The company that I work for relies heavily on influencer marketing – 80% of our revenue comes from our influencer marketing team. However, recent gradual changes in the influencer marketing realm have motivated us to take an agile approach in terms of both marketing and software.
My company was in a fortunate position when we began working with influencers about five years ago – we got into the market before it became oversaturated. Now, however, the amount of brands that use this technique of partnering with Instagrammers and YouTubers to promote their products on their social media channels has reduced the effectiveness of macro influencers because. The main reason for that is a major drop in engagement on these large platforms. By employing regular 5 minute scrum meetings, we have managed to begin to activate agile marketing which has encouraged us to shift our focus away from these big-time content creators, and proactively look at new ways of using brand ambassadors.
As we continued to see the growing gap in engagement and ROAS between micro and macro influencers, we decided we needed to make a change in our software use as well. While we were using Hubspot to manage our influencer partnerships, we realized we needed a tool that would allow us to cast a wider net, so we began working with a relatively young company that would provide us with the CRM software that we thought we needed. We were able to work closely with their developers to take an agile approach to developing the software so that it fit our current needs and would allow us to move in agile way in response to the changes in the market. In fact, our subscription to their software gave us the opportunity to maintain that agile relationship and request new changes to be made as we saw necessary.
After three months of attempting to onboard this new CRM tool, we were operating at a loss, and our team made the decision, with our CRO, to abandon this tool. We realized that the large amount of automation was not providing the accountability needed when dealing with influencers, and was creating more problems than it was solving – basically, we needed to reduce automation and stay on top of our influencers no matter how many or few followers they had. It made more sense to clean up our data Hubspot and simply redirect our focus to influencers with high engagement. By pivoting in these ways, our company has taken a proactive approach which is necessary to maintain profitability in an industry that is so heavily affected by innovation and constant changes in digital marketing.
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