Managing influencers for a direct-to-consumer brand is an involved role. You're not just managing tasks, you're also managing people and building long-term relationships. That's where tech vendors come in; today's digital marketing solutions can help you scale your approach to influencer marketing while discovering new, lucrative potential partnerships.
To do well at your job as an influencer marketing manager, you need to ensure brand partnerships are a positive experience for influencers as well as the audience you're targeting. Managing expectations and maintaining satisfaction for two or more parties can be difficult. However, with good management and help from a few tools, any influencer marketing manager can succeed.
In this article, we're going to list seven essential tools for influencer marketing managers to have in your arsenal and make your next partnership a success. Read on below to find out which tools you need to invest in for your next influencer marketing campaign.
1. Pixlee TurnTo (now Emplifi Influencers): Influencer marketing platform
An influencer marketing platform can help you discover new influencers in your niche, manage creators, partnerships, and content from start to finish, and analyze campaign success based on eCommerce metrics tied to sales.
With Pixlee TurnTo, everything from content collection to messaging is integrated into one platform so you don't need to move from one platform to another. You can also extend Pixlee TurnTo's services to manage user-generated content (UGC) and discover potential brand advocates within your existing community. Pixlee TurnTo also has various features that can help you elevate your influencer marketing strategies and stand out from your competitors, like influencer link tracking tools and the ability to map specific influencers and content pieces to revenue in dollar amounts.
Whether you're a bigger brand working with a lot of influencers of various sizes, or a smaller brand working with just a few for the time being, spreadsheets don't cut it when it comes to influencer marketing. There are a lot of factors that need to be considered and visible to your team, so investing in a versatile management platform can pay off, big time.
2. Notion: Online planner
The key to a successful influencer campaign is having a solid plan outlined for your team and for yourself. A tool we recommend for personal planning is Notion, which is popular for being a multi-purpose platform. Notion can be used for a variety of things such as website creation, project management, and even journaling. However, they're excellent for planning time-sensitive tasks.
When it comes to influencer marketing, time management is highly important. Handling influencers and content means that there are deadlines to meet. With a tool such as Notion, you can stay on track and ensure that everything is going according to plan. You can also utilize the tool's "Timeline View" feature to oversee a project's timeline.
Notion has four pricing plans to choose from depending on the scale of your influencer marketing operations. The good news is that Notion's personal plan is free, so if you want to get a feel for the platform by planning just your own tasks, you don't have to pay from the get-go.
3. Emplifi: Social Media Management
As an influencer marketing manager, it's likely that you play a role in the social content shared on your brand's profiles, from Instagram to TikTok. Emplifi's social media marketing solution lets you create and schedule custom social content to a variety of different platforms, and monitor success metrics as defined by your team. This is especially useful if you're resharing influencer content as your own posts.
Like Pixlee TurnTo, Emplifi also offers community management, analytics, and social listening tools to help you continue tweaking your influencer marketing campaigns to be the best they can be.
4. Google Drive: Cloud storage
When managing influencers and their content, you're going to need a vast amount of storage. Printing out content might not be feasible and resorting to a hard drive might be challenging to do so especially if you work in a team. So, the best way to share content and files with your team and influencers is by using cloud storage.
Cloud storage is great because anyone who has access to it can open it from practically anywhere. This makes remote work easier and you won't have to worry about forgetting any files since you can upload anything within minutes. This will also make working with clients and influencers much easier.
We recommend using Google Drive because it's free and it's perfect for collaborative work. Sharing access can be made easy by using links or emails. Users can also comment on images and edit folders.
5. Wise: Payment system
The third thing you need as an influencer marketing manager is a proper payment system. Whether you're paying influencers commissions or flat rates, it's important that you pay them on time and efficiently. Making single payments can be inefficient and time-consuming. With a payment system like Wise, you can send payments electronically and automatically.
If you're working with smaller-scale creators or brand ambassadors, Pixlee TurnTo's product-for-post capability allows you to easily send these individuals free products in exchange for posts on their social media profiles. Consider the different ways your brand can pay influencers; check out our influencer pay guide for more.
To ensure that payments are made on time and seamlessly, it's important to settle on a payment platform or system that works for you. You will also be using this platform to receive transactions from clients as well. There are a lot of platforms out there you can choose from. Before settling on a payment platform, do your research and look for references.
Wise is especially useful if you have clients or influencers overseas. Another platform that's popular is Paypal, and some creators build subscription models in Patreon.
6. Stellar: Review seeding program
One of the most effective influencer marketing strategies is product reviews. Influencer marketing managers get product reviews by sending products to creators. Pixlee TurnTo offers Creator Reviews, automatically asking the influencers you work with to share a review of your product after they use it as part of a campaign.
Taking reviews a step further, Stellar offers review seeding programs that integrate with influencer management platforms like Pixlee TurnTo. With Pixlee TurnTo and Stellar's seamless integration, food and beverage container brand Stanley is able to run these sampling campaigns and launch reviews live on-site in under four weeks. This is especially beneficial for obtaining more reviews and social proof for brand-new products your influencers may be promoting on social media.
7. Canva: Graphic design platform
Canva is a design tool that allows users to edit photos, create custom designs from scratch, or work off of existing templates free to use. Canva's regular plan is free and offers access to thousands of templates, graphics, and tools, while the pro (paid) plan offers even more and the ability to add team members to your account.
Canva can be valuable for influencer marketing managers who need to design quick assets, from social media posts calling for new influencers to reach out to sample content that influencers can work off of when designing their own promotional posts. In fact, Canva can be used to design anything for your brand — use the pro plan's "brand kit" tool to upload logos and colors, and build everything from campaign briefs to business cards to slide decks.
Influencer marketing management is a challenging job. It's a fast-paced working environment with lots of things to keep up with. It requires good management skills and the ability to maintain relationships with both clients and influencers. With so many demands, it can be hard to do without any tools.
The importance of project management can't be underestimated. To succeed in influencer marketing management, influencer marketing managers need to invest in certain tools to maintain their business. These tools we mentioned above are crucial when it comes to managing influencer marketing campaigns. So, if you're looking to ease your workload or improve your job, consider investing in some of these tools.To succeed in influencer marketing management, influencer marketing managers need to invest in certain tools to maintain their business. These tools we mentioned above are crucial when it comes to managing influencer marketing campaigns. So, if you're looking to ease your workload or improve your job, consider investing in some of these tools.
Ebnu Sudarso is the Co-founder of Milkwhale, an internationally acknowledged infographic production agency. Graphic design and writing have always been a passion. Over the years at Milkwhale, the company has created and published numerous infographics and great visuals.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on pixlee.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
