"Time is a non-renewable resource. Use it wisely, or it will use you."
– Auliq Ice
When it comes to influencer marketing, finding the right influencers, vetting them, reaching out, tracking their performance, and communicating with them can be incredibly time-consuming. The marketing and sales team here at CIPIO.ai conducted an informal survey of both our customers and prospects, plus our own internal managed services teams, and asked how much time each week they spend on various influencer marketing executional tasks. The results weren't surprising, but the amount of time spent wasn't small.
At our core, this is why CIPIO.ai was created: to automate as much of the influence marketing and UGC cultivation execution as possible so brand marketers can focus on bigger strategies and tasks. And looking at our results, we have, without question, hit on something that makes our customer's influencer work more time-efficient.
Here are several executional tasks involved in influencer marketing that can be optimized for you to spend less time on the busy work of campaigns, and more time moving the needle on your marketing efforts.
Searching for Creators & Influencers
Utilizing influencer databases is very simply a major time-saver. These databases provide a wide range of information on creators, including their follower count, engagement rates, and areas of interest. This means instead of spending hours scrolling through social media profiles and conducting manual searches, brands and agencies can quickly and easily find influencers who are a good fit for their brand.
Our clients and team told us when they switched from manual search & discovery to leveraging an influencer database, they saved up to 10 hours per week. This represents a significant time-saving opportunity that can be used to focus on other areas of the campaign.
Vetting Creators & Influencers
Implementing an automated tool to filter and help vet your creators can be a game-changer. Such tools can quickly analyze an influencer's audience demographics, engagement rates, and content quality to determine if they are a good fit for the brand.
Imagine having a list of 1,000 creators and needing to figure out which are located in Los Angeles. You can export your list into a database or spreadsheet and do searches or manually review each entry. With influencer marketing software, you can simply type "Los Angeles" in the city filter and be done.
Now consider doing the same, but filtering by a certain percentage of their audience is in Los Angeles. You're likely saving anywhere from five to who knows how many hours per week!
Reaching out to Creators & Influencers
Templatize your outreach! Creating templates for initial outreach, follow-up, and campaign briefs can help ensure consistency in communication while also saving significant amounts of time. This helps you scale as you need to go from talking to, let's say 10 creators, to talking to 50.
CIPIO.ai's customers and internal team estimated template save them up to 8 hours per week of manual message writing and copy-paste emails.
Tracking Creator & Influence Performance
Tracking the key performance indicators of a creator or influencer campaign manually means asking for screen shots of a creator's analytics, then typing each relevant field into a database or spreadsheet. One creator's analytics can take an hour if they have multiple posts.
Using a software platform that pulls analytics through the various social network APIs takes that hour down to minutes. Brands and agencies can now hit a few buttons to get reports on an individual creator or aggregate all creators into a campaign report. Our clients and team say that saves an average of seven hours per week. Of course the more you scale your campaign, the higher that number of saved time can go!
Coordinating with Creators & Influencers
Project management tools are built to take inefficient processes and make them work better. Such tools can help ensure that all communication and deliverables are organized and easily accessible, saving significant amounts of time in the long run. According to our client and team conversations, just being organized cuts out six hours of extra work per week.
In case you weren't keeping track of all that time, moving to an automated tool or software solution to assist your influencer marketing and UGC campaigns can save your marketing team anywhere from 36 to hundreds of hours in time resources per week. That's a full-time employee!
Even for small businesses, implementing time-saving strategies can have a significant impact on the success of influencer marketing and user-generated content campaigns while also freeing up valuable time for other areas of marketing, or life! By utilizing influencer databases, automated platforms, email templates, tracking solutions, and project management tools, brands, and agencies can increase productivity and efficiency with UGC and influencer marketing efforts.
Interested in learning how CIPIO.ai can save you time?
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