The Unicorns of the Marketing industry are influencer marketers

The search for the perfect marketer is over as I know the secret to finding the best marketing employee you could ever hire, Influencer Marketers. These majestic unicorns in the industry are unlike any others and often overlooked purely due to a lack of understanding on what influencer marketers do. The famous saying is ‘a Jack of all trades is a master of none’, however, the full saying is actually ‘a Jack of all trades is a master of none but still better than a master of one’. There is a perception that has been created that the only skill influencer marketers have is knowing how to deal with influencers, which is only one facet of their daily tasks. They are truly the masters of influencer marketing and that cannot be taken away from their wheelhouse, but they are also a Jack of all marketing trades. This article aims to dive deeper into what makes up these multifaceted marketers to change your perception and make you want to hire an influencer marketer to be a part of your team.

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As mentioned, Influencer marketers deal with content creators, influencers, and talent managers but we also have to deal with clients, agencies, paid media, public relations, shoots, events, brand management, social media strategy, content marketing, digital marketing and financial management. Let’s dive into these elements to showcase how all the above elements are skills that an Influencer Marketer needs to obtain and have experience of.

Influencers, talent managers and content creators: Of course, we need to deal with these parties when doing campaigns but what does it really entail? It all comes down to people management and relationship building. A soft skill that isn’t taught, you either have it or you don’t, and some Influencer Marketers just don’t but it shows in their work. There is a level of professionalism that needs to be created when creating a partnership with influencers, but this is based on building influencer relations. Without influencer relations, you cannot truly collaborate to the fullest potential. Emotional intelligence and people management is a valuable skill that is an asset to have in a candidate.

Client Service: Something that is also not taught through books but rather experience, is client service. Building a relationship with a client, delivering on the client’s expectations, and being the middleman between the client and the influencers. Client service is nothing new in the industry but influencer marketers deal with clients directly whereas a traditional client service role in an agency would be the only person that deal with clients. Influencer Marketers build client relations and sale their services to them. We are the business development managers in an agency, and this is often overlooked. If an influencer marketer is good at what they do, a client will trust them as a specialist and advisor, but this trust is earned.

Agencies: If this article has not already convinced you to hire an influencer marketing into your marketing team, let me share something to help you further filter the good from the bad. Ask an influencer marketer their experience with integrating with other agencies and disciplines. This experience will divide the experts from the armatures as it takes a specialised individual to understand a full agency integration ecosystem. A deeper understanding of all disciplines is needed to fully integrate as well as a key strategic eye. An Influencer marketer needs to understand digital marketing and strategy, customer journey, paid media, public relations, internal communications, activations, and more to fully build an influencer strategy that seamlessly fits within all the other disciplines. The questions an influencer marketer needs to answer are how does the influencer piece of a campaign answer the client’s brief and fit within the overall campaign big idea or how does the influencer piece fit and work with paid media, public relations, internal comms, digital platforms, and social media strategies. Not many marketers have the ability to have a full understanding of the marketing ecosystem to understand how influencers can work through the line. This understanding is needed to be able to then build a creative solution for influencer through strategy.

Social Media, Content and Digital: No one will understand social media as well as an influencer marketer. The reason is that these unicorns need to understand everything social and digital to understand the best was to execute a campaign. In a normal agency, client service will brief creative to generate content for social media and digital channels. Influencer marketers are doing the same thing; however, they brief influencers instead of creatives. This process is more involved as the marketer needs to brief, guide and participate in the creation of content. They need to understand where is the content going, on what platform, to what target audience, through what form of content, etc. These specialists need to be on the pulse of social media and content in order to understand the latest platform updates, trends, content types, as well as understand the analytics behind them to see what will bring in the best return on investments. A deeper understanding of customer journey comes into play as we need to understand how someone gets fed content from an influencer, and what are the next steps towards commercialisation. We are not just making pretty content on Canva to be posted onto a brand’s owned channel, we understand the deep nuances of owned and earned in a digital ecosystem and how to take advantage of it.

Financial management: Something that many people do not realise is how an Influencer Marketer also needs a strong understanding around finances and how to budget manage on campaigns. Not only are we putting costings for campaigns together, we also negotiate with influencers and need to keep track of costs against budget. This may sound simple, however, when you are dealing with over 50 plus influencers with multiple different costs, you’re Excel skills need to be at the level of a CFO. On a personal note, I have put hundreds of campaign costs together in my life and my Excel abilities to cost manage on massive campaigns and create formulas to streamline campaign tracking has been a personal achievement.

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The aim of putting this together is to inspire you to see these marketers in a new light. The unicorns of the industry that do way more than you perhaps realised. These individuals, the experienced ones that is, are an asset in your digital marketing team. You do not need to be dealing with influencers to head hunt an influencer marketer as I have seen many companies hire these talented marketers as public relation experts, event managers, digital strategists, social media managers, content marketers, communication specialists and business development managers. So, the next time you look for a unicorn to hire, look to the influencer pastures.