INDUSTRY GUIDE TO INFLUENCER MARKETING: AGENCY

Chapter 3: Campaign Launch

When you’ve found some influencers, it’s time to activate them and get your campaign moving.

Industry Hub > Industry Guide to Influencer Marketing: Agency > 3. Campaign Launch

AGENCY GUIDE NAVIGATOR

0. Introduction

1. Campaign Definition

2. Campaign Setup

3. Campaign Launch

4. Campaign Monitoring

5. Campaign Analysis

Automate & track outreach

For agencies, writing outreach emails to every influencer they want to contact just isn’t possible. Automation tools can speed up the process, and Heepsy lets you export contact information for this purpose.

Remember Heepsy Lists? Well, you can download any list as a .csv or .xls file, using the button at the top right of the lists panel. Just to be transparent, this function is only included in our Business and Gold plans, as stated on our Pricing page.

There are various SaaS solutions out there to help you automate influencer outreach. We personally like Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM), as it’s free and integrates with Google Sheets and Gmail. It also keeps track of who’s opened your emails, which have bounced, etc.

If you’ve never tried YAMM and want to learn how to set it up, refer to Chapter 3.1 Contacting Influencers of our general influencer marketing guide.

Considerations for global campaigns

If your agency handles clients that have a presence in various countries, you may end up working with influencers from around the globe. In those cases, there are a few things to keep in mind when negotiating with influencers and preparing the campaign for launch.

Don’t forget about time zones

You might have to strategically time communications, in which case pay attention to time zones. Sometimes they’re sneaky; Portugal and Spain, for example, are one hour apart despite being neighbors.

Different countries = different economies

This affects influencer fees. When negotiating, you can’t offer the same incentive to an influencer from New York and one from Quito. Know your market.

Overcome language and culture barriers

If you have to communicate with an influencer who speaks a different language than you, take into account that you may have to put a bit more effort into how you interact with them. Virtual meetings might not be so easy for people speaking in a second or third language. Likewise, there may be some cultural differences in the way people communicate; stay open and friendly to avoid miscommunications.

Check your copy

Even in our first languages, typos sometimes happen. But they can be doubly difficult to pick up on when working in second or third languages. Double-check the spelling of all brand mentions, hashtags, coupon codes and links you plan to use in the campaign, both when you send them out and later when influencers publish them. A misspelling in one of these could lead you to miss valuable results that you’ll want to include in your final report.

Negotiating for your clients

Brands hire agencies to manage their campaigns, and that includes negotiating collaborations with influencers.

First rule of thumb: be friendly and respectful. Don’t start out by solely demanding, as this can prohibit you from converting influencers into campaign collaborators. The more personal you can make your message, the better. Use their names, give examples of their content that you like, and explain who your brand is and what it wants to communicate.

In our experiences, contracts aren’t necessary for collaborations paid solely in product, unless the product is extremely valuable. That being said, agencies may use contracts as a standardized protocol for all their campaigns.

That’s fine, especially when working with top influencers who frequently collaborate with brands and have managers to handle administrative tasks. But when you’re negotiating with nano influencers (1-5K followers) or micro-influencers (5-50K), a contract could come across as a bit intimidating.

If you sense this, walk them through it. Nano and micro influencers offer low costs and the highest average engagement rates in the influencer industry, and they can be valuable assets in campaigns for all types of brands. They’re just not as used to collaborating and may need an extra bit of help.

You are a knowledgeable liaison; both brands and influencers should feel comfortable coming to you with any questions or concerns.

Know the disclosure rules

As we’ve said before, you are the influencer expert in this scenario. Brands turn to you to properly manage their campaign. So it’s up to you to know how to do that.

Influencer disclosure guidelines are a big part of proper campaign handling, so make sure you know the requirements in any location that may be implicated in your campaign. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, requires disclosure of any type of paid collaboration (fee or product) if it could potentially end up in front of an American consumer.

Heepsy’s audience location analysis can give you an idea of where an influencer’s active audience comes from. In other words, the location analysis includes those followers who actively like and comment on the influencer’s content. These are the followers that matter the most to campaigns, and those that are most important when trying to detect fake followers.

Therefore, Heepsy’s location metric is by no means an exhaustive representation of the general audience, or the countries that the campaign may reach. Between inactive followers, followers without location data, and how Instagram’s algorithm works, the campaign could end up in places you didn’t see coming.

A clear, consistent disclosure policy is your best defense against any potential problems down the line. Talk with influencers about how they’ll tell their followers that their content is subject to brand collaboration. Speak with the brand too, because improper disclosure could fall on them, and that could in turn fall on you.