5 steps to develop a successful influencer marketing platform

With traditional advertising methods slowly dying out, everyone who is somehow involved in the marketing industry is looking at new ways of approaching their audiences.

All the surveys and statistics point towards the same things; the majority of marketers believe in influencer marketing and are looking to launch at least one such campaign in the future, if they have not done so already.

With that in mind, let us take a look at 5 steps necessary to develop a successful influencer marketing platform.

1. Stick to your guns

Despite the fantastic statistics and promising future of influencer marketing, there are many who are still skeptical about it. Some treat it like a second-hand process while others believe it is merely a fad that will go away sooner rather than later.

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If you are going to build such a platform, make two things clear from the very start: influencer marketing is very powerful and it is here to stay.

Some influencer marketing platforms have attempted to branch out to other areas of more traditional marketing such as email campaigns and even cold calling. As one might expect, the results have (usually) been unsatisfactory.

A successful influencer marketing platform will stick to its guns and defend the practice. When someone asks why influencer marketing is important and why they should launch a related campaign, the platform should speak for itself.

2. Data, as always, is king

One of the reasons why some people refuse to take influencer marketing seriously is the fact that many campaigns and platforms are unreliable.

In every other marketing campaign, whether that is based on the Internet or not, there are established analytic tools that allow people in the industry to perform measurements.

While marketing measurement is not always an exact science, it does provide a solid foundation from which marketers can better understand whether a campaign has been successful or not.

Data has always reigned king in marketing and that fact has not changed much over the years. The standardization of influencer marketing analytics is extremely important yet many platforms refuse to develop or even implement such systems.

3. Consider picking a niche market

Since influencer marketing is becoming more popular by the minute, there are quite a few established platforms which host millions of influencers and have already handled an equal number of campaigns.

Instead of trying to reach for the stars right away, you should consider picking a single market and sticking with it for a while. This, of course, requires a lot of research.

For instance, you may find that YouTubers who specialize on video game reviews are hard to reach because they already have established connections.

On the other hand, you might also find that people who specialize in unique costumes are an untapped market.According To Arfan Chaudhry ,CEO of one of the top influencer marketing platform Chamboost:

Many brands end up chasing influencers with the most followers but forget that their is so much more involved than just followers. Engagement is one of the key metrics to see how loyal the followers are. If the Engagement level is low then getting that influencer to promote your brand would be a waste of dollars. Another thing many people forget to in consideration is that micro influencers in a certain niche are usually much more powerful than bigger influencers not in any niche at all

4. Allow for long-term growth

When a brand’s manager arrives on your influencer marketing platform, they might not always know what they are looking for.

Because of the fact that social media is kind of a volatile space, they often think of influencer marketing campaigns as sort of ethereal, something that will happen once and then be forgotten.

What your platform should do instead is promote those kinds of campaigns as part of a long-term strategy while allowing for opportunities to make that happen.

I think a lot of it is too shortsighted. It’s like when Nike signed Lebron at 18 to a ten-year contract. They had a long-term strategy with him. Brands don’t have that sort of vision when it comes to influencers

says Jake Paul, an Internet personality who has also grown a successful influencer management company.

A platform that promotes growth will fare much better in the long term, even if marketers will require some convincing before that happens.

5. Ensure that all services perform at the highest level

An influencer marketing platform must grade highly across all areas of design and function. Searching for and finding influencers must be a fluent process with as few distractions as possible.

Such a platform has one main goal in mind: to connect influencers and people who can work with them, regardless of who those might be. Everything about an influencer must be presented neatly and with up-to-date information complete with as many stats and analytics as possible.

More often than not, a marketer will be more interested in how an influencer can help them than the other way around. They will need to know things like target audience and reach in an instant so that they can better choose between dozens or hundreds of potential influencers.

The platform should also be able to handle everything from choosing an influencer to creating and managing a campaign and then further on to tracking and creating reports.

When users can do everything in a single platform, they are much less likely to leave it because it will fill all of their needs. If they can find everything you are offering and more in another platform with more viable services then they will have little incentive to stay.