Building End-to-End, Large Scale Influencer Programs for Enterprise Multi-Brand Portfolio

Exploring the intricacies of building end-to-end influencer programs tailored for enterprise businesses. 

1. Influencer Marketing Is Becoming More Sophisticated And As A Result Organizations Need To Level Up Their Approach

In today’s digital landscape, the power of influencer marketing is undeniable. For many enterprise businesses it is becoming an essential component in their marketing strategy. But with large brand portfolios to manage, it becomes commonplace for organizations to “max out” their in-house capabilities or hire an influencer marketing agency. 

Executing Influencer marketing involves a multitude of moving parts across identification, outreach, engagement, management and execution. When these activities are carried out on a one-by-one basis, it is easy to see how in-house teams can hit a ceiling, limiting scale, efficiency and effectiveness. Without a strategic and comprehensive approach, executing large-scale influencer programs can quickly become overwhelming and inefficient.

This white paper is designed to explain how you can combat these challenges as your influencer marketing efforts grow; providing an overview of the best practices for running large scale influencer programmes, from initial strategy development to ongoing management and measurement. 

By understanding and implementing these essential elements, businesses can unlock the full potential of influencer marketing and drive impactful results across their vast portfolios. Creating a whole-host of benefits, including but not limited to, the following. 

1. Efficiency: Through standardized & automated workflows and comprehensive influencer databases, organizations can achieve unparalleled efficiency in executing influencer activities at scale. These established processes not only drive down costs but also enhance performance across the board.
2. Scalability: Allow organizations to scale influencer activities across the portfolio by leveraging business wide processes and ways of working that simplify the influencer process across identification, management and reporting.
3. Customization in Line With Objectives: High performance, large scale influencer programmes allow for greater customization across brands by leveraging influencers in regards to their suitability to objectives.
4. Continuous Improvement: Benchmarking influencer performance, fees across one central large-scale programme allows organizations to identify learnings, opportunities and weaknesses that can be leveraged to optimize performance of influencer activities.

Essentially, without a strategy for delivering high-performance large scale influencer programmes, organizations will find themselves at a major disadvantage when it comes to navigating and driving impact in the modern digital landscape.

2. How To Build An Effective, Large Scale Influencer Programme That Drives End-to-end Results For Organizations

There are a variety of steps that organizations need to take to establish and execute a large scale influencer programme that drives efficient and effective performance across a multi-brand portfolio. Luckily for you, we have outlined some of these essential components below. 

2.1 An Always on Influencer Casting Function:

In order to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of the influencer selection process, organizations should establish an always-on casting function to identify and onboard upcoming influencers in line with specific selection criteria that support brand objectives and content requirements. This allows teams within the business to have access to the right partners without the need to search for them independently, reducing barriers to executing influencer marketing. 

2.2 An Established Influencer “Pull” Function 

Using a centralized location to pull-in and recruit creators with existing brand affinity into a highly desirable ambassador programme (amplified through social paid activity) that offers unique benefits for high performers. Influencers can apply to become an ambassador, giving your organization streamlined access to partners that already love and use your products on a daily basis. 

2.3 Leveraging an Influencer Engagement Strategy 

In order to maximize the effectiveness of your influencer programme it is crucial to fully immerse potential influencer partners in the brand through multiple-touch points. The most efficient way to do this is through a central CRM tool that supports automated updates & communications with influencers, from initial outreach to post-campaign relationship building. 

Furthermore, to maximize brand advocacy, an incentivization programme should be in place to offer rewards and perks (e.g. feature on brand channels or meet with industry leaders to support their growth) to high performing influencers in line with performance objectives. 

2.4 Think About Activators vs. Ambassadors vs Gifted

When looking for and deploying influencers it is important to consider the role these influencers will play for your brand. 

There are three common use-cases for influencer partners that should be present across your influencer programme. 

• Activators: One time influencer partners activated most commonly for campaigns and always on activity, used most effectively to reach niche audience segmentations and drive visibility with new audiences. Often used for events, product launches, limited-time promotions, or campaigns with clear call-to-action objectives. They are focused on creating a rapid impact within a defined timeframe and may not necessarily maintain long-term relationships with the brand.
• Ambassadors: Ambassadors are engaged for longer-term partnerships chosen based on their alignment with the brand’s values, identity, and target audience. They play a more sustained role in representing the brand, building relationships with their audience over time, and fostering brand loyalty and trust. Ambassadors often create a consistent stream of content that reinforces the brand’s messaging, values, and products/services across multiple campaigns or initiatives over an extended period.
• Gifted: Gifted (or seeded) influencers offer a unique blend of versatility, serving as a hybrid approach suitable for both short-term activations and long-term partnerships. These influencers engage with brands by creating content in exchange for gifted products, presenting an economical solution for content creation needs. Moreover, their utility extends across various campaign objectives, whether it’s driving earned media value or directly contributing to sales through their content.

2.5 Using Influencers via Strategic “Swimlanes” Across Passion Points

Influencer marketing is not a one-size-fits all model, influencers can play a variety of roles for your brand. From celebrities who drive credibility and awareness to brand customers who advocate whole-heartedly for your brand to drive authenticity and sales. 

By benchmarking the performance of influencer partners we can use data to bucket them into “Swimlanes”, based on the role & objectives they can perform for your brand. For example, awareness, credibility, sales, content production, etc. By deploying influencers based on their suitability to certain objectives brands can generate cost efficiencies, higher performance and increase their ROI.

2.6 Leveraging Multi-layered Paid Influencer Campaigns

When leveraging influencer partnerships it is crucial to leverage the full portfolio of influencer sizes to build a customized approach that supports results driving across the entire funnel. Different influencer sizes offer varying benefits that can be reaped through a multi-layered influencer programme:

• Hero Influencer (500k-1m+ followers): Leveraged to drive mass awareness and exposure around campaign and brand messaging.
• Macro Influencers (100k-499k): Utilized to strike a balance between quality content creation, reach and engagement.
• Micro Influencers (20k-49k): Driving awareness and engagement to specific, niche and targeted segments & communities of brand target audience – great for conversion and consideration driving activities.
• Nano Influencers (0-19k): Leveraged to create content on an always on basis for paid and organic activities, can be hyper targeted to communities and trends to drive across the full funnel.

Leveraging a combination of these influencer sizes is key to building an end-to-end influencer programme that drives full funnel results that can be customized and altered based on specific requirements. A few services that use the end-to-end, large scale influencer programs are:

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

2.7 An Optimization Function for the Influencer Portfolio

Continuous evaluation and refinement of the influencer portfolio is critical for sustained efficiency and effectiveness impact of large scale influencer programmes. Benchmarking influencer performance over the long term can help organizations identify opportunities to improve and trim the influencer portfolio. 

Growing relationships with fledgling influencers with strong/improving performance to maximize brand affinity and long term impact. As well as defining a criteria for success to identify & wind down relationships with underperforming influencers who are not meeting the standards; supporting a continuously improving influencer programme across efficiency and effectiveness. 

In conclusion, establishing an effective large-scale influencer program requires: always-on influencer casting, an established influencer pull function, a comprehensive engagement strategy, thoughtful categorization of influencers, strategic deployment across passion points, multi-layered paid campaigns, and continuous optimization of the influencer portfolio for sustained impact and efficiency.

3. Conclusion

In conclusion, without a strategy for delivering high-performance large-scale influencer programs, organizations will find themselves at a major disadvantage in navigating and driving impact in the modern digital landscape. 

To build an effective, large-scale influencer program that drives end-to-end results for organizations, a variety of steps need to be taken, including establishing an always-on influencer casting function, leveraging strategic “Swimlanes” across passion points, and optimizing influencer engagement strategies.

Unlocking the full potential of influencer marketing requires a strategic and comprehensive approach, and organizations can accelerate their transformation journey with the expertise and guidance offered by solutions like Billy from Socially Powerful. 

With cutting-edge technology, business transformation expertise, and influencer proficiency, brands can maximize the impact of their influencer campaigns and stay ahead of the curve in the digital age.

4. 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 Prime Influence 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 Prime Influence 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, such as Amazon & L’Oreal. 

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