Difference Between hire Influencers On Your Own and Using a Network

  on May 2nd 2018 (Updated May 3rd 2018) 

You’re planning to start your first influencer marketing campaign, but you’re not sure where to start or how to hire influencers. In fact, you’re not even really sure of how the process works, and you will have to make a decision. Either you try to start the campaign on your own and learn from trial and error until you get it right, or you hire a team of professionals that are in direct contact with a large network of skilled influencers.

On the following page, we will explain the two different processes and provide you with tips on what’s needed to hire good influencers. We will also provide you with the benefits and disadvantages of both methods. So without further ado, let’s get started.

Booking an Influencer on Your Own

Whether you work for the marketing department at a large corporation or you’re running your own company, the process of finding and booking influencers is the same. It can be a tedious and time-consuming process and it goes something like this.

The first step is to figure out what it is you want to sell or market and what the goal is with the campaign. Are you looking to drive traffic to a website or gain more followers on your social media? Are you running the campaign to strengthen brand awareness? Whatever it is, you need to set clear goals before you start, just like you would if you were to run a regular marketing campaign.

After you have identified your goals, you need to specify your target group and on which social media platform you can reach them with efficiency. To learn more about how to do this and what platforms are better for which scenario, we suggest you check out our guide on influencer marketing strategies.

Hiring the Influencer

After you are done with that, the actual hiring process will begin. Your job is now to find a selection of suitable influencers that could help you reach your target group. To find influencers you need to search high and low, look at followers, engagement, niches, influencers’ previous projects, and anything else that will tell you if they fit your project. The next step is to shorten that list to a selected group of candidates that you think are the absolute best. Just keep in mind that not every influencer will be willing to work with you so you need to find more influencers than you actually want to work with since some might say no.

Now it’s time to start drafting a message that you can send out to the influencers where you describe the project, what it is you’re selling, what goals you have, how much you’re willing to pay, etc. Then you wait to see who comes back to you and at this point, there will definitely be questions you need to answer.

When everything is finished and you have agreed with the influencers you want to work with

you will have to create a contract that they can sign outlining the terms of the campaign before you can activate the campaign and send out the products.

Follow Up All the Results with Everyone

After you’ve gotten the campaign up and running, you need to track the progress and collect data on how the different influencers are performing. If there would be any problems during the process, it will be up to you to try and solve them and make sure everything runs smoothly. And when the campaign is over, you need to follow up with everyone and collect the results.

As you probably understand by now, it can take weeks before you actually get started with a campaign and start seeing results from all the work you’ve put in. Not to mention that there is a long learning curve during the first few campaigns you run, especially if you’re using a social media that you’re not used to. In fact, you can spend several weeks up to months on a single campaign, while still having to do all the other tasks you normally do at work.

Luckily there is an easier solution.

Booking Influencers Using an Influencer Network

When you use an influencer marketing network, you will avoid all of the time-consuming tasks and you'll be able to focus on what’s important to you and your brand.

Naturally, we can only talk for ourselves, but by using Beatly, you can have a brand new campaign up and running in no time with some of the best influencers for your industry and target group.

When you contact Beatly to get help with a campaign, we do much more than just hiring influencers. In fact, we’ll help you with all of the following:

1. Hiring the Influencers - If you provide us with the goals you have for the campaign we’ll find you the most suitable influencers with experience marketing for other brands. Also, we will do it much faster than you could on your own thanks to our large network of influencers.

2. Contact and Payment - We will also handle all the contact with the influencers and support you with contracts and everything else related to activating influencers. We can easily pay influencers from all over the world so you don’t have to worry about extra paperwork.

3. Running the Campaign - When the right influencers have been activated we will help you optimize the campaign, deal with issues that might arise, and make sure that the influencers are doing what they’re supposed to.

4. Tracking Progress - By using traceable links and analytic tools for app installs and purchases, we can track every influencer's individual progress so that you know exactly who is helping you with what. This information is worth gold during the campaign but also after if you would like to hire any of the influencers for another similar project.

5. Follow Up - When the campaign is over we will follow up with everyone involved, collect all the results, and evaluate the campaign together with you. In most cases, our network of influencers produces better results than influencers hired directly by companies. And all the information that gets collected can be used to optimize future projects for even better results.

The Benefits of Using an Influencer Marketing Network

We know that we might come off as bias in this situation, but to us, there really are so many benefits of using a network instead of doing the work on your own that it should be a no-brainer.

Why waste time on hiring an influencer and trying to run a campaign that you might not fully understand when we can do it for you - much quicker and with better final results!

Would you like to know more about how the process works and what we can help you with? Shoot us a message at sales@beatly.com!