Today, 90% of marketers consider influencer marketing the real game-changer in brand promotions. No doubt, it has already reached almost $14 billion global market size in 2021. Influencer marketing managers operate silently and are the backbone of this ever-growing global influencer marketing industry.
So what does an influencer marketing manager do? Well, they have to wear many hats. They call the shots for leading and managing a team of influencers on behalf of a brand. Besides that, they run the show for managing all the influencer marketing campaigns of that particular company.
The influencer marketing managers play the lead role in the future influencer recruitment process. They are even crucial in building and maintaining the liaison with the influencers.
Depending upon the size of the marketing program, they can also act as a one-person department. As a one-person department, influencer marketing managers rely heavily on influencer management software and automation tools to perform the duties of an entire influencer marketing team.
As more and more businesses turn online, the demand for influencer marketing managers grows significantly over time. Let’s learn about the things every influencer marketing manager performs to establish a brand footprint in the world of influencer marketing.
Having a Complete Idea about the Audiences
It is impossible to taste the success of an influencer marketing campaign without identifying the potential audiences. An influencer marketing manager is aware of the potential audiences of any influencer marketing campaign. Besides that, they have a strong sense of how their audience will react to that campaign.
Without having a clear idea about the target group and its pulse, it is hard for them to find the right influencers for that campaign.
Defining the Goals and Objectives of Any Influencer Marketing Campaign
It is completely under the responsibility of an influencer marketing manager to define the goals of any influencer marketing campaign before launching it. Every influencer marketing campaign should target at least one of these four goals:
- Build brand awareness as well as strengthen brand image
- Increase social engagement and interactions with the brand
- Improve conversions
- Gain customer insight and data
If any influencer marketing manager has a clear goal and objective for his campaign, he will not face any difficulties approaching an influencer and convincing him to promote the brand.
Finding the Right Influencers for the Campaign
No doubt, every influencer is an opinion leader with a social following base, and their fans treat them as expert and trustworthy sources of valuable information. So, if an influencer marketing manager targets the right influencer, he/she can easily reach to influencer’s fan base.
However, he has to consider several factors like the reach, authenticity, and engagement of any particular influencer to decide whether he is ideal or not. Besides, he should have a clear idea of whether the influencer’s voice matches perfectly with the brand being promoted. Let’s take a look at these factors in detail.
- Reach
Nowadays, you can find three types of influencers in the market based on their fan base, and they are nano, micro, and macro-influencers. An influencer marketing manager can choose any kind of influencer based on the size of their influencer marketing program. However, if we consider engagement with audiences, influencers with smaller fan bases always perform better than influencers with larger fan bases.
But this doesn’t mean choosing a nano influencer is always ideal for your campaign. And the reason is quite simple. Just imagine a nano influencer with 5000 followers and a macro influencer with 200000 followers. Now, if the engagement ratio of that nano influencer is 30%, that means it can provide 1500 potential audiences. In contrast, if the engagement ratio of that macro influencer is 5%, that means it can provide 10,000 potential customers. So, you can reach a larger section of potential customers with the help of a macro influencer.
However, the cost of hiring a macro influencer is obviously much more significant than hiring a nano or micro-influencer. Having said that, if an influencer marketing campaign is bounded under time constraints, choosing a macro influencer is the best bet for every influencer marketing manager to reach audiences globally in a short span of time.
- Authenticity
There is no doubt that you can encounter many fake influencers nowadays on the internet. Fake influencers come with fake followers. They are not only leading to a loss of thousands of dollars in influencer marketing programs but also compromising brand safety.
So, how would an influencer marketing manager judge the authenticity of an influencer? Well, he/she should pay utmost attention to metrics like impressions, overall reach, likes, and comments. This will provide you with quantifiable data to scrutinize before determining to move forward with a partnership.
These insights let you see how the influencer’s following interrelates with their posted content and what kind of content reverberates best.
- Engagement
Every influencer marketing manager should focus on the engagement rate of an influencer to identify the inflated follower counts. For example, if someone has 150,000 followers but only gets 150 likes on their content, there is no question of hiring that influencer, and the manager should immediately raise a red flag.
But how would you calculate the engagement rate of an influencer? A helpful rule of thumb is to divide the influencer’s average likes or comments by their follower count and then multiply it by 100. If you get a result between 2%-3%, it is considered OK, but if you get a higher engagement rate, it is obviously better.
- Voice
Besides all the above factors, every influencer marketing manager should consider whether the voice of an influencer matches perfectly with the brands they’re promoting. They should always search for an influencer whose content is compatible with the brands they choose to promote and simply not select an influencer for their campaign just because he/she has great engagement metrics.
However, after finding the appropriate influencer for any particular influencer marketing campaign, the influencer marketing manager will make sure that the product is successfully shipped to the influencer.
Working on Relationship Building through Influencer Campaign Management
The influencer marketing manager is in charge of creating an influencer marketing campaign. He makes sure that the company’s vision comes through it clearly. He will be also responsible for drafting the proposals for this campaign along with deciding on KPIs. This will help the company to assess the success of that campaign.
The manager will approach the influencers who will promote the brand. He will make sure that the product is successfully shipped to the influencer. Besides that, he has to manage all the communication with influencers. It helps the influencer to have a clear idea about the brand they’re promoting. So, he should find ways to reach common ground with influencers and brands. Ultimately his aim is to attract potential customers through influencers with creative control over their campaign.
The influencer may have some doubts or questions about the brand. In this case, the influencer manager will clear all their doubts and answer all their queries. If the company needs a future influencer to promote a certain brand, the manager will target some influencers and communicate with them to select the best one.
Tracking the Result of Influencer Marketing Campaign
However, their responsibilities do not end only with launching an influencer marketing campaign. After launching the campaign, the person will have to track the success of his social media influencer strategy in terms of posts, sales, and traffic. No doubt, he has to focus on the appropriate influencer analytics to match those with the marketing objective of that particular brand. Besides that, he has to generate campaign progress to showcase the benefits of that campaign in front of the marketing department heads. So, they are responsible for defining how this influencer marketing campaign helped the brand to reach its overall growth goals.
Coordinating with Other Marketing Team Members
There is no doubt that every influencer marketing manager is a part of the marketing team. So, he has the responsibility to support the team to achieve the overall goals. Simply put, they have to coordinate with the company’s other marketing team members to get maximum exposure for their influencer marketing campaigns.
A good influencer marketing manager knows how to incorporate the deliverables from their influencer marketing campaign into other marketing channels.
Making the Changes for the Improvement of Any Influencer Marketing Campaign
Just like software development, the success of any influencer marketing campaign largely depends on the process of ongoing development. So, it comes under the responsibility of an influencer marketing manager to debrief everything after the end of a campaign and tweak the content to prepare the next campaign’s content to achieve better results. After the completion of a campaign, every successful influencer marketing always decides how they can:
- Bring more positive results
- Troubleshoot the unsatisfactory results
- Define the objectives and goals of any campaign more clearly
- Improve the brand message to attract a large number of influencer’s audience
If an influencer marketing manager is able to identify the issues and make the changes, he can launch any future campaign in a completely new way.
Conducting Market Research and Trend Analysis
An influencer marketing manager has to conduct market research and trend analysis constantly to keep up with the latest trends on social media platforms. Whatever he finds from this market research, he should incorporate them into his social media influencer strategy.
He should even keep his eyes on other influencer marketing campaigns for competitors. This gives important insight into improvements to be made in the campaigns.
Involving in the Recruitment Process to Acquire the More Influencers
Last but not the least, influencer marketing managers always look for potential influencers to fill in the gaps among their current team of influencers. They use different types of influencer marketing software to identify them. All of this software offers a detailed list of influencers along with their engagement metrics. So, it is always important for every influencer marketing manager to look for potential influencers and hire them to bring more positive results to the organization he’s working for.
Final Thoughts
The influencer marketing manager job is not in the market for a long time. But it has become incredibly popular. Only a good influencer marketing manager knows when to pitch which influencer to make his brand stand out and yield a high ROI. You can even outsource the task of an influencer marketing manager if you are not keen on expanding your marketing team right now. But always remember the above understanding of what an influencer marketing manager does to promote a brand.