What Does an Influencer Marketing Manager Do?

The latest member of marketing teams everywhere are influencer marketing managers. These marketing professionals manage influencer marketing campaigns and influencer relations for their companies.

With more and more brands adding this position to their marketing departments, do you know what this position entails? Does it match your skills? Could it be your next career move?

The Basic Job Description of an Influencer Marketing Manager

Influencer marketing managers are responsible for managing the end-to-end operations of a brand’s influencer marketing campaigns. They build a team of influencer partners for the brand, manage communications, and coordinate with the rest of the marketing team to get maximum impact for their influencer campaigns.

Responsibilities of an Influencer Marketing Manager

Campaign Management

First and foremost, an influencer marketing manager is responsible for taking an influencer campaign from start to finish. You’ll be creating campaigns around a unique vision, drafting the proposals for this campaign, and deciding on the KPIs so that you can measure the campaign’s success.

You’ll also be reaching out to the influencers that your brand will partner with. You’ll need to draft outreach email templates that you can use for your campaign, and you’ll need to keep a watchful eye on your email inbox so that you can respond to any influencer questions.

You may also need to provide assistance when the influencer is creating content. They may need guidance or a creative push in the right direction. In any case, you’ll still need to be in constant contact with your partners to keep the campaign moving forward.

Once the content is published, you’ll be tracking the success of the campaigns and reporting it to the rest of your team. You’ll need to be able to communicate how this campaign helped the brand reach their overall growth goals.

Relationship Building

While campaigns may provide the first contact with an influencer, you’ll want to build a relationship with this influencer for your brand. Influencer relationships are crucial to the success of your influencer marketing campaigns.

Keep communications going with these influencers and other contacts so that they are familiar with you and your brand when the opportunity arises for a collaboration. You’ll want to build a list of contacts that can help you on future influencer collaborations.

You’ll also need to find ways to reach common ground with brands and influencers. Brands are typically trying to reach their KPIs with as little cost as possible, while influencers are trying to maintain creative control over their content and present an entertaining message to their audiences. At times, these goals can be at odds with each other, but a good influencer marketing manager will find ways to help both parties reach their goals and find common ground.

Influencer Communications

From the first day of your brand’s influencer marketing, you’ll be communicating with influencers. Whether it’s keeping the relationship fresh or responding to their questions about a specific campaign, you’ll need to have strong writing and communication skills to make sure that influencers are receiving thorough information and feedback from you.

Over the course of a campaign, you’ll be writing:

• Outreach messages to recruit influencer partners
• Support emails to answer questions from influencers
• Reminders so that influencers meet the campaigns deadlines
• Followup emails thanking the influencer for their participating and letting them know next steps

Coordinating with Marketing Team

An influencer marketing manager should fit into and support the overall goals of the marketing team. With that in mind, you’ll need to coordinate with the rest of the team to make sure that influencer content is shared with the social media manager, links are clearly tracked to differentiate between your campaigns and the campaigns from the rest of the team, and that your campaigns support the messaging for the rest of the brand.

Influencer marketing campaigns can support the other initiatives of the marketing team. A good influencer marketing manager will work with the rest of the team so that the timing, theme, and deliverables from their campaign can help power the rest of the brand’s marketing channels.

Market Research and Trend Analysis

In addition to managing the different campaigns of the brand, an influencer marketing manager must keep up with the latest trends on social media and within the influencer community.

Your influencer marketing program and influencer strategy should incorporate the findings of your market research. New features of the social media platforms should be tested and proved against the results of your other influencer marketing campaigns to see if they can benefit your brand.

The best influencer marketing campaigns capitalize on trends before anyone else and create content just as the trend is taking off. This requires constant research and active participation in these social media platforms to ensure that you are up-to-date on the latest trends.

Skills Needed to Be an Influencer Marketing Manager

• Knowledge of social media – This doesn’t mean that you have an Instagram account where you post pictures of your cat. You need to have a working knowledge of all the top social media platforms, as well as any advertising options these social media platforms have. You should know how to optimize content for each platform, as well as how to market your brand with each platform’s unique features.  
• People skills – Influencer marketing managers must not only develop relationships and network with influencers, but also find ways to create connections to brand executives so that everyone benefits from your influencer marketing campaigns. You’ll be negotiating brand deals and partnerships and will need to be able to properly communicate with all parties involved.  
• Mediation – A skilled influencer marketing manager will be able to find common ground between the influencers and the brands. You serve as the middleman in these negotiations and you’ll need to find ways to keep them both happy as you create the arrangements for the campaign.  
• Master communicator – As stated above, you’ll be in constant communication with your influencer team and with the stakeholders from your brand. You should have strong writing skills to easily construct email templates, as well as inter-personal skills when talking to influencers and brands in person.  
• Able to multi-task – You’ll need to be able to context shift as you talk to your influencer team and complete tasks for your influencer marketing campaigns throughout the day. You’ll need to be able to track multiple conversations with influencers so that you can provide them with the answers they need to keep the ball rolling.  
• Degree in marketing, communications, public relations, or similar field – While this is not required to start work as an influencer marketing manager, it can help you get hired for the positions and provide you with the basic knowledge in marketing and business that you’ll need to succeed in the position.

Who Should Be an Influencer Marketing Manager?

While you don’t need years of experience to start as an influencer marketing manager, it does take a deep understanding of the influencer marketing landscape and a desire to build relationships for brands.

An ideal candidate for an influencer marketing manager will have knowledge of content marketing and social media marketing strategies. They will also be detail-oriented, able to multitask, and a people-person.

If you don’t have good communication skills or you struggle to understand social media, then you probably won’t thrive in this position.

The biggest keys to success as an influencer marketing manager are your ability to build relationships between the brands and influencers so that everyone benefits from your campaign guidance.

Does My Brand Need an Influencer Marketing Manager?

If you are thinking about hiring an influencer marketing manager, then you probably have some previous experience with influencer marketing. You can build brand awareness and revenue by partnering with influencers and it’s a valuable way to grow your business.

However, as you scale up your influencer marketing, you’ll need time. That’s where an influencer marketing manager comes in. An influencer marketing manager has the time to scale up your influencer marketing, while continuing to provide high quality communications to everyone involved.

If you want to grow your brand but are lacking in time, then an influencer marketing manager could be the best person to add to your marketing team.

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