The Social Media and Influencer Marketing industries have greatly matured over the last decade, and your business needs to adapt accordingly. With so much business being done online, marketers need to take every opportunity to join authentic conversations happening in every corner of the internet.
A lot can be done by Googling and combing through hashtags and geotags, but it takes a lot of time, energy, effort, and manpower to execute a manual influencer search properly. In their efforts to scale and keep pace with the global movement towards social media marketing, most brands and agencies are choosing to work with influencer marketing platforms.
There are many benefits of switching from a manual process to using a platform. First, working with a platform allows marketers to streamline their entire influencer marketing process from end to end; something without which they’d never be able to scale. It also allows them to do important market research and competitive analysis, getting as granular as they’d like to when analysing social data.
But once you’ve decided you’re ready to partner with a platform, it can be overwhelming to choose which platform is right for you and your business.
Here are 5 questions you should ask when choosing an influencer marketing platform…
1. Is my business ready for this?
Before anything else, you should have a clear understanding of where you are in your business and your relationship with social media marketing. Ask yourself things like, “What’s my budget per campaign? How much do I want to spend on influencer marketing per quarter? Per year?”. Once you know how much budget you’re willing to allocate to the process, estimate how many influencers you’d like to hire to understand if you’re truly ready to scale your efforts.
Influencer Marketing has been shown to have the highest ROI of any form of marketing today. Only you can answer whether you want to start slow & small, or if you’re ready to scale fast.
2. How easy and efficient is the whole campaign process on this platform?
You can have the most powerful technology in the world, but it won’t matter one bit if it isn’t easy for you and your team to use. When demo-ing a platform ask yourself if you can see yourself learning to use this tool and getting daily value out of it. Same goes for your team; how easy will it be to train them? The goal is to have a platform that makes their job easier and more efficient!
3. Is my team’s sensitive data safe on this platform?
We know… data privacy isn’t exactly the sexiest thing to talk about when it comes to choosing a platform. However, it’s truly one of- if not THE most important box to check. Honestly, a lot of platforms aren’t super up front about their data privacy ratings and efforts and are happy to keep you distracted with other “shiny objects”. But global markets are demanding more restrictions around data privacy & compliance and if the platform you choose isn’t consistently up to date, you, and any of your clients, could be in trouble.
That’s why when demo-ing a platform it’s essential to ask the representative to show proof of what their platform is doing to secure their clients’ sensitive data.
4. Is the data I’m getting accurate so I can feel confident about the marketing decisions I’m making?
When platform shopping, one of the first questions you should ask is “do you have direct access to platform data?” It’s important to know and understand where your data is coming from.
Imagine you’re in the middle of a demo and you’re being shown all the social data you’re going to have access to if you sign up for this platform. But have you ever stopped to ask where that data is coming from and how that platform is getting access to it?
Unless a platform has direct API access – meaning they’re getting their data directly from the social media platform itself – that data is “scraped” and inaccurate. Not only is the ethics of scraping data highly questionable (because users have not given their express permission for their data to be shared), but the accuracy of that data is extremely questionable. That means you might be making important decisions based on information that isn’t accurate.
5. Is there a limit for how many relationships or searches I can complete?
Finally, make sure you understand the pricing structure and limits of your plan with any given platform. Some platforms limit how many relationships and connections you can make and how many searches you can execute, while others (like Tagger) give you unlimited access.
These 5 questions are an excellent place to start when shopping for an influencer marketing platform. Having access to this level of technology allows you to quickly and easily execute highly-detailed searches, plan strategic campaigns, discover relevant talent, message and pay influencers, and report your ROI, all in one place.
If you’d like to see how Allegiant Media handles all of the above questions, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us for a demo of the world’s leading Influencer Marketing platform and we’ll show you how we make influencer marketing easy and profitable for the top brands and agencies around the country.
This article was originally featured on TaggerMedia.com on April 01, 2021.