Marketing Procurement

An introduction to Influencer Agencies: Insights for procurement professionals

Adding Value

For procurement professionals, understanding the basics of influencer agencies and their market dynamics can enhance collaboration with marketing teams. By facilitating clear communication, strategic alignment, and effective contract management, procurement can help drive impactful, measurable outcomes from influencer marketing campaigns.

In the evolving world of digital marketing, influencer campaigns have emerged as a key strategy for brands to engage with targeted audiences authentically. As procurement professionals, understanding the basics of influencer agencies and their role in marketing can significantly enhance the value and efficiency of these collaborations. Here’s an introduction to influencer agencies and insights into how they can improve ROI for marketing efforts.

What constitutes an Influencer Campaign?

An influencer campaign leverages social media personalities (or ‘creators’) to promote a brand’s message or product. These campaigns can range from a single post to a series of posts over several weeks or months but typical last between 2 and 8 weeks. Otherwise, the budget often defines the scope and duration of the campaign.

Levels of Campaign Involvement

The ‘levels’ below are an indication of the work done either by your influencer agency or your colleagues (if you manage your creators directly):

1. Strategic Campaigns: These involve comprehensive activities such as creative concept development, influencer vetting, selection, negotiation, and follow-up on campaign performance. Fees for these campaigns are relatively moderate – not by media or creative agency standards, mind – due to the number of services provided.
2. Outreach Campaigns: These focus mainly on sourcing influencers, negotiation of their contracts – a very important aspect (see below) – and budget recommendations, these campaigns typically have higher fees due to their strategic and specialized nature, as well requiring more time.

Influencer Tiers

The size or ‘reach’ of influencer is a key element in determining the RoI as well as their role in helping achieve your marketing goals. While a ‘small’ creator may not give you a huge volume of influence he/she may present great value or have future potential to do so. Here are the widely accepted names and meanings:

• Nano-Influencers: 1,000 to 10,000 followers.
• Micro-Influencers: 10,000 to 100,000 followers.
• Mid-tier Influencers: 50,000 to 100,000 followers.
• Macro-Influencers: 500,000 to 1 million followers.

Key Platforms

Influencer campaigns are particularly effective on platforms such as Twitch, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. The shift towards social media, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has made these platforms essential for reaching consumers.

Choosing the Right Influencer

• Data Matching: Ensure the influencer reaches the desired demographic. The number of monthly impressions is a quantitative (not qualitative) measure of how often posts appear in others’ feeds, but are much more meaningful when coupled with…
• Engagement Rates: Focus on influencers with high engagement rates. These are the amount of verifiable interactions – likes, RTs/reposts, comments – the posts receive from other accounts
• Cost Analysis: Evaluating the cost per view/CPM and cost per engagement (CTR or other if there is a further metric), just as you would for other digital campaign.
• Posting Frequency: Consider how often the influencer posts about the brand – silence or talking about the brand at the wrong time are rarely sought-after performance traits.

The Client’s Role in Enhancing Campaign Performance

Often overlooked, agencies and ‘creators’ don’t work in a vacuum. As the segment grows and develops so does our understanding of ‘best-in-class’ behaviour by your colleagues…

• Clear Briefs: Define goals, budgets, timelines, and a single clear message. The absence of a clear message can lead to confusion and fatigue on the part of the targeted consumer, if not the creator themself.
• Understanding Metrics: Success can be measured by brand equity, share of influence, reach, product awareness, and consideration. Articulate what it is you’re trying to achieve in the short and long term.
• Roles and Responsibilities: Implement a RASCI model to clarify duties across global and local teams.

Assuring Influencer Agency Performance

Procurement can add significant value by:

• Structuring a fair and transparent pitch (when using an agency): clear parameters, an even playing field and comprehensive documentation are a source of as a great relief to your stakeholders and agencies alike, even if they aren’t the most fun part of the process. A competent procurement professional doesn’t just help remove the workload in getting the right agency for stakeholders, he/she removes the anticipated stress and sleepless nights of an unclear process. Hit those dates and deadlines!
• Benchmarking fees: not just how much you’re paying for services, but what they cover. Review the contract versus what you’re being invoiced.
• Gathering constructive feedback from stakeholders: it speaks for itself, but this should be a given throughout the pitch and (importantly) in ensuring an ongoing, successful relationship afterwards – a contract reaching its planned expiry (or even being extended, pending correct approvals) is a sign at least the basics have gone well, and you have avoided unnecessary work and business upheaval
• Scheduled monitoring: day-to-day execution tracking should be done against strategic goals. Licensed platforms like TRAACKR are commonplace with large corporates, making up-to-the-minute campaign and creator performance tracking an invaluable resource already. This is normally the domain of your marketing colleagues, but keep a close eye both on the general performance as well as the
• Organizing QBRs: Regular Quarterly Business Reviews to assess progress on your strategic goals as well as the agency relationship .
• Remuneration and Feedback: Performance-based bonuses and satisfaction surveys involving both agency and client feedback are successful when they have the buy-in of client and agency alike; “When you win, we win!”

Regarding maximising RoI in terms of contract KPIs, the market is still very young for definitive influencer agency metrics (à la Media or Search), but third parties are out there developing new, qualitative methodology that will rinse out any non-qualitative elements (like bot interactions) – watch this space, as I am researching right now.

Negotiations Between Agency and Creators

Key contract negotiation points include:

• Fees: what the creator is paid, but it (of course) has to cover costs of materials and expenses, which can depend on the brief
• Content format and tone of voice. The wrong choice here is the same as choosing a creative agency that doesn’t understand brand guidelines.
• Platform selection and engagement specifics: i.e. which social media and how many impressions and engagements are expected.
• Pricing and rights to use content in other media (see ‘Boosting Content’ below).
• Competitor terms and termination clauses: should be self-evident, but they can’t be working for the enemy, and a clear definition of underperformance should be included.
• Payment criteria and posting schedules: what deliverable triggers campaign delivery? How often are they expected to mention your brand?

The Value of an Agency

Retaining one large agency brings scale and specialization to influencer marketing, often reaching broader audiences more effectively than in-house teams. Try bringing it in house and you’ll see that the workload and knowledge are areas you either leave to experts…or become one yourself as a client (which takes years).

They are also instrumental in coordinating the reach and impact of a campaign beyond basic brief criteria:

• Boosting Content: Boosting extends the reach of influencer content beyond their followers, often using their content in broader digital or outdoor campaigns.
• Managing Campaign Overlap: Avoid ‘cannibalism’ – my terminology, for want of a better expression – by ensuring influencers have distinct audiences and content that don’t overlap significantly, preventing confusion or audience fatigue.
• Integrating with Broader Advocacy: Influencer marketing should complement PR and event strategies, creating a cohesive experience across all media types. For product launches, integrating influencers helps maximize media impact and maintain consistent reach and frequency.

Conclusion

For procurement professionals, understanding the basics of influencer agencies and their market dynamics can enhance collaboration with marketing teams. By facilitating clear communication, strategic alignment, and effective contract management, procurement can help drive impactful, measurable outcomes from influencer marketing campaigns.

About the author

David Little has over 20 years’ experience in procurement. David has worked on several areas in Marketing, including Media, Creative, Influencers and Sponsorships. He is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

The truncated (‘list’) version of the article can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-l-151b1b6_an-introduction-to-influencer-agencies-insights-activity-7224353933589176321-6HUs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop