How Agencies Can Better Sell Influencer Marketing

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In the days of Don Draper and Mad Men, Madison Avenue advertising agencies could book a TV commercial on one of the three TV channels and demand a 15% fee for these services. Brand options were limited and fee structures were set. Life was good for advertising executives. 

Today, running an agency business is far more difficult. Agencies are looking for areas where they can drive revenue and influencer and content creator campaigns are one area where agencies are finding commercial success. 

However, selling influencer marketing services isn’t easy. There are still brands that are hesitant to invest marketing dollars into it. It’s important for agencies to be able to better sell influencer marketing to their clients. Here’s four ways how agencies can improve their mindset and pitches. 

Think Like a Brand, not an Agency

I’ve encountered a lot of agencies that focus on what’s best for their business, rather than their clients’ interests. Too many agencies are looking to extract the largest budget and fattest fee and “justify” it with strategy. This is particularly true with influencer marketing. 

Influencer marketing is largely manual and it costs an agency the same manpower to service one mega influencer as it does one micro influencer. The only difference is a huge gap in the fee. Sometimes a brand needs more micro influencers than one mega influencer, but agencies are hesitant to suggest this, because they’ll have to work harder for the same payoff.  

If you are only thinking about your agency’s bottom line and not thinking about how to extract the maximum value for the brand, you are vulnerable. Think like you were the brand manager and determining where to spend money and why. This will help you approach and sell your services more effectively. 

ALSO READ : Which Type of Business Models Work Well with Influencer Marketing?

Pitch an Integrated Strategy - Not Just Influencers

The agency world is very territorial. You have one agency for digital, another for media, a third for influencers. Sometimes brands consolidate, but they very often have specialist agencies for different disciplines. However, that doesn’t mean you need to “stay in your lane.”

Influencer marketing does not stand alone. It shouldn’t be separated from your primary marketing strategy. Help the brand visualize what the entire campaign could look like. Brands are always looking for creative ideas. Even if you’re not a creative agency, pitch creative ideas. 

Hot Pockets did a great campaign, where they marketed directly to Gen-Z gamers, rather than the mothers (like they have done in the past). In the “Pockets 4 Bits” campaign, Hot Pockets utilized Twitch influencers to hype up a promotion that enabled online gamers to buy Hot Pockets and receive Twitch “Bits” for their gaming experience. This campaign involved a microsite, paid media, influencers, and offline commerce. 

Pitching this entire concept makes influencer marketing seem much more valuable, than just saying “these influencers can promote your product.” Even if you can’t fulfil all aspects of the campaign, the client will help fill in the gaps with their other agencies and give you the influencer marketing business. 

Reframe How You Think About Your List of Creator Names

I have read countless creator briefs that view audiences and creators in a linear manner. For example, a deodorant brand might look for influencers who talk about fitness and sports. Their target audience are people who live an active lifestyle. So they want creators who are into fitness. There is a straight line between the content and the brand. 

This is a terrible way to approach which creators to work with.

First of all, it narrows the list of potential creators you work with. Not only are there a finite number of creators in each category, when you account for any that have also posted for a competitor, it makes finding acceptable names more difficult. 

The real reason why this is a poor strategy is because people are multi-dimensional. I work out daily and I don’t follow any fitness influencers, but I do consume a lot of digital content by content creators. 

There are many different ways of looking at the content of a creator and their audience. For example, I encountered a brief for a sleep aid brand. They wanted to talk to young professionals about solving their insomnia and anxiety. Instead, we shifted the conversation to “high performance professionals,” people who looked to optimize their lifestyles to improve performance. This opened up a new audience of creators for them to talk to, while still including their existing audience. 

As an agency, you are only thinking about what the brand offers and the content creator that explicitly makes content for that niche, not only will you have a hard time selling these campaigns to your clients, but you’ll have a hard time differentiating yourself from competitors. 

Speak their KPI Language 

As an agency, you typically have a brand contact. Every single one of these people have to report to someone else. From an assistant brand manager all the way up to CEO, everyone has to report their decisions and defend their reasoning. 

It’s not your job just to deliver the work in your SOW (service of work). You need to help make your counterpart look good, so they can sell your services internally as a win for the company. You can’t do this if you’re speaking two different languages. 

Influencer and creator marketing fall under the marketing and media umbrella. That’s where the budget is coming from. Therefore, you need to be able to speak in the same KPIs (key performance indicator) terminology as they do. If you are not tracking what is important to the brand in the language they need to sell up the chain, then you are going to have a very difficult time retaining the client. 

This means going beyond terms like Engagement Rate and learning the terms like Cost Per Engagement, Cost Per View, and understanding how to calculate them. You need to be able to explain where creator content fits in the marketing mix, what the difference is between awareness, consideration, and conversion content is. 

If you can speak the same language as your client or potential client, the more likely it is they will trust you and give you their influencer or creator business. 

Most agencies do not know how to effectively sell an influencer or content creator campaign. They focus too much on the number of creators they know (discovery) and less on the strategic value for the brand. By understanding these four tactics, agencies, no matter the size, can expect to land more clients.