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Marketing has long since expanded past traditional methods like television and snail-mail advertising. Though these strategies can still be effective in some instances, the digital side of marketing is taking over, including influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing has blown up in the past several years, and the worldwide market size has more than quadrupled since 2017. With the market size of influencer marketing expected to grow past $14 billion in 2022, the best time for your business to start influencer marketing campaigns was years ago, and the second-best time is now.
The thought of jumping into influencer marketing can be scary for businesses that don’t have the knowledge or the time to create effective campaigns. Like any kind of marketing, there are a lot of variables that go into influencer marketing, especially if you want to treat it as a serious channel and use a data-driven approach. Keep reading to learn about influencer marketing agencies and how they can help you find the right influencers for your brand and get results from your campaigns.
What Is an Influencer Marketing Agency?
Social media platforms brought rise to social media influencers with large audiences and loyal followers. Working with influencers can bring your brand many benefits, like increased brand awareness and credibility, higher website traffic, and more sales. Influencer marketing agencies help connect brands and influencers. In addition to facilitating connections, many agencies help organize and execute successful influencer campaigns from start to finish.
Agencies might also have their own proprietary software for analyzing metrics like follower count and engagement rate to ensure that your brand is paired with the most fitting influencer possible for your goals.
They are also experts at fundamental marketing skills like idea creation, performance tracking, and data reporting. Just like you might pay a social media marketing agency to perfect your business’s social media strategy, an influencer marketing agency perfects your influencer partnership and campaign strategy.
What Exactly Do Influencer Marketing Agencies Do?
An influencer marketing agency’s specific tasks and responsibilities will vary depending on what the client needs and what service the agency offers, but a “good” influencer marketing agency will be able to direct the entire campaign for their client. They’re responsible for creating a strategy, executing it, and assessing its performance throughout the whole process.
Agencies often have relationships with top influencers that are household names in different niches, or they are experts at identifying and reaching out to these influencers. This allows them to choose the best partners for a particular brand—“best,” meaning influencers that not only match your budget and have a presence in your industry, but influencers that are in line with your brand’s image and mission.
Influencer marketing can take several forms, including sponsored content, paid sponsorships, product placement, affiliate partnerships, and more. The strategy you should use depends on your company’s end goals. Most influencer marketing campaigns involve one or more of these strategies:
- Product placement: This usually means an influencer integrates a brand’s product into their social media content in some way. It could be anything from creating a post to publishing a few short Instagram stories linking the product.
- Social media takeover: With this type of campaign, the goal is to increase the popularity of a brand’s social media channels. A takeover might consist of an influencer posting directly for a brand. An influencer marketing agency can help the influencer and the brand work together to create and execute takeover campaigns.
- Giveaways or contests: An influencer promotes a giveaway on behalf of a brand. Fun competitions and giveaways can give both the influencer and the business they are partnered with more attention, making it a win-win.
- Theme or hashtag campaigns: In this strategy, an influencer uses a hashtag or theme that is connected to your brand in some way. For example, if you are a dog toy company, an influencer partner can post a photo showing them using your toys with their dog, caption it with a particular hashtag, and then ask their followers to do the same.
Many more strategies may be involved in successful influencer marketing (testimonials, demonstrations, affiliate linking, etc.). An influencer marketing agency’s specialty is implementing the strategies that best fit a brand’s goals.
The Benefits of Working With an Influencer Marketing Agency
Full-service influencer marketing agencies are responsible for executing influencer marketing campaigns and handling the intricacies so you don’t have to. Like any specialized marketing agency, influencer marketing agencies are experts in their niche field.
Their expertise is in connecting clients with the right types of influencers and then supporting collaboration to create a successful campaign. There are many ways that hiring an agency can alleviate the workload on your shoulders. Agencies can:
- Determine the target audience for a campaign.
- Identify popular influencers that speak to that target audience and are appropriate for the campaign.
- Work with successful influencers across multiple social media apps and understand how to reach the audience on each channel.
- Create a strategy for the marketing campaign so that the client’s goals are achieved.
- Assist influencers in creating engaging, fun content that’s relevant to the brand and its audience.
- Monitor the influencer’s content to ensure that it’s high-quality and shared at the right time.
- Measure performance to ensure things are going as planned.
Influencer marketing agencies save you precious time and effort as a business owner or a marketing manager. Hiring professionals who already have experience and ties in the industry will ensure that you don’t spend your valuable time searching for influencers on top influencer marketing platforms like Instagram and TikTok or wracking your brain for sponsored content ideas.
In Conclusion
To put it simply, influencer marketing agencies work with your brand to find the right fit for an influencer partnership and help you launch influencer campaigns to reach your target audience. If you don’t have the time to focus on an entirely new marketing channel or if you want to see better results from your influencer marketing, you might want to look into hiring an agency.
