If you’re a brand that is starting to explore influencer marketing as part of your online marketing efforts, you’ll undoubtedly encounter an influencer manager. This is more so if you’re acquiring influencer management services because it will assign a dedicated manager for your campaign.

A full-service agency knows every nook and cranny of influencer marketing–how the industry works, how to set up a campaign from scratch, what workloads are involved especially matching the campaign goals with the right influencers and pitching to them, etc.

Of course, you may even decide to hire one in-house. One good thing about doing influencer marketing campaigns in-house with an influencer manager at the helm is that you control the entire process. You’d also get immediate feedback, more so when it comes to the campaign’s progress against the deliverables and milestones.

Either way, you want a highly-skilled influencer manager who is an expert in handling the campaign from start to finish.

It is highly advisable to understand what this position entails and how it can help make a campaign more successful. So whether you hire an agency or do it in-house, your expectations from the said role are guided.

Who is an influencer manager?

Influencer manager is one of the newest professions in the marketing sphere. It may appear like a familiar managerial position, but it actually involved certain peculiarities that only an influencer manager does.

Every influencer marketing campaign needs an influencer manager. However, influencer management doesn’t stop at handling campaigns—it also involves professionally managing influencer relations. As such, the manager must be proficient and competent in handling a campaign regardless of its scale and reach. In addition, he should contribute to creating a campaign for maximum impact and effectiveness.

An influencer manager should have a deep knowledge of how social media works. He must be digitally and socially savvy, aware, and active. He would know how to approach influencers and build long-term relationships through this.

Responsibilities of an influencer manager

Basically, the manager is responsible for managing the end-to-end operations of an influencer marketing campaign. Here is a more detailed discussion of an influencer manager’s worth-knowing duties and responsibilities.

1) An influencer manager manages a campaign

The entire campaign execution falls on the hands of the manager. The manager is responsible for overseeing the campaign from beginning to end. With this, they should not take their role lightly. Their commitment is also vital in guaranteeing that all bases are covered.

First, the manager needs to understand the client’s unique vision before creating an actual campaign around the said vision. Second, the manager needs to draft a proposal for the said campaign. Third, he will decide on the KPIs and other metrics or parameters with which the brand can gauge the campaign’s success.

Every influencer manager should be proficient at building effective influencer marketing strategies and achieving the highest ROI (return on investment) possible. Additionally, influencer managers should keep in mind that every little tactic culminates in making the influencer marketing campaign successful despite how incessant the processes are.

2) An influencer manager build relationships

If you are an in-house influencer manager, you are expected to reach out to influencers. You have to draft outreach email templates and monitor your email inbox for inquiries or responses. You need to address all questions pertaining to a particular campaign to activate participation and success rates. You’ll be sending follow-up emails to the influencers or brands to remind them of deadlines and payments, respectively. Finally, you’ll want to send thank you emails to let all the participants know how successful the campaign is and what factors contributed to such success.

As such, the manager is the influencers’ first contact. That’s why he’s also key to building meaningful relationships with them. Unless there’s a database of influencers that the manager doesn’t maintain, he needs to create a list of contacts for future collaborations. Likewise, the manager needs to keep communicating with these influencers to make communicating with them easier when the opportunities for collaboration arise.

As the influencer manager, you bridge the gap between the brands and the influencers. Finding common ground between these two entities is your duty. On the one hand, brands want to reach their marketing goals, hence the KPIs, at the lowest cost possible. On the other hand, influencers want to maintain creative control over their process despite doing branded content. They want to convey an inspiring message to their followers. There is a possibility of a clash between these goals, so a competent influencer manager can help both parties find compromises to make the campaign successful.

3) An influencer manager communicates with the influencers, brands, and other entities

You still need to communicate with the influencers even if you’re not an in-house manager but an influencer manager working for an influencer marketing company. At times, they may find producing content a challenge, so it is necessary to give them a creative push to steer the campaign in the right direction. Influencer managers need to be tough, though, empathizing with the influencers.

Overall, the canteen manager should constantly contact all the influencers, clients, and other entities, ensuring that a company is moving forward. The most diligent influencer managers ensure that the influencer receives accurate information and solicits feedback from them. In this way, the managers would know which things are doable and not.

Another critical part of the communication tasks of the influencer manager is tracking the progress of the campaign and reporting members the milestones and challenges to the relevant teams or clients. Finally, an influencer manager must communicate how the influencer marketing campaign propels the brand to reach its marketing goals.

4) An influencer manager coordinates with both the influencers and brands

Aside from verbal and written communication skills, influencer managers should also have coordinating skills. He will be coordinating with the influencers, the brand representatives, and the social team if one is involved. Social teams ensure that the content is on-brand and that the links are working and can be traced back to the campaign. This makes the campaign easier to analyze and gather insights from.

If the influencer manager is handling one campaign and other influencer managers and marketing teams manage other campaigns, it would be wise to coordinate with them. He can share what makes his campaign work primarily in terms of timing and deliverables to help our other campaigns.

5) An influencer manager assists the influencers with their content-related needs

Apart from ensuring that an influencer marketing campaign involves the right influences, the influencer manager also needs to assist the influencers. This is especially true when creating content that requires more than furnishing them with a list of branded content guidelines. If she needs equipment or additional talent, the influencer manager is also expected to help with these things.

The influencer manager understands that each influencer is creatively unique in terms of content, interaction, and niche, in general. Therefore, as much as possible, the influencer manager should treat influencers varyingly, adapting their marketing content to capture the experiences and expertise of the influencers.

This is critical since the manager is the one to guide the brands in choosing the right influencers for the campaign, based on his recommendations as well. Therefore, he needs to create a shortlist of influencers to bring the most value to the brand. In turn, the chosen influencers must be able to meet the goals of the campaign by creating content that resonates the best with its community of followers.

6) An influencer manager keeps up with market trends

While the manager is doing all these things, he also needs to keep abreast of the influencer marketing trends as well as digital marketing and social media marketing trends. Influencer marketing campaigns are getting sophisticated because of these technological advancements.

Hence, you also need to incorporate some of these into new campaigns to make them successful. Trying out new social media features would be beneficial once you, the influencer manager, are able to determine using such features will benefit the brand or the campaign.

Some of the most successful influencer campaigns capitalize on social trends that are presently taking off, creating social content. This requires active learning of the changes in social media influencer managers, which all influencer managers are expected to perform.

All in all

An influencer manager takes care of everything, overseeing the entire campaign toward its successful completion. His works may sound simple, but many additional tasks and workloads add up. Thusly, an influencer manager is extremely helpful to any brand desiring to kickstart its own influencer marketing campaign.

If these–hiring an influencer manager and creating a campaign from scratch–cannot be done in-house, an influencer marketing agency can definitely assist you. The agency can handle all the processes associated with a campaign while also delegating a dedicated influencer manager to oversee it.

Gushcloud has dedicated influencer managers and a pool of influencers who work in campaigns in varying niches. We can immediately set up a campaign and match your brand's goals with suitable influencers.