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How To Scale Influencer Marketing: 7 Ways To Take Creator Partnerships To The Next Level

January 18, 2023
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15 min
Author
Rochi Zalani
Content Writer, Modash
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Influencer marketing is manageable when you begin: a handful of partnerships, 1:1 communication, and manual content tracking.... But what happens as you grow?

  • When you've recruited more creators
  • When influencer-generated content becomes hard to keep track of
  • When your team members are overwhelmed by communicating with creators and managing campaigns…

If scaling your influencer marketing program is at the top of your marketing to-do list this year, you're in the right place.

Here are seven ways to help you scale your influencer marketing efforts — without burning out.

1. Speed up influencer discovery with software

Use when:

  • You’re spending a lot of time searching for the perfect influencers
  • Your goal is to increase the number of your influencer partnerships
  • You struggle with identifying whether a creator is the right fit for your brand

There’s nothing more soul-sucking than spending hours on your For You page searching for your next influencer. Worse, you’re still not 100% sure whether they could bring you a positive ROI.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Using Modash, you can search for influencers, check their performance & audience data, and get their emails -- all in a few clicks.

In the database, you'll find a whopping 200M+ influencers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Use filters to find creators who match your desired criteria exactly — like a key to a lock.

There are two kinds of filters:

  • Influencer filters: These are the quantitative and qualitative metrics you want your influencers to meet — like a certain growth rate, number of followers, engagement rate, and more.
  • Audience filters: These are the demographic details you want your ideal influencer’s followers to have for targeted reach — like age, location, gender, interests, and more.

⚡ Pro-tip: apply two to three filters in your first round of searching and keep narrowing down slowly. This will ensure you don’t miss any ideal influencers because you got too picky in the beginning.

Next, you want to analyze influencer profiles using Modash’s influencer vetting tool. Get a detailed breakdown of a creator’s audience, popular posts, paid content performance, and more. Here’s an example of what this data looks like for hair influencer, Suman.

If the creator has an email publicly available anywhere, Modash will find it, and make it available to you in 1 click.

If you already have an influencer or two in mind, simply enter their usernames on Modash to get their profile analyzed. Forever minus the hassle of manually reaching out to creators and hand-vetting them.

Found a creator you love already? Find similar ones using the influencer lookalike tool. For Suman, Modash found 184 influencers similar to her.

Dreamy to have all this (and much more) under one tab, am I right? Try Modash for free for 14-days.

2. Boost influencer commitment by creating a performance-based model

Use when:

  • Your goal is to reduce the risk of influencer marketing
  • You want more trackable ROI from creator partnerships
  • You aim for a deeper commitment from your influencers

There are many ways to compensate creators, but by far, the lowest-risk and highest-reward one is performance-based pay. The idea is simple: you pay influencers a part of each sale, sign-up, download, or click they bring in.

  • Low-risk: You don’t invest in influencer relationships where there might be little to no ROI. You only pay when you get a desired action triggered via the creator.
  • High-reward: You ensure every influencer brings in tangible results — whether that’s revenue, clicks, downloads, or sign-ups. Plus, since influencers take a commission on each sale that comes through them, they are incentivized to bring you more money.

How do you kick off performance influencer marketing? Create trackable affiliate codes or UTM links to attribute traffic and conversions to a specific creator. For example, Keara Callahan uses her discount code, KEARACALLAHAN50, so her audience can save from their first order on Kinder Beauty.

Performance influencer marketing is similar to partnering with affiliates for your brand.

⚠️ But remember: not every influencer will accept 100% performance-based pay. The solution here is to have a fixed base rate built into your compensation model (to cover content creation costs), then add performance-based pay on top.

3. Widen your influencer marketing horizons by experimenting (with guardrails)

Use when:

  • You haven’t experimented with many types of influencers and/or channels
  • Your goal is to get more eyeballs and expand your brand’s reach
  • You have the budget to try something new

Often, companies limit scaling their influencer marketing efforts due to self-imposed restrictions.

All these are instances where you can give yourself more breathing room to try something new.

For example, writer and influencer Baron Ryan partnered with Ubisoft to promote…Nintendo Switch. It seems like an unlikely animal friendship, but the comments are beaming with how perfect of an ad it is.

Knowing what you want and where you’ll get it is good. But influencer marketing is a creative game — don’t let the “rules” limit you.

  • Dabble with new kinds of creators
  • Try marketing to a new type of customer
  • Dip your toes into a new social media platform now and then

Build room for flexibility in your influencer marketing budget — your best bet might come from an unexpected source.

⚠️ Note: experiment within guardrails and with a strategy. For example, experimenting with Yoga creators makes sense if you’re a fitness brand and have only partnered with gym influencers. But collaborating with a food influencer? Um, not so much. Take a calculated risk instead of just throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks.

4. Collect creator content fast using an influencer monitoring tool

Use when:

  • You need to collect influencer content for reporting
  • You can’t keep track of influencer posts going live, especially stories
  • You aim to distribute or repurpose creator content

Imagine having a virtual assistant staying up 24*7 to track what every one of your creator partnerships is posting. That’s exactly what an influencer monitoring tool does. Whether you’re looking to download IG stories before they disappear or track how many influencer gifting campaigns were successful, monitoring tools will help you do it all.

Modash lets you discover, analyze, and monitor — all under one roof. Simply create a campaign, specify hashtags to track, and Modash’s monitoring tool will auto-capture every piece of content created using your inputs.

Repurposing, reusing, and tracking IGC isn’t something your team should be doing manually. Use SaaS tools to your advantage and scale in a jiffy.

5. Eliminate time-sucking logistics using templates, automation, and documentation

Use when:

  • You have an army of influencers and are adding new creators to your team frequently
  • Your team is spending a lot of time communicating with creators
  • You start each influencer partnership from scratch

As you add more and more influencers to your program, you’ll find it challenging to manage the logistics of it all. Setting up time-saving automation is a no-brainer.

Here are the five workflows you can easily automate or templatize:

  • Content collection using influencer tracking tools
  • Copy and fill the same influencer brief template for each campaign
  • Automate an email drip sequence using Drip (or any similar tool) to onboard new creators
  • Use a platform like Arka to create personalized packaging for influencers at scale
  • Tweak an influencer contract template for each new influencer you onboard
  • Have an influencer outreach template to scale your email/DM game with influencers
  • Create a document or landing page to answer FAQs like Laurie Belles does for their ambassador program

The easiest way to scale is to keep trying to find ways to reduce the time on repetitive activities. And with technology being as massive as it is today, you can automate or templatize most things in your workflow.

6. Maximize impact by repurposing influencer-generated content

Use when:

  • You have a backlog of influencer-generated content (IGC) that has never been reused or repurposed
  • Your creators have produced excellent creative deliverables you can distribute
  • Your goal is to spend less money on in-house content production

Picture this: an influencer produces excellent content for your brand. They publish it on their account, it performs exceptionally well, you get happy, and you move on to the next partnership. That high-performing content never sees the light of day again.

Wait, what?

If something has proven to sit well with your audience, wouldn’t you want to reap more benefits from it? It’s simple math: you must squeeze every drop of juice out of your IGC to ensure the money you’re putting behind influencer marketing has a good return on investment.

The best part? It's smart scaling — way easier than flying on the “more! more! more!” content production hamster wheel.

Glossier is a pro at this: it regularly shares content its influencers produce on its own Instagram channel.

But resharing IGC on your own brand profile isn’t the only way to repurpose influencer-generated content. You can also repurpose IGC for:

  • email campaigns
  • website creative
  • paid social ads
  • case studies
  • blog posts

⚠️ Note: you need to obtain usage right permissions from influencers before reusing their content. Ideally, you should include this in your contract. Some influencers might charge an additional fee in exchange for this, but the ROI is worth it.

7. Amplify your ROI by doubling down on your best-performing influencers, channels, and niches

Use when:

  • You’ve been in the influencer marketing game a while and know your best bets
  • You’ve seen fantastic results with a channel or influencer marketing strategy
  • You have many high-performing influencers working with your brand

The flip side to experimentation is doubling down on what works.

If it isn’t your first rodeo with running influencer marketing campaigns, you know a thing or two about what hits well with your audience.

  • Maybe you found TikTok works better than YouTube
  • Or you know the exact script that makes people ‘click’ with your mission
  • Perhaps you found a specific kind of influencer gets you the highest ROI

Whatever it is, dig your heels deeper into your sure-fire successes to scale influencer marketing easily.

Partner with more creators who look like your ideal match if you have the management resources.

But if you can’t manage to increase your influencer count right now, consider turning your best-performing influencers into brand ambassadors. Creating a brand ambassador program is cheaper than partnering with new creators and offers plenty of benefits:

  • exclusivity from influencers
  • deeper commitment to your brand  
  • easier to scale compared to creator collaborations

Beauty Works is a champion at transforming its best influencers into brand ambassadors. Most recently, they launched a collection with Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu.

Whether it’s a channel, a cheerleading squad of your favorite creators, or a niche kind of content, scale what already works.  

Scaling influencer marketing without making it transactional

At its core, influencer marketing is about people. More influencer partnerships don’t mean more revenue — quality beats quantity, every time. It’s no surprise, then, that managing your creator relationships is the cornerstone of every successful strategy.

You can’t scale speaking with creators 1:1, learning what they need to do their best work, and providing value to each influencer you work with.

Unlike other forms of marketing, influencer marketing is more art than science. Scaling your influencer marketing efforts doesn’t mean you build one-off creator partnerships and “automate” chatbot conversations with no soul — it’s quite the opposite.

Scaling influencer marketing is about calibrating your methods to focus more on the relationship aspect and less on the admin stuff.

Try Modash for free for 14 days and let it do the heavy lifting of the logistical (and let’s face it: usually boring) stuff of influencer marketing. You focus on building authentic relationships with your creators.  

 
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