• by Nea Barman , Op-Ed Contributor, January 14, 2021

Due to the changes in the digital marketing ecosystem and rapidly changing consumer buying behavior, marketers are facing even more challenging times ahead in 2021. Consequently, they need to seek new, agile ways for bettering their marketing ROI. The good news is that there is still room for improvement to growth hack your marketing spend in mid-air during 2021. 

The only questions brands and their agencies should be asking themselves are: 

How fast are they able to adapt? Are they taking advantage of fresh opportunities and improvements that occur in new tools and ways of working? 

The first essential thing marketers need to look at when budgeting for social media marketing and content creation, is how to actually manage the work both in-house and together with agencies. It all comes down to the process effectiveness which can be growth hacked by managing influencer marketing and content creation, using the right proprietary tools. 

With the right, easy-to-use, influencer and content management tools, brands or their agencies acting on behalf of them, are able to grow their organic social media presence cost-effectively and maximize their content creation ROI. 

By tightening the engagement with their social media audience at an early stage and increasing the influencer marketing budgets, especially on Instagram (since it saw 17% user growth alone in Western Europe in 2020) brands will also be prepared for the ecosystem change of third party cookies. Influencer marketing on Instagram is important especially for brands who have reach and engagement as their main KPI’s.

The same marketers and their agencies, who have been using advanced ad technology tools to manage their programmatic display and paid social advertising effectively for years, don't necessarily use similar effective management tools to run their influencer or content sourcing campaigns. And for this reason, they might be lacking the possibility to achieve maximal efficiency and scale of their influencer marketing to drive the best possible ROI.

These new tools are a great way to maximize ROI, but what challenges the capitalization of these optimization opportunities of influencer marketing and content creation, might be the existing, deeply rooted organization models and processes and the way brands have previously carried out their work. 

As the programmatic and digital advertising buying decisions might be in the hands of the CMO and marketing or e-commerce team, influencer marketing and content creation decisions might be made elsewhere in the organization, like the PR and Communications departments and within the creative team. These teams are used to working in a different way and are measured using metrics other than engagement rate or page ranking.  

If this is the case, the essential way for you as a marketer to maximize the ROI is to simply prove your case. This can be done by an easy and effortless A/B test that calculates the management time that goes into managing influencer marketing the old way, versus in a new way, using proprietary influencer management tools. Naturally, existing metrics can be calculated and added to the content creation ROI as well.

The second essential area to look at when maximizing the marketing ROI, is the area of content licensing fees of your photographs and videoclips. Anyone working with authentic branded photos knows how much the licensing fee per geographical location and per medium might cost, especially when talking about global, lifetime rights. The fees are complicated to calculate even for the photographers themselves, thus they are using several calculation tools to do so and it's not really something that modern, automated, data driven marketing is able to deal with very well. 

When carrying out an influencer marketing campaign using a proper influencer management tool and platform, you don’t only have access to the data showing the engagement of each influencer post, but you also have the possibility to buy the lifetime licence for this content. This means you can easily, with the click of a button, buy the global, lifetime rights to content that is already proven to engage your target audience. Just imagine the savings for even just the license fee. This is saved capital that can be used to reach more new customers.

The third essential benefit of these new management tools is the possibility to gather insights. With the help of influencers and through influencer marketing, you can gather insights directly from your core audience, in the most authentic way. Simply organize an influencer campaign, ask the influencers to pose questions from their audience according to your brief and the audience will happily engage and genuinely answer the questions of their trusted influencers. The influencers will then collect the data for you by using the influencer marketing tool, and in no time you have gathered a large pool of valuable consumer insights to develop your brand.

What organization would not want to cut the management time and cost spent on influencer marketing and content creation by at least 50% and increase the marketing ROI, especially during these turbulent times? Get a feather in your hat by doing a simple A/B test and prove your business case to the team and to your stakeholders, with the essential steps showcased above. They will thank you later.