Helping You Manage Influencers that Work with Your Brand

Getting Influencers to Interact with Your Brand

One of my favourite services to offer my virtual assistant clients is influencer management. I know this can seem like an ambiguous service, almost like I made it up! I can assure you that it’s a very real service and something that clients of mine who are building up a large following really need. Throughout this blog post, we are going to go through together:

1. what influencer management is,

2. why it’s helpful to have a VA take on this role and,

3. how to know if you are ready to have this type of support in your business

What is influencer management?

From my experience, influencer management is another form of marketing. It involves engaging with influencers, introducing them to the brand, offering products or services in exchange for reviews on social media, collaborating on giveaways, and creating paid content. Engaging with influencers begins on social media, such as on Instagram. The first order of business is selecting influencers whose content and personality fit with your brand. Once approved, follow them and like some of their recent posts. This is always good Instagram form. Criteria to vet influencers to work with can vary. However, some key benchmarks include:

• a high level of engagement,

• no comment pods (the same people who comment on posts, often in a very generic way),

• have a growing following, and

• create consistent posts of high quality and show passion in your field.

Once you have selected influencers to work with, the best strategy to follow is to categorize them according to the extent of their online presence. For instance, some will only be fit for product in exchange for review and then possibly move to a giveaway depending on how the relationship has progressed, then an Instagram campaign, and others you might want for paid content.

An Instagram campaign focuses on influencers promoting a contest for your products around your company philosophy. For example, a client of mine focuses on body positivity in her business. We have created a campaign in which influencers pose in a bathing suit demonstrating body positivity in their caption and photo, while encouraging others to take part in the contest. The post also includes the relevant hashtag to track all the other entries.

Paying for content means that the influencers shoot photos of themselves using your product. Content examples include lifestyle shots, flat lays and more. Once approved, they will post the image on their Instagram feed, tagging your account. As you have paid for the images, you are welcome to repost their image to your Instagram feed with a tag to the creator.

How a VA Can Help

Having a virtual assistant help you in managing your influencer partnerships can substantially free up your time. Here is an overview of the tasks I do for a client of mine with a growing influencer base:

Photo by Wonderful Ida

• Select influencers to work with

• Email influencers according to where we want to start with them

• Create and regularly update a tracking spreadsheet (almost like a database) with current statuses of all influencers. I use Google sheets so that my client can monitor our progress and provide feedback in real time. I also want to avoid reaching out to the same influencer more than once!

• Collect and store media kits and rates

• Organize giveaways by providing instructions, monitor posts, repost mention of give-away on stories

• Create and distribute coupon codes for specified amounts to appropriate influencer, track who has been given what coupon code

• Create and manage campaigns based on values of company. I email the relevant influencers to take, provides campaign rules and guidelines and helps track the entries.

• Relationship building with influencers - guide them on a journey with your company.

How to Know if Your Business is Ready for Influencer Marketing

Photo from Unsplash.

Right off the bat, influencer marketing is not for everyone. It’s just that some businesses might not have the budget or want to make time to get this up and running.

There is no benchmark on the number of followers you need on Instagram or TikTok. It really depends on how engaged your community is with your content. Seeing how other people value and review your products can be very powerful as it tends to get picked up by more and more accounts, spreading through Instagram with help of the algorithm. That’s where I think the true value of influencer marketing lies. As with most things in business, you won’t know until you try!

If you are looking to grow your business and spread the word about your products or services, I really think you should give influencer marketing a try. If you are looking for some admin support on this, feel free to reach out to me on my contact me page here. I’d love to see how I can help you grow your business with influencer marketing!

🌟If you want to read about my other VA Services for small business support, you can check them out here.