What is Influencer Relationship Management (IRM)? A Beginner Guide to IRM Software

Developing a better relationship with influencers is definitely crucial to make the collaboration a breeze. With the right Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) tool, it enables brands and agencies to build rapport in the long-run effectively and efficiently.

What is Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) and why is it important? 

IRM refers to strategically managing your interactions with influencers that can make an impact on your audience. 

As you recognise that influencers are also strategic partners of your brand, you would be better equipped at managing your influencer relationships and marketing strategies. Doing so would benefit you in having and maintaining the upper hand when it comes to influencer marketing. By partnering with influencers that have influence over your target audiences, it puts you in a position to sway purchase decisions.

Like managing any other partnership, it is no easy feat, but cultivating a good relationship with influencers will go a long way. With more trust between you and influencers relevant to your brand, you will be able to ask more of these influencers, and you also stand a higher chance of them recommending your products and/or services to your desired audience. Having a strong IRM strategy will aid you in maximising the potential of your influencer marketing campaign – potentially leading to increased brand awareness, brand loyalty, and even your returns on investment (ROI). Whereas if your brand does not manage relationships with influencers well, the influencers may not be as invested in your brand – thereby a missed opportunity for you in reaching out to their followers, or worse, influencers doing a poor job of building your brand’s credibility.

The way your relationships with influencers are managed can have a significant impact on your sales and revenue, therefore implementing a strategic IRM is crucial for your brand.

Here are How You can Manage Your Influencers Effectively:

(1) Work with the right influencers 

By using StarNgage Pro’s software, you are able to search for the right influencers to work with. A right influencer refers to someone whose values and missions align well with your brand’s. This is key to influencer management, because how an influencer presents themselves will be representative of your brand. With aligned values, when influencers promote your brand, your target audience will continue associating said values with you. 

Not all influencers may align 100% with your brand, but you will eventually learn to adopt better ways in identifying high-performing creators with time. It has also been proven that relevance and shared values is also something that influencers prioritise when it comes to partnerships. According to statistics, 49% of influencers are more likely to collaborate when brands are relevant to their own target audience. As you use StarNgage to find influencers, you would stand a better opportunity streamlining your selection of influencers to collaborate with those that you would like to be represented by. 

With the right influencers chosen via StarNgage Pro, you can then reach out to them using the community management or direct messaging features to further discuss your collaboration. Engage them for campaigns such as content creation, or speaking at events, which are usually a pay per content creation model or on sponsored content.

(2) Track the campaign progress and analyze the results using StarNgage Pro to attribute results to the right influencers

Not only are you able to create and manage influencer campaigns via StarNgage Pro, you are also able to track their progress and analyse the results of each campaign. 

The StarNgage Pro platform will provide you with advanced analytics and metrics for campaign performance management to track whether the influencers have published their posts and metrics such as post likes and comments. Analytics as such enable brands to understand the performance of an influencer’s post. By knowing which campaign fares better, it will also highlight which influencer aligns better to the brand. 

(3) Identify the top performers from the past campaigns and continue to work with them for future collaboration 

With the top performing campaigns identified, you would be able to discern which influencers align best with your brand. So in the long run, your brand will make increasingly better selections when it comes to continue collaborating with the right influencers and/or recruiting new influencers. Thus, solidifying your brand identity to both your target audience and amongst the followers of relevant influencers. You can then use the tag feature of StarNgage Pro to segment your influencers with better performance so that it is easier to differentiate the top performers.

(4) Skip spreadsheet and DMs and use StarNgage Pro to bring all of your communication under one roof to keep the conversation warm to build a long-term partnership 

Instead of having your communication channels spread out across different platforms, StarNgage Pro allows you to to connect with your influencers all in one place – more convenience and clearer communication for both parties. As your communication is made easier, naturally your relationship with recruited influencers have a higher chance of improving as well – increasing your opportunity to maintain a good and long-term relationship with them! Besides, you can create custom fields such as birthday to jot down the birthday of the influencers at StarNgage Pro so that you can send their birthday wishes or gifts during their birthday to build a better relationship!

Interested in giving StarNgage Pro a go? Drop us a message to request for a demo!