Influencer Relationship Management – What Is It & How To Build Your IRM Strategy

Influencer Relationship Management, or IRM, refers to how you manage your interactions with influencers. This strategy is heavily inspired by Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which is about managing customer interactions.

Brands can effectively manage influencer relationships and their marketing strategies by realizing that they are not your employees but strategic partners. You should focus more on building relationships with influencers than on customers.

The goal of Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) is to build strategic relationships with influencers. This will allow you to maintain control over influencer marketing. This is possible by partnering up with people that influence your target audience. The influence that can affect purchase decisions.

Why is IRM important?

If done properly, Influencer Relationship Management can build customer trust. This will bring long-term value to your brand. But it is not easy to build good relationships with influencers.

Poorly planned Influencer Relationship Management strategies will not only harm relationships with your influencers but also lead to ineffective influencer market campaigns. Your credibility will be damaged if your influencers don't invest enough in your influencer-marketing campaigns.

Strong IRM strategies will allow you to harness the true potential of your influencer marketing campaign.

This will increase brand awareness and customer trust and also improve your returns on investment (ROI). Therefore, building relationships with influencers can have a positive impact on your sales and revenue.

Below are five ways your brand can build strong relationships with influencers which will help you gain customer trust and high ROI.

How can you manage influencer relationships effectively in five ways?

It takes a lot of work to manage influencer relationships. It starts with finding influencers and goes on as long as the collaboration.

Although many more things go into nurturing influencer relationships than these five steps, they will still provide a solid foundation for your campaigns and collaborations.

#1. Approach Relevant Influencers Only

Relevance is a key factor in effective Influencer Relationship Management. Your brand can benefit greatly from partnering with influencers who are relevant and have controllable audiences.

Relevance is also a key factor for influencers when they screen potential clients. They will only work with brands that are relevant to their audience and have social media domains.

#2. Use A Warm Outreach Strategy

Cold outreach is when you contact the influencer via generic emails, asking them to work with you. After reaching influencers, every marketer has a common question: "Will they reply?"

The answer is that there is no way to know for sure.

What's the solution, then?

Personal messages can increase your chances of receiving a reply. You should first get to know your influencers as a person before you can start building relationships with them. This is a fundamental rule you need to follow for Influencer Relationship Management and any outreach campaign.

For example - if you want to collaborate with top youtubers in India, you can follow them on social media or blogs to get started. Engage with their social media posts as often as you can.

This includes liking, commenting, and sharing their posts on social media on a regular basis. Be consistent with your efforts to build a relationship with Influencers.

Make sure you leave thoughtful comments to make them notice you.

What will it do?

This ensures that you are remembered by the influencers and stand out from the rest.

This will help you to approach your influencers as a brand. You'll let your influencer know that you are a fan. The best outreach strategy is to contact your influencers as individuals and not as brands. This is an important step in your Influencer Relationship Management campaign.

Influencer Marketing Platforms will allow you to save time and reach out to well-matched influencers willing to work together. These platforms offer vast databases of influencers across all domains as well as information about their effectiveness and rates.

A search for influencers on this platform will yield the best-matched influencers and a direct way to communicate with them. Because influencers already trust you, building relationships with them will take less effort. It is possible to directly pitch your collaboration proposal, which will reduce the onboarding time.

You will still need to send out a formal outreach email. Your outreach email must be authentic and personal. The following should be included in your outreach email:

• An attractive subject line

• Recognition of their work

• How much value you can offer them

• Some examples of previous collaborations

• A clear call-to-action

#3. Offer Fair Compensation

You can build strong relationships with influencers by showing respect and treating them well, but this is not enough. Your influencers expect financial returns for their hard work.

It has a significant impact on your Influencer Relations Management strategy.

What is the impact of compensating influencers well?

You show influencers that you value their contributions to your marketing campaigns by paying them a fair amount of money. You also indicate that you don't expect them to promote your brand for free. All these things are essential in maintaining positive relationships with influencers.

#4. Provide Creative Freedom

Your influencer and you both need to be creative. It's very obvious that your influencer knows the audience much better than you. 

They will be able to identify the preferences and opinions of their followers. It's your influencer audience that you are aiming at.

Your influencer will know what content is most likely to engage their audience, and they will publish content that not only engages but attracts followers.

What should you do?

You must give your influencers space and freedom if you want to be successful in Influencer Relationship Management.

#5. Give Adequate Time

Management of influencer relationships is a long-term strategy. Respecting the time of your influencers is a must if you want your brand's influencer relationships to be strong. It is important to understand that influencers require sufficient time to create engaging and authentic content.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1. What is influencer management?

A. Influencer Management is the management of your relationships with influencers. This includes everything from negotiation to collaboration, approvals, content creation, campaign management, payments, and building long-term relationships.

Q2. Why is it important to establish a relationship with influencers?

A. These content creators have a deep understanding of their niches and can help people trust you and make a purchase.

Marketers and brands must build strong relationships with influencers in their niches.

Q3. Do influencers have managers to help them?

A. Celebrities and macro-influencers are more likely to have managers than micro and nano-influencers.

Many influencer management agencies help social media influencers negotiate, strategize, and sign contracts with brands. 

An influencer management agency can help you find the right influencers to support your influencer marketing campaigns.

Q4. What is an influencer relationship management platform?

A. This is a tool that allows you to find the right influencers for your campaigns by analyzing their content, engagement data, and past work and then partnering with them.

All aspects of negotiation, content creation, approvals, and campaign monitoring can be managed from one location.

Moreover, influencer relationship management platforms allow influencers to find brands and agencies with similar values and aesthetics.

Q5. How can you manage influencers in influencer marketing?

A. If you only have a few influencers, you can do it manually or use an influencer relationship management platform to manage influencers.

No matter what method you use, these things will help you build and maintain good relationships with influencers.

• Define your expectations clearly.

• Allow them creative freedom in content creation.

• You can sweeten the deal by offering perks like free products or experiences.

• Appreciate them for their hard work.

• To encourage them to help drive sales, use custom affiliate codes.