Between finding and vetting influencers, reaching out to them, and keeping track of their content, managing influencer marketing campaigns requires a lot of time and effort. So scaling your campaigns, especially for multi-influencer activations, is a feat.
Back when I was writing outreach emails for top online publications, I was doing it all from scratch for each and every publication. It took a lot of thinking, a lot of research (to personalize each email), and a lot of time. That’s enough to know how time-consuming even just the influencer outreach process can be.
Of course, your influencer proposals should always be personal if you expect creators to accept them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t automate other aspects of your influencer campaign workflow. By automating certain repetitive tasks, you can streamline your campaign management and enhance efficiency.
In this article, I break down the steps and best practices for implementing workflow automation in your influencer campaigns.
Automating your influencer marketing efforts enables you to do things more efficiently, resulting in greater time-savings. This leads to additional benefits further down the line.
Automation lets you perform repetitive tasks like collecting influencer data and verifying their authenticity more efficiently. This helps you save time so you can focus your efforts on more human-centric activities like communicating with influencers and nurturing your relationship with them.
Studies even show that automation tools like generative AI have enhanced content creation and campaign efficiency for over 42% of respondents. Additionally, almost 55% of marketers have a favorable view of AI for enhancing efficiency.
With greater time-savings comes the freedom to do more. As such, workflow automation is the key to scaling your influencer campaigns. For agencies, this means a greater ability to manage more campaigns for your clients and working with more influencers.
Automation tools can process vast amounts of data and make data-backed suggestions on how to optimize your campaign. Whether it involves recommending the best influencer platform to run your campaign or predicting the outcome of a specific influencer mix, you can make informed decisions to maximize the impact of your influencer campaigns.
While there are plenty of tasks you can automate, having a clear idea of how these tasks fit into your campaign workflow will simplify the process. Let’s take a look at some of the top tasks you can automate at different stages of the influencer marketing campaign workflow.
Manually scouring through thousands of influencer profiles takes time. Automation tools simplify the influencer search process with smart filters to narrow down the most suitable influencer profiles. You can customize your search to focus on influencers based on audience size, demographics, topic, and various performance metrics.
This streamlines the influencer discovery process and helps you save time finding the best influencers for your campaign. With platforms like Influencity, you can even find Lookalikes, which are influencers matching the essence of your favorite influencers but tailored to your ideal budget, location, or audience size.
Influencer verification is another aspect of your campaign workflow that you can automate. With the rise of fake influencers, there’s a pressing need to weed out influencers with fake followers during your influencer search process.
Automation tools can analyze each influencer’s profile to assess the quality of their followers, speeding up the fraud detection process.
Platforms like Influencity offer a Follower Quality metric, which shows you the percentage of nice followers vs. doubtful followers. The tool is powered by image recognition technology and natural language processing, which analyzes audience profiles and interactions to identify suspicious accounts.
To further streamline your campaign preparation, you can use automation tools to predict the outcome of specific campaign plans. This will help you get a better understanding of how to adjust your campaign before it even launches.
AI-powered analytics tools like Influencity let you estimate campaign outcomes based on specific influencer combinations. This automatically estimates performance and spending based on the influencers you’ve added to your campaign. So you can see if the campaign will be impactful and within budget, allowing you to make adjustments before actual execution.
As someone who hates receiving messages or emails starting with something generic like: “Dear author…” (yep! That’s an actual message I received), I’ll always advocate for a personal touch in your actual influencer outreach. Whether it involves mentioning a recent viral video they created or applauding a content style that’s uniquely them, adding something personal is the key to making a good first impression.
But as for follow-ups, automation is the solution. Haven’t heard back from the influencer in a week? Schedule a message to go out automatically so your campaign can stay on track.
Create an email automation sequence to send bulk messages to influencers who haven’t responded to your first message. This will allow you to send timely follow-ups at the desired time, allowing you to stick to your campaign schedule.
You can also save time by automating influencer onboarding tasks like signing contracts, sending briefs, and sending billing information. This helps you stay on track with your campaign schedule and ensure that these key steps don’t fall through the cracks.
Streamline the process by creating a step-by-step onboarding workflow and visualizing it on the Influencity platform. That way, you can ensure that everyone has visibility into your campaign progress and sees what needs to be done.
Once your campaign launches, you can use automation for effective content publishing. Content scheduling tools allow you to post your campaign content at the best time. That way, you can stay on track with your content calendar and take advantage of peak engagement times.
Influencity comes with built-in tools to schedule your influencer content across Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and more.
It’s easy to miss influencer messages and emails among your everyday work communications. Automation makes it easy to keep track of your influencer communications. You can set up notifications in your influencer management tool to easily get alerted when new influencer messages come in.
That way, you never miss an important message from influencers. So you can prevent delays and miscommunications while actively nurturing your influencer relationships.
Keeping track of influencer content is another aspect of campaign management that’s time-consuming if done manually. Instead, use influencer marketing platforms to automatically track if influencers have posted their assigned content.
You can use Influencity’s social hub tool to keep track of which influencers have posted content and which ones haven’t. So you can effectively track deliverables and follow up as needed.
One of the biggest aspects of influencer marketing workflow automation involves performance tracking. It’s impractical to manually collect performance stats of multiple influencers to understand campaign performance.
Influencer analytics tools like Influencity streamline the process by automatically analyzing the data across hundreds of influencer posts. They then put together these stats in a dashboard so you can easily visualize your campaign performance even at the post and influencer level. Not only does this help you understand how your campaign is paying off, but you can also identify which influencers and platforms are adding the most value.
This will give you the insights you need to adapt your campaign strategy and focus on your best-performing influencers and platforms. Plus, you can also get a better idea of what types of content tend to resonate with your audience. You can then optimize the performance of future campaigns using these insights.
In line with the above, you can automate the campaign reporting process by putting together vital performance metrics into a comprehensive report. This makes it easy for clients and stakeholders to visualize the campaign impact and understand key metrics about how your campaign is paying off.
Influencity lets you create customized reports with filters to select the metrics that matter the most to you. You can then export this report into a PDF file for easy sharing. It even allows you to create a public URL so those outside your organization can easily access the report along with real-time performance updates.
Administrative tasks like keeping track of invoices from influencers and paying them on time may seem straightforward. But if you’re not managing them all in one place, things can easily fall through the cracks. One missed email could lead to a late payment. The result? A frustrated influencer having second thoughts about working with your brand.
So I highly recommend automating this aspect of your influencer marketing management.
On platforms like Influencity, you can create payment pools with multiple influencers and send out payments in bulk. You also have a dedicated portal where creators can submit their invoices. This allows you to keep track of all your influencer invoices and payments in one place, reducing the need for multiple follow-ups and the risk of delayed payments.
Beyond knowing which tasks you can automate, successful automation also requires incorporating a few best practices. Let me share some of the ones that you should keep in mind for influencer campaign workflow automation.
Start by evaluating your influencer marketing campaign workflow. This is a key step to help you figure out how automation can fit into your overall workflow. Look for processes that require repetitive tasks or extensive data analysis. That’s what you should consider automating.
Assess tasks and processes using the following criteria:
For brands like PowderPeaks, finding the right influencers was the most challenging and time-consuming aspects of their campaign workflow. So they leveraged Influencity’s Influencer Discover tool to streamline their search with a range of filters, narrowing down the right influencers based on topic, location, and bio.
Automation saves time, yes. But that doesn’t mean you automate every aspect of your influencer marketing campaign. Some things are better left to human hands.
Take influencer communications, for example. No influencer worth their salt wants to see a generic email about a collaboration opportunity. What you need is a human touch to make your email stand out and leave a strong impression on potential influencer partners.
I’m not arguing against the use of influencer proposal templates altogether. Templates save time and help you ensure that you’re not missing key details. So use templates, but leave some room for a personal touch to tailor your communications to each influencer. Similarly, you can create influencer contract templates and personalize them for each influencer based on your agreement with them.
Speaking of negotiations, this aspect of your campaign should also be human-led. Set up discovery calls where you can discuss deliverables and payment terms with each influencer.
Finally, you’ll need a robust toolkit to help you with your influencer marketing automation. Make the right choice by assessing your automation needs first. Then look at your current tech stack to see if your existing tools can help you with these tasks.
You’ll then be able to narrow down the right tools to help you automate the rest of the tasks.
Platforms like Influencity offer plenty of features to automate most of your campaign workflow. From influencer discovery and fraud detection to influencer tracking and payments, the platform comes with most of the automation tools you need.
The platform’s AI-powered influencer search engine helps you pinpoint influencer profiles that match your unique needs, automating significant portions of the influencer discovery process. It further analyzes influencer profiles for authenticity, weeding out fake followers using image recognition and natural language processing technology. So you can automate the fraud detection process and streamline your search.
You can even create email templates, customize them, and send them out in bulk to scale your influencer outreach efforts. Additionally, it lets you set up campaign workflows so you can visualize your tasks and optimize the flow of activities.
Influencity’s automated performance analysis is one of the most powerful tools to help with workflow automation. It automatically analyzes the performance of individual influencer profiles and content, providing you with a deeper understanding of how your campaign is paying off.
The platform also provides automation tools for admin tasks like influencer invoicing and payments. So you can add influencers to a payment pool, pay them in bulk, and keep track of your payment status.
Workflow automation is the key to scaling your influencer campaigns and maximizing their outcome. I’ve provided a list of tasks you can automate at various stages of the campaign workflow. I’ve also shared a few best practices to keep in mind while automating your influencer marketing tasks. Make the most of this guide to seamlessly implement automation within your influencer campaigns.