Influencers are a powerful force in the digital landscape. Their unique appeal allows them to stand out and reach audiences in a time of fast-paced consumption. Social proof backs this up: 81% of consumers are influenced by the recommendations from their social media feeds, while over half of users have bought a product following influencers’ advertisements.
Companies are embracing this trend more and more willingly, with 85% of brands and marketing agencies believing it to be effective and 60% planning to increase their influencer marketing budget over 2024. Influencer marketing was found to be effective for both expanding awareness and increasing sales, for small and medium-sized businesses in particular. As a result, the industry market’s worth is expected to reach $24 billion by the end of this year.
Regardless of scale, any influencer marketing campaign requires multiple efforts-consuming steps, including analytics, communication, and strategy design. Contracting out this work to a skilled third party will streamline the process and ensure the campaign’s quality.
Let us hear industry voices: Here are five major burdens that external professional services can relieve on the brand’s shoulders.
Blogger Communication
They allow companies to sign off the content quickly and correctly by tackling all the nuanced issues and points of contention that might occur in communication with influencers.
Operational Support
They remove the weight of management responsibilities, including fast payments, control of blogger activities, response to force majeure situations, bulk purchases, and so many more.
Legal Paperwork
They streamline legal document flow: from devising clear-cut contracts to sorting out legal nuances in the new region.
Comprehensive Strategy
They present a full-fledged strategy that will meet the brand’s needs in full and regulate every key aspect of the campaign.
Post-Campaign Report
They provide detailed analytics of the campaign’s performance based on the audience’s metrics.
Now that all the cards are on the table, how do you decide between hiring a freelancer expert and working with an agency?
In this article, we have gathered insights from industry experts on the importance of outsourcing and the pros and cons of each option.
Depending largely on your goals and resources, the answer lies in the desired scale of your campaign: do your goals require a long-term brand strategy, or will a brief campaign suit your needs better? Do you want to focus on a narrow niche or span across platforms? These and other questions can guide you toward the right choice. But first, let us explore each option more closely.
Freelance Influencer Marketing Manager
What is a Freelance Influencer Marketing Manager?
A freelance influencer marketing manager is an independent professional with hands-on experience in digital marketing and blogger communication. They typically work on a project-to-project basis rather than partnering with a single company for the long term and have a wide range of responsibilities, from drafting contracts to placing ads.
4 Benefits of Hiring Freelance Influencer Marketing Managers
1. Tailored Support
With generally fewer clients, freelancers can provide more undivided attention to each project. This allows them to better align their strategies with their clients' specific needs.
Besides, unlike most agencies, they are not restricted by rigid algorithms and guidelines. Therefore, they are more flexible in their decision-making and more willing to adjust their strategies.
2. Niche Expertise
While it does not apply to all freelance experts in the field, many of them stand out in the market due to their specialized expertise.
This may include a strong focus on specific market segments, deep knowledge of a certain platform, and communication intricacies with a particular cohort of bloggers.
3. Direct Communication
While working with a freelance expert, you communicate any changes and adjustments you wish to make directly to the person responsible for the production.
With no middle layers to cut through, there is less chance for misalignment, confusion, and ignoring.
4. Cost-Effectiveness
Perhaps, one of the strongest benefits of freelancers is their cost compared to that of the agency services.
They charge substantially lower fees, which makes them a more affordable option, particularly attractive for small businesses.
4 Drawbacks of Hiring Freelance Influencer Marketing Managers
1. Capacity Constraints
However vast and wide-ranging, the resources and expertise of a single person are worlds apart from the potential of a full agency.
This is why large-sized campaigns will require the services of 3-4 influencer marketing experts, let alone other specialists, such as the creative director and operation manager. This might demand additional efforts from the company, in terms of workflow coordination between the freelancers.
2. Scalability Challenges
Unlike agencies, a single specialist might find it challenging to quickly adjust the campaign size according to the brand’s changing needs.
While they offer flexibility in terms of strategy adjustments, their limited resources are a severe obstacle to large, effort-consuming shifts.
3. Varied Quality
Freelancer experts may vary in quality substantially, and because of a non-transparent market, it might be challenging to gauge their expertise prior to recruitment.
Besides, different sets of skills within the whole team can serve as a balancing force, something freelancers do not have by definition.
4. Reliability Issues
Without rigid coordination, a single employee is more likely to fall behind deadlines or, even more dramatically, become unavailable altogether.
Moreover, freelancers tend to be limited in their expertise around legal issues and finance. In this case, the brand might be faced with a large portion of related complexities to tackle without assistance.
While some drawbacks, like quality and reliability issues, are largely dependent on a specific individual the brand chooses to work with, scalability and capacity challenges are the defining disadvantages of freelancer experts. Yet, these two might hold little relevance if the brand is in need of a relatively modest campaign, and the creative demands are not complex in terms of time and effort.
Influencer Marketing Agency
What is an Influencer Marketing Agency?
An influencer marketing agency is an organization that works with brands and influencers to run marketing campaigns. The agency’s team of professionals typically consists of a creative director, influencer marketing managers, data analysts, designers, and others. A specific list of positions and responsibilities may vary.
4 Benefits of Working with an Influencer Marketing Agency
1. End-to-End Solutions
Agencies handle the full campaign cycle, relieving the brand of any campaign-related responsibilities.
A skilled team can define and structure the brand’s needs even if the brand does not have a clear vision. Based on that, agency experts can develop a full-fledged creative strategy packed with data-driven innovative takes to leave the audience captivated and wanting more.
Agencies are geared with the knowledge of best practices and trends, bringing a rich toolkit to guide the client.
2. Creative Projects
With multi-hand skills and diverse expertise, agencies have all the resources to create full-fledged special projects with multiple creative takes — from native integrations and cosplay projects to short films and mini-games.
Since creative formats have been crowding out standard integrations and taking center stage lately, an innovative approach of this sort brings another strong marketing value point to the agency.
3. Streamlined Blogger Communication
While both freelancers and agencies take the task upon themselves of communicating with bloggers, agencies perform it more efficiently due to greater resources. As a result, they resolve any complexities in terms of content management, blogger coordination, and force majeure situations at greater speed.
Besides, the blogger communication is likely to go off more smoothly due to the weight of authority that the agency has, being a full-scale professional organization.
4. Risk Management
Unlike freelance experts, agencies can fully guarantee the protection of the brand’s rights, as they have the specialist to tackle legal issues and finances.
Proficient in risk management and well-versed in legal nuances of different regions and market segments, agencies offer complete coverage of all potential complications.
4 Drawbacks of Working with an Influencer Marketing Agency
1. High Price
Agencies charge substantially higher fees, since they offer a full team of specialists at a brand’s disposal. Yet, this is likely to become a barrier for small companies with small-scale campaigns.
Besides, additional costs might arise in the course of the work due to expenses for creative projects.
2. Limited Control
When partnering with an agency, brands naturally have less control over the choice of influencers, creative strategies, content details, and the overall campaign execution.
Backed by strong expertise, agencies are heavily reliant on their own vision and competence, so brands are likely to have a smaller input into the final marketing project than they could have.
However, a competent team of professionals will by no means neglect their customers’ ideas and suggestions.
3. Complex Communication
Agencies can have a large network of specialists. Thus, the information flow between the brand and the agency might be managed by a dedicated point of contact, which may create additional challenges to passing on the revisions without loss.
In some extreme cases, overloaded agencies might become less responsive and give preference to larger clients.
Yet, in some cases, a personalized manager that the agency provides for streamlining communication will, on the contrary, enhance the process of exchanging ideas.
4. Less Personalized Approach
With a set of rules and guidelines to regulate their work, some agencies might be less flexible in adapting their strategies to the campaign’s needs. They may be guided by their own success stories more than by the brand’s vision.
If an agency chooses to adopt a uniform approach, the brand runs higher risks of the campaign’s misalignment with its values.
To avoid this, consider partnering with an agency that specializes in creative campaigns and special projects. This way, a personalized approach is guaranteed.
Just like with freelancer experts, the last two of the listed drawbacks are highly optional, depending on the agency’s approaches: some are, on the contrary, highly customer-oriented, striving to tailor their strategies to each project. Instead, high expenses and control issues do occur in such partnerships quite often.
However, these are the direct outcomes of the company’s decision to relieve themselves of this task in full, delegating it to a competent team of experts.
Choose the Right Option to Craft a Perfect Influencer Campaign
To select a perfect partner for your project, reflect on the ambitiousness of your goals and the scale of your future campaign and weigh your financial capacities. Limited resources and niche expertise make freelance influencer managers the best pick for small-sized campaigns designed for a specific niche and platform.
Contrary to this, an influencer marketing agency is the place to go if you need to come up with an elaborate, long-term, and multi-channel campaign packed with creative elements.
Author Bio
Kira Chesalina, the Creative Director at AAA Agency, an international influence and special projects agency. AAA Agency creates authentic brand stories through collaborations with the best influencers and build audience trust with our clients.
Gaming stands as the cornerstone of AAA Agency's expertise. We specialize in crafting and implementing profitable Influencer Marketing initiatives tailored for game publishers. Our experience is proven by 100+ successful cases from satisfied clients: Wargaming, NCSoft, Lilith Games, Ubisoft, etc. And for 2023, the total reach of our campaigns in the Gaming vertical was about 11,000,000.
