Make Influence Methodology: 
A strategic approach to influencer marketing.

What is the Make Influence Methodology?

The Make Influence Methodology (or MIM, as we call) is a framework that helps companies succeed with influencer marketing by structuring and aligning their influencer strategy, associated workflow and process, as well as its integration with other marketing channels.

The Make Influence Methodology aims at providing a guidance to any kind of business on how to develop an influencer marketing program that is efficient, effective and integrated with their other marketing channels and business functions.

In order to achieve an influencer program that maximises value for the brand, the Make Influence methodology focuses on three complementary elements:

1. How to create an efficient and self-sustaining influencer machine, what we call process strategy.
2. How to ensure that the influencer machine delivers the most possible value in terms of marketing objectives, what we call the channel strategy.
3. How to ensure Ensure that the influencer machine works efficiently with the other marketing channels (website, email, paid social etc.), as well as it’s well integrated with the rest of the company functions (logistics, e-commerce, finance etc.). We call this the integration strategy.

Why do you need a methodology?

Influencer Marketing can be a difficult discipline to master. This is mostly due to the fact that, compared to other channels that are more technology led, for example Social Media Advertising, Influencer Marketing requires relationship building, a great deal of coordination and communication skills, as well as mutual understanding and trust between a company employees and a group of influencers.

This means that influencer marketing requires a serious and deliberate strategy, followed up by a continuous effort to work effectively. It is not as simple as creating a few ads creatives and copies, allocate a budget and press a button to send them live.  

As a result of being somewhat complicated to create an effective influencer program, most companies see influencer marketing as a on-and-off, support channel to boost and legitimise marketing campaigns that leverage primarily on other channels.

However, when done right, influencer marketing can become the very engine of your marketing strategy and provide ROI that greatly outperforms other channels.

Let's get into it, and discover how the Make Influence Methodology works in practice.

‍

The Process Strategy: How to build an efficient influencer machine.

The first, and probably most important step to creating an influencer marketing program is to ensure you have a consistent approach to recruiting and collaborating with influencers, so that the collaborations run smoothly and you ca ultimately expand on the partnerships that delivered the best results.

Why is it so important? Because recruiting new influencers and onboard them to your campaign can be time consuming and expensive, so you really want to maximise what you can get from your existing collaborations, while making the recruiting and collaboration parts as efficient as possible.

Influencer Flywheel Framework

At Make Influence, we see an influencer campaign as a process that starts with the recruitment of an influencer, continues with its activation and performance reporting and ends up with either a continued or discontinued collaboration, based on how good the collaboration went. When this works well, this process becomes self-feeding, meaning that the recruitment of new influencers is facilitated by existing influencers who recommend your brand to other creators in your network.  

At Make Influence, we call this self-feeding process loop the "Influencer Flywheel"

‍

What is the influencer Flywheel?

The Influencer Flywheel  is a general, strategic framework to help businesses recruit, manage, and retain good quality influencers in an efficient way (i.e. with the least amount of resources such as hours and money).

The goal of the flywheel process model is to generate long-term valuable collaborations with as little effort as possible. �

It's important to notice that this framework is not dependent on business objectives or other contextual factors, which makes the Influencer Flywheel applicable to most business cases.

‍

How does the Influencer Flywheel work?

The Flywheel is comprised of 3 layers (or levels):

1. The Stages Level
2. The Jobs To Be Done Level
3. The Solutions Level

At the flywheel's center, we have the influencers (not customers or revenue). This means that the ultimate goal of this framework is to make your influencer program efficient, not guide what your campaigns should include or how to generate the desired results you are aiming for with your influencer effort.

The Stages level is a breakdown of the overall influencer marketing flywheel into 3 sequential stages, each of which ends with a clear result or action.

The Activities (or Jobs to be done) level consists of a set of “jobs” or “activities” that marketers must carry out at each stage of the process in order to reach the end goal of the stage. It can be considered a further breakdown of each stage, and the amount of activities can slightly vary from case to case.

The outermost layer is the Solution level. This level encompasses all others, and it consists of all the solutions that Make Influence can provide to customers in order to help you carry out your activities and ease the problems associated with them.

‍

The Stages Level: How do you break down the collaboration?

At the outermost level, we find the process that a company needs to follow in order to develop a self-sustaining influencer marketing machine. The process is a closed loop, meaning it feeds back into itself.

The better the outcome from any stage of the process, the better the initial condition of the next stage, meaning a more efficient and faster process overall.

In more visual terms:

Better recruiting = faster activation & easier relationship management = more loyal influencers = easier recruiting via referral and word of mouth.

This process is broken down in 3 stages.

1. Recruit 🎣
   Recruit is the stage in the influencer's workflow where the company needs to find influencers and recruit them to a campaign via a collaboration proposal. In this stage, the company needs to discover suitable influencers, invite them to collaborate, and negotiate campaign terms in order to secure a collaboration.
2. Collaborate 🤝
   Collaborate is the stage in the influencer's workflow where the company needs to manage the relationship with the influencers to ensure that campaign objectives are met. This includes activating influencers and ensuring they deliver on campaign terms, validating the work of influencers through analytics & reporting and fulfilling their obligations towards the influencer (pay them, for example).
3. Expand 🤝
   Expand is the stage in the influencer's workflow where the company needs to manage the relationship with their community of influencers, ensuring that future collaborations are made possible and long-term collaborations keep thriving. This includes ensuring influencers are updated about new campaigns they can join, that they receive products on an ongoing basis as loyalty rewards and that they can refer other influencers that might be right for future jobs.
   ‍

The Activities Level: What are the Jobs to be done?

The different stages of the process are comprised of several activities that the marketer needs to perform in order to complete the stage. These activities are called “jobs to be done”.

The amount and nature of activities is fluid, meaning it can vary slightly from company to company, and can change in time. For example, a company that does not sell physical products will not have to ensure their products are shipped to the influencers, while a car company will likely have a lot of work when it comes to ensure their product reaches the influencer, which might even include collaborating with partner companies.

Let's have a look at the most common activities you are likely to have to perform at each stage of the flywheel.

Recruit

1. Create campaign brief: create a document that specifies all the details about your campaign to be shared with the influencers.
2. Invite: Invite shortlisted influencers to collaborate with you.
3. Negotiate: agree on compensation and deliverables for the collaboration.
4. Legal: for some products and services, you might need to create contracts and ensure the collaboration respects industry regulations and the law.

‍

Collaborate

1. Plan content: get an overview of all the content that is going to be produced, the platforms it's going to be delivered on etc.
   
2. Send products: ensure the free products are ordered and shipped to the influencers.
   
3. Activate: ensure collaboration is carried out and deliverables are created according to plan.
4. Approve Content: ensure the deliverables are done according to specifications.
5. Monitor: keep track of results from the collaboration.
6. Report: analyze overall campaign performance and document it.
7. Pay-out: perform your part of the contract

Expand

1. Pay-out: compensate influencers for their work.
   
2. Re-activate: ensure top influencers get new products and are asked to keep the collaboration running.
   
3. Engage community: keep your community of influencers engaged with updates about your brand and its campaigns.
   
4. Create ambassadors: talk with top performing influencers about creating long term ambassadorship collaborations.
   
5. Get referrals: activate influencers to recommend your brand to other creators in their network.

‍

The Solutions Level: What do you need to get the jobs done?

Each of the activities above comes with its own set of pains related to it.
Planning content is time consuming, reporting can be technically challenging etc.

It is important you equip yourself with the right processes and tools to get these activities done in an efficient way.

This is where Make Influence comes in: we create solutions to your problems and facilitate the carrying out of the various activities in the influencer marketing process.

Sounds like something you could get some help with?