords like “influencer” or “thought leader” and expect their boss to jump on board. As always, the execs at your brand will want to see a well-thought-out and specific marketing strategy that proves an influencer program will yield a good ROI.
How to pitch an influencer marketing platform to your boss
Describe the creator economy.
At this point, your leadership team is likely familiar with the term “creator economy.” But chances are they don’t know exactly what it means or how the company can leverage it to grow the brand.
Keep your overview simple, but be sure to outline a few key points as to why a strong presence within the creator economy is critical to DTC and ecommerce brands.
Creator economy – The space where we collect, create, distribute, and provide compensation for content in our current digital world.
- There are about 50 million social media creators worldwide.
- Creators exist in every niche imaginable (including yours).
- Creators provide a level of trust for their followers that traditional forms of advertising can no longer compete with.
- For creator partnerships to succeed, a creator must know the brand, use its products, and truly believe in both.
- 70% of consumers say they follow more than 10 influencers.
- 80% of consumers complete a purchase after seeing an influencer recommend that product on social media.
- More than 100 million people will be buying products via social media by 2023.
See Also: Understanding the Creator Economy
Present the budget.
The most important step to establishing a budget is determining how you plan to pay your influencers.
There are three common compensation models for established programs:
Product seeding (gifting)
This is the most cost-effective compensation method and involves giving content creators free products in exchange for content. It’s also a great way to generate more authentic product endorsements since it enables creators to try your product and learn about your company before promoting it.
Product seeding is most effective with:
- Customer advocates
- Brand ambassadors
- Nano influencers
- Micro influencers
Flat rate
A flat rate payment arrangement requires a pay-per-post structure. Depending on the creator’s audience size, the cost may vary from as little as $10 to thousands of dollars.
A pay-per-post agreement is most common among creators with 10,000 or more followers:
- Micro influencers (10,000 – 100,000 followers)
- Macro influencers (100,000 to 1 million followers)
- Mega/celebrity influencers (1 million or more followers)
Commission
If generating sales is the primary objective of your influencer marketing program, you may want to use a commission structure as your primary payment strategy. Paying commissions helps lower upfront costs while motivating your creators to achieve conversions.
The commission model is most common with:
- Affiliates
- Brand ambassadors
- Nano influencers
- Micro influencers
Outline goals and KPIs.
You’ll need a clear set of big-picture goals you want to achieve with your influencer marketing program. These goals could take weeks, months, or even years to fully accomplish, so it’s important to establish some key performance indicators (KPIs) you can point to for your leadership team to see your program is moving in the right direction.
Keep the following points in mind when selecting objectives and KPIs:
- Make objectives as specific and time-bound as possible. Instead of just saying you want to increase your sales, specify how much and within what time period you want to see the increase. For example, “Increase sales by X% in QX.”
- Set realistic goals and avoid wishful thinking. If your company has been growing at an average of 4% for the last five years, you can target to achieve 5%+ growth by implementing an influencer marketing campaign.
- Create objectives based on the current needs of your business. If you have a new business that people don’t know about, your priority should be driving traffic and gaining visibility instead of creating customer loyalty.
- On the other hand, if you have a well-established business, your focus could be on long-term goals like building customer loyalty and improving brand engagement.
- Establish trackable and measurable goals. If your objective is to increase customer loyalty, define your goal as an increase in customer repeat purchases. Remember, loyalty is subjective and can’t be measured, but you can easily track how many times a customer bought your product or service.
Download Guide: Bulletproof KPIs for Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Summarize the platform’s greatest advantages.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty, show your leadership team a quick but comprehensive overview of all the benefits of an influencer marketing platform. Then you can dive deeper into some of the platform’s greatest strengths.
One person can do the work of an entire team.
Finding brand-aligned influencers to partner with is one of the biggest challenges brands face. And it’s also one of the most important to overcome. Without these content creators, you’ll have a near-impossible time generating endorsements consumers can trust. In the worst-case scenario, you’ll turn consumers off completely with content that seems inauthentic or simply doesn’t resonate.
But with the right influencer marketing platform, the right creators are only a click away. You can narrow your search to specific keywords or demographics to find influencers in any niche and easily pinpoint influencers similar to your best performers.
Refer your boss to this graphic or this tool to help them visualize the time you can save with the right platform:
Find out how much time you can save with an influencer marketing software: GRIN’s Time Saving Calculator
Easily find brand-aligned creators to provide honest product endorsements.
Finding brand-aligned influencers to partner with is one of the biggest challenges brands face. And it’s also one of the most important to overcome. Without these content creators, you’ll have a near impossible time generating endorsements consumers can trust. In the worst-case scenario, you’ll turn consumers off completely with content that seems inauthentic or simply doesn’t resonate.
But with the right influencer marketing platform, the right creators are only a click away. You can narrow down your search to specific keywords or demographics to find influencers in any niche, as well as easily pinpoint influencers similar to your best performers.
Once you give your boss a brief overview of how easy it can be to find the perfect creator for your brand, let them try it for themselves with a couple of free tools:
Organize content and repurpose it across the entire marketing funnel.
Influencer content is the gift that keeps on giving. When you find content that resonates, you’ll want to use it across your entire marketing funnel. This approach saves you a bundle on creating ads, gives you engaging content for your social channel, and more.
Here’s a closer look at the benefits of having a content management system at your disposal:
- All your content is in one place. Your influencer marketing and user-generated content is always at your fingertips. Search it by tag, post type, performance stats, and even color palette.
- Track and report on campaign content. View your stats across all your influencer marketing campaigns and identify your most successful posts by tracking likes, engagements, views, and sales.
- Download and repurpose winning posts. Maximize your best content to reuse in email campaigns, paid ads, or on your social platforms.
- Discover what people are posting about you. Social listening allows you to find creators posting about you under the radar. This is the perfect tool to help you discover authentic new brand ambassadors.
- Use influencer content everywhere. Your platform should cover media content rights for all creator-produced content, so you’re free to share, edit, and reuse it anywhere in your marketing mix.
Create viral content and grow social presence.
Viral content is what every brand dreams of. But it’s tough to pull off without someone fully in tune with social media trends who knows how to create high-quality content. That’s not to say your marketing team can’t pull it off, but they’re much better off allowing influencers to be their secret weapon.
Questions to answer before you pitch
‘Why now?’
Sometimes, timing is everything, so be prepared to talk about recent trends. Find data points that demonstrate that influencer marketing is on an upward trajectory.
For example:
- Influencer marketing has increased from a $1.7 billion to $13.8 billion industry in the last five years.
- Experts predict that influencer marketing will increase to a $15 billion industry by the end of 2022.
- More than 70% of companies increased their influencer marketing budget in 2021.
- You can also find examples of how other brands are using influencer marketing effectively and how that same approach would work for you now.
- Check out some recent GRIN survey statistics to find out what brands and customers had to say about the effectiveness of influencer marketing:
- Nearly 98% of brands say influencer marketing positively impacts their business.
- More than 90% of brands say influencer marketing has increased brand awareness.
- More than 90% of companies say they get a positive ROI from influencer marketing.
- 82% of people are more inclined to buy products that influencers promote.
Lastly, be sure to break down the ROI of your current influencer marketing program. Compare the success you’re having now with the returns you expect with your new platform to paint a picture of exactly how much extra income the investment will bring in.
‘What’s the profitability ratio?’
Marketers are used to talking about KPIs and growth numbers. But your execs are more likely to want to understand how an influencer marketing strategy would be profitable to their business as a whole.
Thankfully, it’s easy for most companies to demonstrate the profitability of influencer marketing.
One of the reasons the strategy is so popular is because it delivers a considerable ROI. Show your leadership team how approaches like product seeding and influencer whitelisting can majorly impact your brand’s bottom line. Be sure to drive home the profit margins you expect to see from your influencer marketing plan.
Download Guide: How to Get ROI from Influencer Marketing
‘What are the next steps?’
Once you’ve presented the benefits of an influencer marketing platform and answered any questions from your leadership team, you’ll need to be ready with an action plan for the next steps. This is a great time to set up a live demo and invite your boss to sit in on the call. A customer service team member can give you a first-hand look at the platform in action, go over pricing structures, and answer any other questions you or your manager might have.
Brands that capitalized with the right influencer marketing platform
City Beauty
City Beauty is a Los Angeles-based luxury skincare brand that unifies beauty and science to produce research-focused skincare solutions. The company formulates its products with clean, cruelty-free ingredients designed to support specific skin goals—from visibly plumper lips to firmer-looking skin and anything in between.
The story
After rebranding in 2018, City Beauty needed a way to retain its best creators and recruit new ones who exemplified its updated mission and values. Over the next couple of years, the company built out a team of high-performing creators who trusted the brand, loved its products, and supported its mission.
The goal
Initially, City Beauty managed its entire influencer marketing program from a crowded spreadsheet. But the two-person team quickly realized it needed a more streamlined approach to managing its program once it grew to hundreds of creators across various platforms.
The solution
City Beauty hit its stride after implementing a platform that enabled them to find, recruit, and retain high-performing creators to grow the brand and manage relationships with its top converters. The team also had a way to easily manage all incoming content and communicate with its creators at scale.
The results
City Beauty has grown its Instagram following to 119,000 since investing in an influencer marketing platform just over two years ago. The team nurtured a thriving community of high-performing creators, with many generating as much as a 200% ROI.
City Beauty has also accumulated:
- 3,000+ pieces of influencer-generated content
- 28,000+ link conversions
- 6.9 million+ impressions from influencer content
View the full City Beauty case study and find more success stories from other beauty and wellness brands.
Schell Games
Schell Games is a game design and development company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that creates video games and interactive experiences for education and entertainment.
The story
In 2021, Schell Games wanted to generate awareness and help drive sales for its latest game release, I Expect You to Die 2.
The company planned its campaign in three phases: Pre-launch (June to August), launch (August), and post-launch (August to December). The two biggest challenges were finding experienced creators in the VR niche and tracking influencer conversions without using affiliate links.
The goal
With a $50,000 budget, the company established the following KPIs for its campaign:
- Cost per engagement (CPE) less than $1
- More than 1 million impressions
- More than 1 million creator video views
- At least 30 creator partnerships
The solution
Schell Games allowed its influencers to create ads for the company. The marketing team gave them creative freedom to produce content using their own voice and messaging on each post to promote authenticity.
With the right influencer marketing platform in place, Schell Games could easily recruit high-performing creators in the AR/VR gaming niche, analyze each one to ensure they met authenticity standards, seamlessly communicate with all creators using email integration, and easily evaluate the ROI of the entire influencer program.
The results
Schell Games’ innovative approach to influencer marketing enabled its creators to produce the type of content their audience loves. That creative freedom helped its influencers fall in love with the brand and encouraged them to reach out for future partnerships.
In six months, Schell games generated:
- 48 creator partnerships
- 1 million video views
- 1.4 million impressions
- $0.51 CPE
- 50,000+ engagements
View the full Schell Games case study and see more success stories from other gaming and electronics brands.
Frenchie Bulldog
Frenchie Bulldog is a pet lifestyle brand and creator of the reversible dog harness. The company strives to create cute, colorful collars and harnesses for “robust” small and medium-sized dogs—like Frenchies. Today, Frenchie Bulldog is one of the most popular dog apparel brands online.
The story
Frenchie Bulldog founder Bridget Levine went to great lengths to integrate the brand into a community of like-minded pet owners. The relationships formed through outreach to dog lovers on Instagram and Facebook and offline community meetups served as the basis for the brand’s influencer marketing program.
The goal
Frenchie Bulldog’s main mission was to generate content and increase brand awareness. With more than 90 creators and 30 celebrity endorsers on its roster, the brand needed a content management approach that didn’t involve convoluted Google spreadsheets.
The solution
Frenchie Bulldog’s influencer marketing platform enabled them to categorize all its influencer content and repurpose it across the marketing funnel. The platform also integrated with the Frenchie Bulldog’s ecommerce store, which allowed order fulfillment directly from the platform without having to log in to Shopify.
The results
Frenchie Bulldog’s community has grown so strong it now plans to extend its reach overseas. Their platform’s Lookalike Tool helps them find creators just like their existing high-performers who can help set them up for global success.
In 90 days, Frenchie Bulldog’s influencer marketing platform helped generate:
- 2,000+ code conversions
- 2,000+ pieces of influencer-generated content
- 400+ emails
- Nearly six figures of revenue
View the full Frenchie Bulldog case study and see more success stories from other accessory brands.
Key takeaway: Come prepared and leave with the green light on your new influencer marketing platform.
Preparation is critical if you want to get your leadership team to buy into an influencer marketing platform. Come ready with tangible stats and dollar figures to show your boss exactly what your company is getting with its investment.
Remember, the content creators are passionate about their craft and pass that excitement off to their followers. Bring the same energy into your pitch meeting, and your company’s executives won’t be able to help but share in your enthusiasm.
Are you ready to stake your claim in the creator economy? Discover more helpful tips and resources from the experts at GRIN: Creator Management Learning Center
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