Why Your Enterprise Needs an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence

1. Why Is an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence the Secret to a Effective & Efficient Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Exploring how establishing an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence can help organize brands and teams to support global aspirations. 

Influencer marketing at scale generates as many problems as it does solutions: here’s where an Influencer Marketing Center of Excellence can come in handy

Influencer marketing has become integral to marketing strategies. As with anything, when influencer activities are scaled it becomes harder to maintain standardized ways of working across teams, whether that’s at a brand or local level.

This often translates to teams working in ‘silos’ creating barriers to collaboration, knowledge sharing and optimisation of activities based on benchmarked learnings. This ultimately complicates the execution of influencer marketing strategies aligned with the global team’s standards and goals

2. What is an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence? A Centre of Experts Who are Excellent at What They Do

A Centre of Excellence is a team of specialists acting as an authoritative and expert mouthpiece to drive the collaboration, communication and standardization needed to achieve a consistent approach to influencer marketing activities, aligned with the global and portfolio teams’ targets and ambition. 

The Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence exists to provide coordination and consistency by centralizing existing expertise and resources through a unified voice, helping businesses attain and sustain world-class performance. 

These centers also serve as a hub for cross-division/cross-team/cross-brand knowledge sharing and benchmarking to support continuous improvement, economies of scale and a reduction in duplicate activities by influencer marketing agencies.

3. Why Your Business Needs an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence

A Center of Excellence for influencer marketing is a centralized unit within an organization that focuses on developing and sharing best practices, expertise, and resources to enhance social media strategies across the organization. The goal is to leverage social media effectively to achieve business objectives, enhance brand presence, engage with customers, and monitor social trends and sentiment. 

This becomes even more crucial when influencer marketing activities begin to scale, creating common pain points for enterprises, including but not limited to the following:

1. Lack of leadership creates misalignment with the global team’s vision and objectives for influencer marketing
2. Inconsistent approach to Influencer management – contracting, fees, briefing, etc.
3. Duplicate activities, leading to overspend and difficulties achieving economies of scale 
4. Inability to benchmark influencer performance and fees creating a lack of governance and performance management

By implementing an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence, businesses can unlock solutions to common pain points.

3.1 Creating leadership and alignment with the global team’s vision & objectives

Setting the influencer strategy at a global (or central) level and leveraging your Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence team to enforce the implementation at local and brand levels is often the main objective. Offering guidance on the overall strategy and providing thought leadership with teams as they localize their strategy, ensuring the key elements required to meet the global vision and objectives are maintained. 

3.2 Establishing a consistent approach to influencer management

Teams operating in silos will establish their own approach to influencer management. Through an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence this process can be standardized,creating a cohesive approach across the end-to-end process from influencer outreach to contracting and briefing. This, in turn, guarantees a brand safe, legally sound and effective approach to influencer marketing.

3.3 Reducing duplicate activities to achieve economies of scale

Duplication of tasks is often seen at global, local and brand level due to uncoordinated development of ways of working as the company expands. An Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence can facilitate knowledge sharing and offer access to learnings, training and templates. This creates efficient and effective ways of working, generating economies of scale across influencer marketing investments.

3.4 Supporting performance and fee benchmarking to streamline governance

Teams often execute influencer campaigns without sharing performance and fee data across teams or markets, leading to inefficiencies in spend and influencer performance. Centralizing data through the Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence enables teams to identify potential cost savings and optimize partnerships for better campaign results.

4. Four Guiding Principles for establishing an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence

Hopefully you are now thinking about building and implementing an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence. Luckily for you we have outlined 4 guiding principles to help you kickstart your transformation journey.

4.1. Standardization: The first step for establishing an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence is to define and develop the standards and best practices you are looking to implement

Example Areas for Standardization in Influencer Marketing

• Stakeholder Engagement: Engaging with key stakeholders across the organization to ensure alignment and support for social media initiatives.
• Influencer Identification Guidelines – What is the criteria for selecting an influencer partner 
• Influencer Management Templates – Outreach emails, contracts & briefs, content calendar templates & social media policy templates
• Tools – The technology you will be leveraging to centralize influencer marketing across the enterprise such as Dash Hudson, Traackr or ARIA by Socially Powerful for scheduling posts, managing accounts, and analyzing performance
• Leadership & Governance Structure – A governance structure, including a steering committee or leadership team, to set & enforce the strategic directions, policies, and standards.

4.2 Leverage Existing Assets: Understanding what is already available to support the establishment of your Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence

Example Assets That You May be Able to Leverage Straight Away

• Human Resource – Are there any members of your current team who have expertise in influencer marketing that can contribute to the Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence?
• Templates – Are any of the teams across the business already leveraging high quality templates that can be used for standardization?
• Historical Data – Is there any data that teams can share that support best practices for influencer marketing? 

4.3 Measurement Centralization: Establishing a process for business wide measurement of influencer marketing results and influencer fees, including an understanding of what success looks like

Approaches for Centralizing the Measurement Process

• Define Data Requirements – Establish the data and KPIs that teams will need to measure from their influencer campaigns e.g. Influencer Fee or Cost Per Engagement
• Standardize the CRM – Establish an influencer CRM tool that will be used to store and centralize the data for benchmarking purposes
• Define Success – Set the standard through an established baseline to inform targets for what a successful influencer campaign looks like
• Regular Audits & Assessment – Conducting periodic reviews of social media strategies, campaigns, and outcomes to identify areas for improvement.

4.4 Ease of Access: Achieve business-wide stakeholder buy-in by ensuring teams have visibility on the Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence and the process for implementing into their influencer marketing activities

How to Ensure Visibility & Engagement with the Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence

• Communicate & Demonstrate Value – Provide transparency on how and why the Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence is being implemented, especially when it comes to measurement and expectations
• Training the Teams – Providing access to resources and training opportunities to educate the team on the Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence process & social media best practices 
• Resources – Provide a clear access route or knowledge repository for the Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence, ensuring the templates, best practices and learnings are easily accessible for team leaders

Using an agency partner to transform your Centre of Excellence to a Centre of Expertise

Establishing the foundational elements of a Centre of Excellence can pose challenges for global team leaders, especially those with limited experience in influencer marketing. Partnering with an agency can be invaluable, saving time, resources, and headaches associated with implementing new practices.

By enlisting an agency experienced in building Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellences ensures you meet the specific requirements. Agencies offer insights from past client successes, crafting data-driven strategies and optimizing workflows aligned with industry best practices.

Moreover, agency partnerships provide ongoing support to refine and optimize your Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence, staying abreast of trends and leveraging technology for continued success. Collaborating with an agency empowers businesses to maximize the potential of their Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence, driving impactful results in influencer marketing. A few services that use the Centre of Excellence model are:

• Influencer marketing agency USA
• Influencer marketing agency UK
• Instagram marketing agency
• Facebook marketing agency
• Youtube marketing agency

Conclusion about Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence

In conclusion, an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence is essential for a streamlined and effective social media marketing strategy, especially on a global scale. By providing leadership, standardizing processes, reducing duplication, and facilitating performance benchmarking, an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence resolves common challenges in influencer marketing. 

Implementing key principles such as standardization, leveraging existing assets, centralizing measurement, and ensuring accessibility, businesses can maximize the benefits of an Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence. With tools like PrimeInfluence by Socially Powerful, enterprises gain access to resources necessary for optimizing influencer marketing campaigns and realizing their full potential.

Empower your brand’s transformation journey with PrimeInfluence from Socially Powerful, a full service influencer marketing solution

PrimeInfluence is Socially Powerful’s solution & service to help enterprises transform influencer marketing to be more efficient and effective.

These white papers offer some initial guidance on how to start your influencer marketing transformation journey.

Leveraging a suite of guidance, frameworks and proprietary digital tools built through Socially Powerful’s vast experience & expertise in influencer marketing.

Empower your influencer marketing transformation journey today, with PrimeInfluence by Socially Powerful. 

Access expert guidance across: 

• Organizational Models for Influencer Marketing 
• Influencer Marketing Centre of Excellence
• Influencer Marketing Centralization for Efficiency and Cost Transparency 
• Influencer Marketing End to End Large Scale Programmes
• Influencer Led Content Production
• Influencer Marketing Dynamic Creative Optimization

As part of the PrimeInfluence Solution we build integrated influencer marketing functions for our enterprise partners led by category leaders to support individual brand pods. 

We establish dedicated influencer marketing functions within the Socially Powerful for our enterprise partners. These micro-agencies deliver bespoke influencer marketing strategies through category leads that connect the team to each division within the business. Ensuring each brand has access to the collective power of the agency but benefits from a bespoke touch through their category lead and brand pod. 

Our influencer marketing agency and social agency are located worldwide, with our agency network based in the USA, UK, UAE and China.

If you want to find industry insights, visit our influencer marketing and social media blogs.

@sociallypowerful