What is influencer relationship management (IRM)?

Why is influencer relationship management important?

Whether your influencer marketing goals are targeting increased follower engagement, building brand awareness, or driving sales, influencer relationship management is key to ensuring everything runs smoothly. It prioritizes influencer relationships, ensuring creators remain engaged and no opportunity to fine-tune your campaigns is missed. Let’s not forget what effective planning does for ROI!

The three stages of influencer relationship management

Effective influencer relationships management falls into three key stages: 

Finding and recruiting the right influencers

For influencer relationship management to work well, you must partner with the best influencers for your campaign’s needs. Conversely, pairing with the wrong influencers or those who post off-message content will harm your brand image… and drain your marketing budget.

Use tactics such as social listening to identify content creators who already love your brand and offer high target audience engagement levels. Influencer relationship management is about managing these collaborations, so working with influencers invested in your brand’s success is essential.

Building relationships with transparent communications

Communication is vital in any successful influencer relationship management program. That’s because influencers thrive on being involved in the process, but their feedback also highlights new opportunities for you to enhance your influencer marketing campaign.

IRM involves consistent contact before, during, AND after an influencer marketing campaign. Incorporating two-way communication into your influencer relationship management program can:

• Streamline your marketing campaign
• Boost brand awareness, online purchases, and follower engagement
• Build highly successful, longer-term relationships with key influencers

Monitoring performance metrics

Crucial to any influencer relationship management strategy is the use of real-time performance metrics. This is best achieved using an influencer management platform, where you can consolidate all of your campaign metrics in one place and easily see which are achieving the best results.

Similarly, influencer platforms allow you to quickly identify any underperforming influencers or those posting off-message content, so you can quickly take action. This keeps the focus on performance, brand image and positive ROI.

Aspire has helped hundreds of high growth D2C brands to successfully keep on top of their IRM. From finding influencers to setting goals, storing content and monitoring performance, manage the entire process in a centralized, easy-to-use platform. Book a demo.