Choosing The Right Social Media Influencer Marketing Agency

In marketing, you always want to meet your customers where they are. Today, that means reaching customers on the social media platforms that they engage with every day.

Paid advertising on these platforms can be part of a well-rounded marketing strategy. But nothing compares to the trust, credibility, and immediate engagement that an influencer campaign can bring to your brand.

While influencer campaigns have huge upsides when leveraged correctly, they involve many moving parts, and a misstep in any area can create problems that put your efforts at risk.

This is what makes partnering with the right social media influencer marketing agency so important. The right agency fully understands the influencer marketplace and can vet each influencer and ensure their content and audience perfectly align with your brand goals.

All influencer agencies are not the same though, and in this guide, we’ll give you the top tips for choosing the right influencer marketing agency to help showcase your brand to the right audience.

What Does An Influencer Marketing Agency Do?

Influencer agencies can offer a variety of services. These services can be as simple as connecting brands with influencers. However, to get the best results, you want a full-service agency that helps you navigate the entire campaign from inception through results tracking and post-campaign analysis.

Below are some of the key services an influencer agency can provide to you.

Campaign Strategy Development

An influencer agency should help you develop and refine your brand’s social media campaign strategy utilizing their extensive experience in the space. Determining the strategy involves knowledge and expertise across different influencer campaigns.

Common influencer campaign types:

• Sponsored posts for brand awareness
• Product reviews
• Collaborations
• Social media takeovers
• Unboxing videos
• On-site events and influencer live coverage
• Challenges
• Giveaways

Help You Choose The Right Influence Marketing Partnerships

Once a strategy is formed, your influencer agency will help you find and partner with the right influencers. This requires the agency to have a wide and diverse list of influencers they work with. It also requires that they can seek out and secure new influencers when needed for specific objectives.

Negotiation And Contracts

Working with various influencers requires a specific knowledge of the negotiation process and the subsequent contracts that are required. An agency helps handle this for your company so that you receive the desired results and are fully protected due to any surprise circumstances.

Create Briefs For Content Deliverables

An agency will help translate your brand’s needs into briefs for the influencer. Whether these are scripts, guidelines, or more extensive video and photo production tasks, the agency ensures everything is aligned with your brand image and the campaign goals.

Manage Logistics

It’s common for influencer campaigns to involve product usage, unboxing, or testing by the influencer. A strong agency will manage these logistics so the influencer gets every resource they need to deliver the required content. 

Logistics can also involve travel or itineraries if the influencer is attending an event for your company or industry.

Monitor And Track Performance

Once the campaign begins, the agency should offer you ongoing influencer analytics to track performance throughout the life of the campaign. Whether you want summarized reports or in-depth tracking, an agency will offer you the data you need to decide whether targets are being met.

Post-Campaign Support Or Extensions

Once the campaign reaches its conclusion, an agency can help with ongoing outreach to extend the campaign and maintain its momentum. This can involve working with smaller influencers or producing updated Influencer-Created Content (IGC) to support new products or options related to the original campaign.

5 Key Considerations When Choosing An Influencer Marketing Agency

When choosing an agency, you’ll be confronted with a lot of choices. Thankfully, you can start to narrow your list quickly by examining the following key areas for each agency.

1: Assess Their Social Media And Online Presence

This one may seem obvious on the surface, but it goes beyond just checking on their social media profiles.

To start, an influencer agency should have a dominant social media presence of its own. Look at how they engage with their own audience and the type of content they post. 

You should see interesting and varied posts that draw you in. If the posts are too promotional and “salesy” or seem stale, then that’s a sign the agency doesn’t fully understand the space.

Beyond just engaging social media profiles, you also want to look for a digital presence that includes marketing industry accolades and mentions.

Industry awards, mentions in trade publications, and thought-leadership pieces should be easy to find for the agency you’re considering.

If these awards or mentions are missing from their online presence, it could be a sign that the agency lacks the proven industry experience to serve your needs.

2: A Diverse Library of Vetted Influencers

Each campaign requires the right influencers. The more relationships the agency has, the better they can tailor each partnership to bring you the best results possible.

Influencer Audience Size

Only certain campaigns need the biggest influencers available. A wide range of audience sizes from nano up to mega and celebrity accounts allows for the exact targeting required to deliver higher engagement, brand awareness, and ROI for your marketing spend.

Audience Interests

Ask the agency if they have influencers with audiences that fit your brand. The more relationships the agency has, the more targeted the campaign can be to create a genuine connection.

Vetting

Vetting is critical to protect your brand’s image and reputation. It can also prevent you from wasting resources on influencers who can’t deliver on what they promise. Ask how the agency vets their influencers and what safeguards or contractual obligations are in place.

You also want to ask any potential agency how they confirm the influencer’s follower count and audience makeup. This includes detecting fake followers and determining the Audience Quality Score (AQS) for each influencer.

This vetting process ensures the true reach of the influencer’s network, so you receive the full benefits that you’re paying for.

3: An Impressive Portfolio Including Large Brands and Unique Startups

Looking into an agency’s portfolio of past and current clients can help you decide if they have the resources and experience to meet your needs.

If you’re a smaller brand, you may think a more boutique agency with smaller clients would be a better fit. But an agency with large clients likely has more power to leverage the best relationships with the top influencers in your industry.

This type of leverage and negotiating power is important when creating the campaign and ensures your brand is aligned with the most sought-after creative talent available.

An agency portfolio that additionally includes smaller startups helps demonstrate the ability to produce results on smaller budgets using innovative and creative techniques that follow the latest social media trends.

The combination of both large and small clients within a portfolio lets you know the agency has both the leveraging power and the creativity to design the perfect campaign and influencer relationships to match your goals. 

4: Ask For Proven Results

Working with top brands is one thing, but can the agency show results? 

In addition to examining the agency’s portfolio, ask for case studies and documentation that shows their past success with clients.

A strong agency will have most of this material already listed on its website. But make sure to ask for specific information and key metrics if you are unsure about how well they can deliver results for you.

If you need more information from the agency, ask for results from clients they serve that most closely match your brand’s size and target audience.

When you’re examining any case studies or results from the agency, another important question to ask is how they source their data.

For the most reliable metrics, an agency should rely on the social media platform’s API and not websites using scraped data sources, which are often inaccurate. 

5: Does The Agency Provide The Services You Need

Depending on your company and marketing experience, you may already have an idea of the type of influencer campaign you want. In this case, you might only need help finding the right influencers and negotiating the contracts along with help managing any logistical issues.

If your company lacks social media experience, you likely need help creating an influencer marketing campaign from scratch that works with your existing marketing materials. In these cases, your choice of agency becomes more important since they play an integral role in translating your brand voice to the social media influencer space.

In addition, your influencer campaign may be part of a concurrent paid advertisement campaign on the platform. Not all influencer agencies have expertise in paid advertising, so this is another service to consider.

Final Tips For Brands Considering An Influencer Agency

Influencer marketing is all about authenticity and a genuine connection with an engaged audience. That connection starts with the agency you hire.

When approaching an influencer agency, they should welcome any questions you have and be completely transparent about their methods and past success. That type of openness will resonate throughout your campaigns and will help drive the connections that make social media influencer campaigns so effective with an audience.

Any hesitancy on the agency’s part to provide information can often be a warning sign.

Using the tips from this article and asking the right questions will help you quickly narrow down your search and find the right agency to help your brand connect with an audience in ways that simply aren’t possible through other marketing channels.