Maverick Mindshare

2025 State of Influencer Marketing

admin — Tue, 06 May 2025 15:19:17 +0000

Click on image to download a PDF of our “2025 State of Influencer Marketing” report.

In an era where influencer marketing stands at the crossroads of artificial intelligence and human connection, the April 2025 Niimbus Influencer Innovation Summit emerged as a watershed moment for the industry.

This exclusive gathering united 25 visionary brand executives and thought leaders in a powerful two-day collaborative experience that transcended traditional conference boundaries.

This report distills actionable insights from the event, offering readers a roadmap to navigate the rapidly evolving influencer marketing ecosystem.

The findings presented here represent not just theoretical frameworks, but battle-tested strategies shared by some of the industry’s most forward-thinking minds.

Is Your Influencer Marketing Agency Protecting You?

Heather McCurdy — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 21:12:52 +0000

While influencer marketing is held up as one of the most successful ways to grow brand awareness and mindshare, it also holds loads of risk, especially when your brand’s reputation is on the line.

We’ve all seen the horror stories of working with influencers. Each new offense drives home just how risky influencer marketing can be.

Gone are the days where a brand misstep is likely to disappear in yesterday’s news. In a digital world, everything has the opportunity to go viral, including a seemingly small misstep.

Maybe the answer is to stick with what used to work – stay off social media, utilize traditional advertising. You can. But in doing so you miss staying relevant. You miss meeting your consumers in the places where they are most receptive to seeing and hearing from you. You miss the power of influencer KLT (Know-Like-Trust) with consumers.

And all the while, your competitors are gaining mindshare so when your consumers are ready to buy they’ve forgotten about you.

But influencer marketing is risky.

Influencer marketing can be risky. We get that. In a digital-obsessed world, online reputation management is more important than ever. So is protecting your marketing investments.

At Maverick Mindshare we take this very seriously and bake brand protection into every step of our process – from onboarding our clients to influencer and content management all the way through campaign reporting. Every timeline, every email, every Zoom call, every reporting document…in each detail, our goal is to protect you from the internal and external forces that might threaten your brand, vision, and ideas.

We bake brand safety into every step of our influencer campaigns.

Here are five ways we prioritize brand safety to protect you.

Time

When we run a full-service influencer campaign for you we take approximately 90% of the work off your plate. We know that protecting your time promotes brand safety by removing some of the crunch of “doing it all” so you can better focus on the other marketing initiatives on your plate.

If you choose to run influencer campaigns in-house, we designed our toolkits to take 50-65% of the work off your plate by creating a fool-proof process–including proprietary playbooks, templates, and checklists–that streamlines your decision-making and communication. This means less time spent in indecision and doubt and more time feeling confident in your next best step…

Financial Investment

Influencer campaigns have impressive ROI all on their own, but our full-service approach squeezes all of the juice out of the lemon. Our campaigns include optimization reports that deliver qualitative and quantitative analysis so that you can leverage your influencer campaigns to boost the performance of all your other marketing initiatives.

Along with that, both our full-service influencer campaigns and toolkits are designed so you aren’t throwing spaghetti at the wall. We walk you through exactly what the next steps should be so you feel confident in your strategy and best steps forward.

Our toolkits come with tested and proven processes, best practices, and templates designed by our team, bringing decades of expertise to every asset.

Not only that, but influencer campaigns are the gift that keeps on giving:

ROI well beyond end-of-campaign measurement as influencers continue to share their content and increase visibility and reach.
Decreased cost-per-impression and cost-per-engagement over time.
Real-time consumer engagement and feedback that gives you critical “voice of consumer” insight.

Vision and Ideas

Savvy marketers always need to keep their internal stakeholders in mind when building the business case for their ideas. Pitching influencer marketing can be tricky in the face of several common concerns:

Need to prove the value to brand stakeholders, especially when it comes to allocating budget
No previous ROI to show as proof it will work
News articles about influencers going rogue or ghosting brands
Internal teams not fully aligned on KPIs
Not enough time and bandwidth to make it all happen

This is where we shine. From our first conversation to wrapping up a campaign report, we support you and your vision.

We arm you with case studies, consumer journeys, a custom timeline, and more to streamline every step in the process. We keep an eye on best practices as well as running a media audit during your campaigns, to keep your brand ahead of shifting trends and the ever-changing consumer landscape.

Best of all, when we wrap up a campaign report we give you results in an easy-to-digest deck so every team member and stakeholder evaluating the data can easily understand the success of the campaign.

Brand Reputation:

We know influencer marketing done “wrong” can significantly hurt a brand’s reputation.

A hidden advantage to working with Maverick Mindshare is that we carefully infuse each campaign and toolkit with our decades of experience in influencer marketing so you can be confident we are always pointing you (and your campaigns) in the right direction.

Every decision or recommendation we make has years of testing, context, and most importantly, success behind it.

Along with this, we are “always on”:

Tracking the hottest trends
Auditing media for developing news
Monitoring current campaigns
Staying in close contact with our brand partners to communicate our findings

All to keep a pulse on both opportunities and potential risk so we can address either in real time, before we’ve missed the window.

Relationships

Alongside carefully vetted processes and systems, strong relationships with both consumers and influencers are integral to a brand’s reputation – especially online. We put our deep expertise to work in this arena as well. Our campaigns tap into:

Strong influencer relationships that we’ve built over time, which allow us to lean on influencer expertise and inspire exceptional performance from them.
Our decades of community-building with influencers, during which we’ve earned their trust and good will.
Our meticulous vetting process which results in high quality results across the board: influencers, content, channel optimization, and campaign performance.
Authentic alignment between your brand and our influencers, which results in long lasting brand loyalty and advocacy.

Are you ready to sidestep risk and tap into the power of influencer marketing with confidence?

Reach out to us to see which of our full-service campaigns or Influencer Marketing Toolkits is the right fit for you.

Phone Number: (484) 240-5880‬ | Email Address: hello@maverickmindshare.com

Influencer Marketing Delivers the Best ROI

admin — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 20:23:11 +0000

Influencer marketing offers the best ROI (return on investment) for all your sales and marketing campaigns.

Here are 7 reasons why influencer marketing needs to be the top priority in your marketing strategy if you want to squeeze all the juice out of your marketing campaigns. But first, let’s define influencer marketing.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is the practice of enlisting everyday consumers who have carved out a thought-leadership niche for themselves to educate and influence their readers (other consumers) who follow them online. We tap these influencers with marketing dollars to develop visibility campaigns on behalf of B2C and B2B brands and companies.

Influencer marketing campaigns can have a number of different goals:

driving brand awareness
enhancing brand affinity with consumers
moving consumers to purchase (product sales)
debunking myths and misinformation
consumer education
combatting inaccurate or harmful media coverage

Working with influencers is also an excellent method for connecting with consumers quickly through trusted channels, either to address challenges to the brand or to optimize opportunities in the digital landscape.

Why does influencer marketing matter?

Consumers are already talking about your brand (or your category or industry). The conversation is taking place now, and you need your brand to be a part of that conversation. Eventually, you’ll want to own the conversation with consumers. To do so, your brand first has to jump into the conversation with consumers and engage with them. Influencers are the best vehicle for doing this.

When you put together an influencer campaign the right way you invite consumers into a conversation with and about your brand. This in turn allows you to capture the voice of your consumer, understand more clearly the pain points they have, and gain critical consumer insights you can funnel into your other marketing efforts. Rather than a “push” tactic it’s a “push-pull” tactic where you share information out to your consumers, but you also get important insights back through engagement with ideal consumers.

This is real time data from your ideal consumers which will make your marketing efforts even more effective in driving the marketing outcomes you desire.

Another critical reason to work with influencers: your competitors are already working with them. Every day that goes by that your brand is not working with influencers is a day that you lose ground to the competition. (Keep in mind: competition can be a brand or misinformation that is harming your brand’s reputation with consumers if left unaddressed.)

Influencer marketing spend is estimated to increase to over $21B in 2023. Even worse, according to Boston Consulting Group, you will need to spend $1.85 for every dollar saved by sitting on the sidelines right now, to catch up with your competitors (who are already investing in influencer marketing).

If that’s not incentive enough, consider that 41% of Gen Z has made a purchase after seeing a creator post about it on social media according to Pew Research Center. With $143B in Gen Z buying power, letting your competitors own the influencer space means you’ll lose out on a significant revenue opportunity.

Consumers Trust Influencers

Adding influencer marketing to your marketing mix will also expedite the time it takes to build Know-Like-Trust factor with consumers. As a brand, consumers automatically view your message with less trust. 71% of consumers say they trust product placement from influencers, while only 34% trust brands. Smart brands leverage influencers to tap into the trust they’ve already built with their audience. That trust flows over to the brands being promoted or mentioned by influencers.

Skepticism of Brands

It’s only natural that consumers are skeptical of what brands have to say. Consumers know that brands have a vested interest is presenting a highly polished message and targeted information to consumers. This leads consumers to be resistant to messaging shared by a brand directly. That lack of consumer trust for brands creates a barrier to meaningful conversation between brands and their consumers.

This doesn’t mean you can never talk about your brand, for instance across your brand’s owned social media channels or via earned media. Rather, your content strategy needs to include outreach tactics that encourage interaction with consumers and provides an opportunity for meaningful conversation.

Trust in Influencers

Influencers are consumers and speak consumer language. They ask themselves the same questions consumers do. They share the same life experiences consumers do. All of which makes them the perfect channel to answer those questions for consumers.

Influencers build their brand and online presence by engaging authentically with consumers – their valued readers – to build their trust. As a result, consumers trust influencers and seek out conversations with them.

This is what we call the Know-Like-Trust factor (KLT). Influencers build KLT by relating to their readers on a personal level and making programming decisions that prioritize delivering value to that audience. They are “just like them.” This KLT factor makes influencers a trusted source of information and word-of-mouth marketing for their readers. It also makes working with influencers critical to your marketing campaigns.

KLT With a Megaphone

Influencers use their platform as a megaphone to share your message to readers. We call this a “One-to-Many” amplification. At the same time, the personal relationship they build with consumers allows them to engage with them on a one-to-one level as well.

Because of this, they are able to speak directly to a consumer’s needs, concerns, questions, and more, which is a direct benefit to your brand for many reasons, some of which we discuss below.

Our Secret Weapon

In fact, one of the benefits of working with Maverick Mindshare is the fact that we have a proprietary process that connects your brand with the right influencers who speak the right language and engage the right consumers to grow mindshare.

Grow Mindshare

We all know the importance of word of mouth marketing when it comes to raising brand awareness and growing mindshare. Word-of-mouth is directly responsible for 90% of all consumer purchases. This is another place influencer marketing offers incredible return on investment. It’s word-of-mouth marketing on a large scale.

Here’s why. Rather than one consumer sharing about your product in their personal circles, that influencer with a “One-to-Many” megaphone is skilled at crafting messaging that resonates to a larger consumer base. The megaphone is made up of the tools and channels influencers use to share content: blogs, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, newsletters, email, and more.

Influencer marketing has the same effect as trusted friends sharing recommendations with each other, only at scale. This is because influencers meet readers/consumers where they are in their everyday life and offer solutions as a trusted resource in a format that is comfortable and safe to your consumer.

This increases visibility with your target consumer in a personal, more impactful way. The result is that your product is more likely to be top-of-mind and even preferred when they see it on store shelves or add items to their online shopping cart.

Building this kind of mindshare can lead to accelerating the consumer’s speed to purchase, as influencer content often motivates your consumer to move directly to purchase (much more quickly than branded content will.)

Accelerate Speed to Purchase

When done right, partnering with influencers who have built trust with their readers can create speed to purchase with consumers. The ability for an influencer to be a “One-to-Many” megaphone paired with their one-to-one connection with your consumer, gives you, as the partnering brand, a direct line to speak to consumers. Best of all, it’s in a place they are primed to not only hear your message, but also feel confident to take action more quickly.

The key here is that you need to do it right.

How do you do it right? It’s quite straightforward, and yet often challenging.

For starters, you partner with the right influencers to share the right message.

Leverage Leading Edge Best Practices

Along with influencers speaking the same language as your consumers, they are experts on how and where to reach the consumer with messaging delivered in a way that effectively engages their readers (consumers).

This is because influencers make it their job to stay up-to-date and leverage the latest best practices: SEO, trending social media platforms, and best methods for reaching as many people on those platforms with their content as possible.

Their expertise gives your brand the ability to leverage the hottest trends, platforms, and channels without having to invest an incredible amount of time and money on becoming the (or maintaining) authority on each best practice and platform.

All the points above already provide an incredible amount of positive ROI for your marketing department. But there’s even more value in working with influencers.

Offers Customer Service Opportunities

Another hidden benefit with influencer marketing is customer service. Customer service is important to building consumer confidence. However, this is a cost center for any brand and most marketing departments are either not tasked with it or do not have the bandwidth/budget/team for this. It is simply not factored into the brand’s customer journey.

Influencer marketing provides customer service without impacting your bottom line in either budget or team hours. Influencers naturally provide guidance and feedback to your brand’s consumers when those target consumers engage with the influencer content.

Here’s how it works: when an influencer publishes content, they then engage with their readers on a one-to-one level on each content channel. Through this online conversation, they are able to knock down myths, educate consumers, answer questions, and encourage purchase. It could be as simple as the influencers sharing which retailers carry certain products or as nuanced as making specific recommendations to their readers based on what they know about that reader.

While your team can (and should) also engage with consumers on an influencer’s content (for instance, in the comments), an influencer doing so resonates more authentically and optimized the exchange. In addition, as the brand you only have the ability to engage with public-facing conversations.

More and more these days, consumers are engaging outside the public eye – via email, DMs, and “in real life” conversations. Influencers are motivated to respond and nurture those conversations with their readers, wherever they happen.

Provides Measurable Results

At the end of any marketing initiative, it’s crucial to have the right data packaged the right way so you can showcase your ROI success with your stakeholders like the rockstar marketer you are.

Key Performance Indicators That Matter

Many marketing initiatives, such as a print publication, the brand website, billboards, radio spots, and TV ads, offer vague KPIs (key performance indicators) via impressions or a general idea of what consumers are seeing and may be reacting to. This is not the case with influencer marketing.

While an influencer campaign does measure impressions, it goes far deeper in measuring ROI. A key value of influencer marketing is that it offers in depth concrete measurable results in the form of quantifiable data that is much more granular than impressions. This is true for both social media influencers and blogging campaigns.

Quantifiable Data Driven Campaigns

In fact, the quantifiable data that results can become so deep and granular that you risk being swamped in data. The danger here is that you may get so much data that you don’t even know which data matters. Secret: we can help you with that.

Importance of Qualitative Data

In addition, an influencer marketing campaign provides you with a treasure trove of qualitative data. It will tell you exactly what your consumer sees and engages with, and whether or not it is resonating with them. In fact, as described above, your consumers will tell you that directly!

What About Engagement Rates?

Speaking of engaging, engagement rates are one of the most coveted data points in influencer marketing. Both brand platforms and influencer programs alike can offer engagement rates to show the success of messaging.

However, we see time and again that influencer marketing campaigns offer a significantly higher engagement rate than a brand’s platform or any other marketing that comes directly from the brand.

Why is this? Simply put, consumers trust influencers and want to engage with them.

ROI That Continues to Grow

Once you have a wrap-up report for an influencer program, you can use all your influencer marketing ROI – both the quantifiable and qualitative results – to boost your other marketing initiatives. Think: website, digital media buys, owned social media channels. Those are just a few examples, but insights from an influencer marketing campaign will yield tremendous impact to every other marketing tactic and channel you are leveraging.

In addition, our clients find immense value in sharing these results with their internal sales team to ensure B2B customers and all end-user consumers hear the same message across all platforms.

As mentioned above, an influencer campaign delivers unparalleled ROI. However, as with all reports, you have to choose a point in time to measure your results. By nature, the metrics any program gathers are a snapshot in time.

ROI Continues to Increase

The beauty of an influencer program is that your influencer marketing ROI continues to grow over time as influencers continue to engage with consumers, grow their audience, and reshare their content during relevant conversations and seasons.

This means your cost continues to decrease as your ROI increases. In addition, there are always opportunities to gather more data and insights to get a clearer picture of how your ROI increases over time (just ask us how).

In Conclusion

At Maverick Mindshare, we can go on forever about all the ways that influencer marketing offers you the best ROI for your marketing budgets. To sum up all we discussed above:

Influencers engage authentically and personally with your consumer in a highly human and relatable way.
Influencers build trust faster and easier (and more economically) than your brand can on its own.
Influencers clear the obstacles to purchase in a way you as a brand simply cannot.
Influencers deliver expertise in engaging with their readers the right way on the right platforms.
Influencer ROI is measurable and grows long after the marketing campaign is finished.

We are passionate about helping you do influencer marketing the right way. We don’t just talk the talk. We walk the walk. We have proprietary processes, which include campaign management tools, that ensure you share the right message using the right influencers on the right platforms at the right time.

We then take all that data and package it up into reporting that you can showcase to your stakeholders. So that you can protect and defend your ideas and–most importantly–be a rockstar for your brand when you deliver successful results.

Take the next step.

Reach out to us: hello@maverickmindshare.com | (484) 240-5880‬

Campaign Management Tools: Key to Success in the World of Influencer Marketing

admin — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 20:10:20 +0000

Attend any marketing conference, and you’ll hear that influencer marketing campaigns are crucial to promote brand awareness.

Truth is, they are.

In fact, any marketing campaign that doesn’t include influencers is at risk of missing out on audience and program insights that are unique to influencer campaigns. Insights that will fuel every other marketing campaign and initiative your team is running. From social media to your brand’s search engine optimization efforts. Working with influencers can even have a direct impact on your brand’s R&D efforts, as well as talent acquisition and retention.

But…does your marketing strategy really need to include influencers, or can you explore all other marketing channels before going that route? Isn’t it enough to build targeted campaigns on social media, or design well-crafted email and content marketing assets, or omnichannel digital media ad buys? And even if you’re ready, how can you win buy-in from your executive team to start running campaigns if you’re not already including influencers in your digital marketing mix? It’s a catch-22.

These fears can leave you feeling better off staying away from influencer marketing campaigns altogether.

A word about your targeted audience (and their behavior)…

At any given moment, 95% of your target audience is likely not looking for or ready to buy your products and services. However, when they do have a need, they are likely to go into the buying cycle with only 3 brands in mind and will ultimately choose only 1 of those 3 brands when they purchase.

Which means, it’s more important than ever to focus your marketing efforts on out-of-market demand generation within that target audience. This is also known as “brand awareness” or “brand visibility.” By sharing personalized marketing messages through influencers and their social media channels, you prime your target audience to choose your brand when they move in market in their buying cycle.

When you reframe it that way, it’s easy to see how every influencer marketing campaign is critical to your brand’s bottom line. This is also why most of your marketing budget should be spent nurturing the out-of-market buyer, as they make up an overwhelming majority of all buyers.

…And a word about your competitors.

Not only that, but according to Statista, influencer marketing spend is estimated to be $21.1 billion in 2023. Making it likely that your competitors are investing heavily in influencer marketing to drive brand awareness right now.

This means every moment you sit on the sidelines of influencer marketing, your competitors are growing mindshare with your consumers. And syphoning that same consumer loyalty and preference (demand) away from your brand.

The sidelines are expensive.

Lost market share is actually a very expensive challenge.

Boston Consulting Group recently found that “Regaining lost market share requires a future investment of $1.85 for every $1.00 saved from near-term reductions in brand spending.”

Not only does the cost of recapturing your consumer go up when you reduce spend on brand marketing, but conversions go down. A successful marketing campaign–including marketing campaigns that leverage influencers–helps “soften” buyers and make them ready to buy when they are in market.

(Spoiler: influencers already have KLT factor with your target audience, otherwise known as know, like, trust. Making it much easier to create a marketing campaign that moves consumers to action, because your target audience is poised to listen to and trust the influencers you bring in.)

Are you ready to run your own influencer marketing campaign?

Influencer campaign management can often feel out of reach for brand teams for several reasons. Your internal brand team may consist of 1-2 marketers who are trying to spin multiple plates at the same time. Or, your team may not have experience with influencer marketing campaigns, making you weigh the risk and effort against the possible benefits.

When you look at all the marketing initiatives already on your plate, you may wonder how you can build a successful influencer marketing campaign without an extensive marketing team or investment in campaign management tools. Those campaign management tools can often be prohibitively costly while also requiring extensive training only to get underwhelming results.

We get it. It’s overwhelming. We’re here to take the stress out of running influencer marketing campaigns so you can successfully execute and deliver a campaign that delivers ROI (such as new sales, new customers, and new insights). Plus, we have solutions for brands at every budget level.

The secret? Our proprietary campaign management tools.

What does effective influencer marketing campaign management require?

Campaign management is the process and system an organization uses to plan, execute, and analyze marketing campaigns for success.

In influencer marketing specifically, it’s the process and system you use to manage your influencer marketing campaigns. There are many steps to successfully plan and implement a marketing campaign that leverages the KLT power of influencers:

consumer and influencer avatar development
key messaging creation
influencer outreach, vetting, onboarding, and management
campaign management
content quality control
accurate reporting and data analysis
optimization planning

Each component above will impact consumers or influencers, or both. Ultimately, how each step is executed will affect your outcomes – for better or worse. It’s important to have a clear and careful plan for how you will manage your influencer campaign before you start.

Why is careful campaign management important to influencer marketing?

Each phase of an influencer marketing campaign includes hidden touch points that can deliver powerful insights and boost the performance of the program. To uncover those golden nuggets, the differentiating factor is campaign execution.

In an effective marketing campaign, campaign managers take the time to consider the desired end goal so that they can reverse engineer the campaign. Here are a few questions to consider with your marketing team:

Is each phase carefully planned, with an eye toward best practices?
Does the initial marketing strategy clearly guide each decision along the way, ensuring optimal results?
Are the influencers nurtured in such a way that they feel inspired to overdeliver?

Not only does effective campaign management require these touch points, a program that overlooks them will face significant challenges. With our proprietary campaign management tools, we can help you sidestep the risk, while maximizing the value of your influencer marketing campaign.

What challenges do companies frequently face when it comes to marketing campaigns using influencers?

In addition to needing to understand the elements that go into a successful influencer marketing campaign, brands typically run into these common obstacles once they’ve decided to actually run one.

lack of process
lack of time to execute properly
limited team bandwidth and experience
wrong influencers (This would have been nipped in development stage, so the challenge would be finding the right influencers.)
too many objectives
losing momentum mid-campaign
too much/not enough data
data that doesn’t make sense
lackluster ROI

Any one of these hurdles can sidetrack an influencer marketing campaign, while frustrating the teams who are actually managing campaigns.

The solution?

A campaign management tool.

Why do you need an influencer marketing campaign management tool?

Here are some of the ways using an influencer campaign management tool can help you effectively run an influencer marketing campaign:

Stay on budget.
Stay on timeline (or be able to make informed decisions about how changes will affect the end results).
Give influencers clear guidance for better outcomes.
Protect brand safety.
Maintain and grow internal your influence.
Save money.
Support team morale and protect momentum.
Avoid false starts and missteps.
Make decisions easily.

What are your options?

There are a variety of options when it comes to choosing a campaign management tool.

Create your own campaign management system.
Buy pre-packaged campaign management tools (templates, checklists, etc.).
Use an influencer marketing platform.
Hire an influencer marketing agency.

What are the right campaign management tools for your marketing team? Let’s look at these options more in depth so you can choose the right fit for your team.

Should you create your own campaign management process and system?

You absolutely can create your own process and system for managing your influencer marketing campaign. However, creating that process and system takes an immense amount of time as well as learning from trial and error.

Questions to ask yourself:

Do you know where the gaps are in your knowledge of and experience with running influencer campaigns?
Do you have a dedicated team member who excels at designing processes and can focus on creating and maintaining this campaign management system?
Do you have an organizational commitment to ongoing support for this role on your team? For instance, if the person who “owns” this process leaves the company, will you hire for this position or will your hard work to build your campaign management system walk out the door?
Can you afford the risk that comes with the trial and error process of building the plane as you fly it while running an influencer campaign?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” you’ll want to look for outside support. Reach out to learn about our custom solutions at hello@maverickmindshare.com or (484) 240-5880.

Buy pre-packaged campaign management tools.

Here’s something you may not have considered. You can buy pre-packaged campaign management tools that give you varying levels of support and guidance as you develop and launch your influencer marketing campaigns. This can be especially beneficial if you have a limited budget.

Use Already-Limited Bandwidth

The trade off is that you’ll rely more heavily on your internal team to run and report on your campaigns, and it will be a “test and learn” experience at first, but you’ll have more flexibility in running your campaigns in terms of timeline and cost.

Require Research

These types of packages are extremely rare and require significant research to find, which takes time. You will need to cut through a lot of “noise” in your research, including search results that are not what you’re looking for from companies that are not experts in influencer marketing. Plan to devote a significant chunk of time to making sure you are investing in a reliable and effective tool from legitimate sources.

Deliver Lackluster Options

When you do find these pre-packaged campaign management tools, they are often incomplete. They offer solutions in the form of algorithms, platforms, and dashboards which lack real-world nuance that influencer marketing requires. The “experts” behind them often sell their technology rather than solutions that specifically help a brand successfully fill the critical gaps in their influencer programming.

Maverick Mindshare Campaign Toolkits

We have several packages that we’ve developed from our 13+ years experience in running hundreds of influencer marketing campaigns for national and global brands of all sizes across a variety of industries.

Not only do our packages come infused with our expertise and proven processes, but we have designed each toolkit to be easy to implement and deliver success quickly. This saves you time and cuts down on the drag of an extensive and painful learning curve. You can jump right into implementation and know that your efforts will be successful out of the gate!

Maverick Influencer Outreach Toolkit (DIY)

The Maverick Influencer Outreach Toolkit includes the organizational system, checklists, and templates that enable you to easily discover, vet, and onboard the perfect influencers for your next successful in-house influencer marketing campaign.

This includes:

Step-by step playbook for influencer outreach
Influencer outreach email series (templates)
Influencer discovery and vetting system (rubric)
Influencer outreach tracking report (checklist)
Influencer onboarding process (checklist)
Turn-key process

Maverick Influencer Outreach Toolkit + Strategic Advisory (DWY)

Enhance your The Maverick Influencer Outreach Toolkit with strategic advisory to have us in your back pocket along the way. We provide just-in-time consulting calls, expert guidance, and customized feedback to support you during key phases of your in-house influencer campaign.

Questions to ask yourself:

Do you feel pressure to incorporate influencers in your marketing strategy, but you don’t know where to start?
Do you need to get started ASAP but have a limited resources (time, energy, team, budget)?
Do you have a team you can lean on to roll out an influencer campaign the right way, given the proper tools and structure?
Do you want a safety net in place as you work with an external influencer platform to run your programs (to make sure you’re getting the full value of your investment in that platform)?
Do you want quality assurance to make sure you’re getting the best result from your current influencer marketing agency?
Do you want to capture your learnings and best practices to be able to repeat your success with influencer marketing over and over?

If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” one of our Maverick Influencer Outreach Toolkits is a great solution for you. Reach out to us at hello@maverickmindshare.com or (484) 240-5880 to learn more.

Are Influencer Marketing Platforms Your Campaign Management Solution?

Investing in an influencer marketing platform might seem like a good idea, especially when those platforms tout their time-savings and efficiency. You’ll be enticed by the prospect of streamlining the campaign development process and minimizing your time spent finding influencers. You’ll anticipate the ease of a real-time dashboard for monitoring programs and keeping them on track.

However, once you unpack these tools, you’ll likely find that there’s a lot missing:

First, setting up a platform takes time. You (or a dedicated team member) will need to spend significant time setting up platform software in order to run your programs with any success. You’ll have to learn the ins and outs of the platform you choose to invest in – how to navigate it, where to add things, the gaps it has. They can be tricky to set up correctly, which can cause frustration and delays, making them difficult to actually use. This can feel like a waste of money, but one that you’re compelled to keep using to recoup that investment.
Second, even if set up goes well, no one platform delivers all that you’ll need throughout the lifecycle of a campaign. A platform cannot read the nuanced differences between influencers and their audiences, nor can it effectively negotiate contracts with influencers or motivate them to meet deadlines. It can’t detect if an influencer has an affinity for specific retailers or is a brand loyalist to your competitor. A platform cannot tell you which KPIs to measure or give you a qualitative analysis of your campaign results. Often, using a platform adds an impersonal “middle man”, a barrier if you will, that can delay communication (including urgent updates) between your marketing team and the influencer.
Lastly, an influencer platform removes much of the human touch that is key to building strong relationships with influencers. This is another place that the algorithmic barrier can be detrimental. Influencers are people first and have quirks just like all of us. Real life doesn’t look like a textbook. Influencer platform software and dashboards can’t navigate the intricacies of life (illness, pregnancy, death, technology snafus, or fresh ideas) with the same thought and care as a person managing the campaign is able to.

For these reasons, we strongly believe using an influencer marketing platform has the potential to be harmful to your brand, your marketing team, the influencers, and the overall ROI of your influencer campaign.

Questions to ask yourself:

Do you know exactly the outcome you desire by investing in an influencer marketing platform or dashboard?
Does your team have the bandwidth to research and figure out how to set up the platform?
Do you feel confident that you do, in fact, have the right pieces in place to run a successful campaign (e.g. the right message to reach the right consumer)?
Do you have a team member (or team members) who can find and fill the gaps in what the influencer platform delivers?
Does your team have the bandwidth to go beyond what the platform offers and conduct additional influencer research and vetting to get the right influencers?
Does your campaign have flexibility if/when the platform incurs delays?
Can you afford the risk of potential lackluster results in your campaign (even if you saved time) from using a platform?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” we have a variety of solutions to offer, from full-service campaign management to influencer marketing toolkits to help with specific “hot spots”. Reach out to us at hello@maverickmindshare.com or (484) 240-5880.

Hire a marketing agency to manage your influencer campaign.

We’ve recently seem an explosion of “influencer marketing agencies” as well as full-service agencies who have developed influencer capabilities. Just like all influencer marketing platforms are not created equal, not all influencer marketing agencies are created equal. Secret: some actually manage and run influencer campaigns using the same influencer marketing platforms described above! Not only does this add another middle man between you and your influencers but it adds one more layer of complication and one more step to your process of getting anything done.

Additionally, most agencies aren’t experts in influencer marketing, but have simply “added on” influencer marketing as a branch of their business to answer demand from clients. They don’t have tried-and-true processes in place for maximizing influencer marketing campaign investments, which can often lead to brands feeling like influencer marketing lacks impact. (Spoiler: it’s not influencer marketing as a tactic, but rather the technicians managing the campaigns that are missing the mark.)

Look for a marketing agency that specializes in influencer marketing and has deep experience in the industry along with solid influencer relationships.

Questions to ask yourself:

Are you interested in maximizing your results by bringing in expert support?
Do you have the budget and approval to bring in outside support for your influencer marketing goals?
Is it urgent that you run an influencer marketing campaign, but you don’t currently have the bandwidth to do so?
Are you looking for a partner that can powerfully augment the work your team is already doing by understanding your overall marketing strategy and goals?
Is it important to reduce workload from your team so that they can focus on other areas of importance?
Are you worried about sitting on the sidelines because you’ll lose ground to competitors who are investing in influencer marketing?

If your answer to any of these questions is “yes,” reach out to us at hello@maverickmindshare.com or (484) 240-5880 to see if our solutions are a fit.

Maverick Mindshare assists CMOs and their marketing teams to successfully manage marketing campaigns using influencers.

We’ve specialized in influencer marketing campaign management from the moment we launched over 13 years ago. We started when influencers were called “bloggers”, and we’ve tapped the evolution of the industry over that time to deliver programs featuring influencers who leverage all the platforms channels and drive results through leading-edge best practices.

In that time, we’ve:

built rich connections with influencers (developing equity that benefits our clients).
created a proprietary campaign management system and process that protects your brand investment from start to finish.
perfected our process to remove most of the work off your plate while maximizing your outcomes.

We protect you.

Based on our years of expertise, we’ve created several solutions that solve your needs and fit your budget when it comes to executing an influencer marketing campaign. They range from full-service campaign management to do-it-yourself toolkits.

Discover the influencer campaign management solution that fits your needs.

Full-Service Influencer Campaign Management

Leverage influencers’ “Know-Like-Trust” factor to accelerate your consumer’s journey from “Awareness” to “Advocacy.”
Benefit from our hands-on management of ideal influencers, including discovery, vetting, and onboarding.
Ensure quality control of content campaign while maximizing consumer engagement.
Win stakeholder buy-in all marketing initiatives by leveraging our comprehensive campaign data reporting and analysis.

Why is hiring us to manage your influencer strategy and campaign needs from end-to-end your best option?

We free you up to focus on your other brand marketing needs.
We take a 360 approach to your team, making sure we support your people while we overdeliver influencer marketing results.
We ensure your programs stay on track while your internal team tends to the other fires burning on their desks.
We have a proprietary, tried-and-true campaign management system that protects you and your investment – no trial and error.
We never hand off your campaign to a junior account executive.
You benefit from our deep equity with influencers.
You can sleep at night knowing we are protecting you every step on the way to delivering outsized ROI

Our full-service influencer campaign management includes the elements below. We also offer each element as a stand alone package.

Digital Landscape Assessment

Protect your creative briefs and ideas from naysayers and tire-kickers in your organization with just-in-time data.
Leverage the unseen gap between how your industry is behaving and how your consumers are behaving so you can stay ahead of your industry’s curve.
Identify new motivated consumers to expand your consumer base.

Strategic Analysis

Strengthen your consumer’s emotional connection by dialing in your brand messaging.
Pinpoint and eliminate barriers in consumer perception that negatively impact consumer behavior.
Differentiate your brand though our competitor analysis so that you can easily stand out in an oversaturated marketplace.

In addition to our full-service campaign management options described above, we offer several Influencer Marketing Toolkits that you can use to run a successful influencer campaign internally: our comprehensive Influencer Outreach Toolkit option, and the Done-With-You package which includes our expert strategic advisory as you launch your campaign.

Maverick Influencer Outreach Toolkit (DIY)

The Maverick Influencer Outreach Toolkit includes the turn-key process, checklists, and templates that enable you to easily discover, vet, and onboard the perfect influencers for your next launch so that you can execute a successful in-house influencer marketing campaign.

This includes:

Step-by step playbook for influencer outreach
Influencer outreach email series (templates)
Influencer discovery and vetting system (rubric)
Influencer outreach tracking report (checklist)
Influencer onboarding process (checklist)
Turn-key process

Maverick Influencer Outreach Toolkit + Strategic Advisory (DWY)

Ready to Take the Next Step and Rock Your Influencer Marketing Campaign?

Reach out to us: hello@maverickmindshare.com | (484) 240-5880‬

3 Tips for Handling Influencers the Right Way, When Everything Else is Going Wrong

Casey Benedict — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 20:53:26 +0000

Daily Harvest has made headlines lately (and influencers are to blame).

One of the brand’s products is apparently making consumers very sick, and the company has issued a recall of its French Lentil and Leek Crumbles.

CNN, Bon Appetit, and Insider have reported on the situation, and online searches related to Daily Harvest soared last month.

Interestingly, influencers have landed squarely in the crosshairs of that coverage.

The same influencers credited for helping build Daily Harvest into a brand whose valuation topped $1 billion last November are now to blame for the brand’s downward spiral in the public eye.

According to CNN “…Daily Harvest’s emergence as a household name was linked in large part to its aggressive social media (influencer) campaigns.”

In the face of a recall and massive public scrutiny, these same influencers are now being called out as risky, with their power to lift brand awareness labeled a blessing and a curse.

Let that sink in.

Media coverage of a product recall is focused on influencers who at one time supported the brand.

No wonder many brands mistakenly avoid working with influencers, when these types of misconceptions are held up as the unavoidable outcome of working with them. In fact, transparency and authenticity are the foundation of working with influencers, even when a crisis occurs. When brands embrace this reality, they can supercharge the results of their influencer marketing efforts.

What’s a brand to do when navigating the tricky waters of influencer marketing?

I’ve been working with influencers since 2010 and built a best-in-class agency devoted to this industry.

Why?

Because influencer marketing works. It connects your brand to the right consumers with the right messaging and drives those consumers to action.

That doesn’t mean it’s as simple as shipping product to the next YouTuber you see and hoping for the best. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Like any successful strategy, influencer marketing and outreach must be thoughtful and thorough. Brands who get this right will grow their brands significantly and even weather the turbulence of a crisis much better than brands who don’t.

3 Tips for Successful Influencer Marketing (Before, During, and After a Crisis)

1) Get your house in order.

Often, brands handle influencer marketing in a scattered fashion. It is designated “low priority,” so there are few—if any—formal systems in place to guide influencer relationships. This leaves the dangerous gaps that plagued Daily Harvest, such as not including influencers in crisis communications and mishandling brand messaging via influencers.

Ask:

Who “owns” influencer marketing on your team? How many people “touch” influencers?
What are the lines of communication and the rules for engagement? How does your team reach out and when?
How often do you evaluate your process for gaps (e.g. team members who are out on maternity leave or who have taken another role/job)?

2) Protect your investments.

The cost of marketing decreases as consumers develop brand awareness and loyalty. This is a painfully evident misstep in Daily Harvest’s reckless approach to influencer relationships: the investment cost of “acquiring” influencers who were loyal and supportive of the brand in the beginning was flushed down the tubes by completely ignoring those same influencers when a crisis developed. Daily Harvest missed a huge opportunity to communicate effectively with consumers through their established influencer community. Instead, they poured lighter fluid on those relationships (and the inherent marketing value they held) and lit a match.

Ask:

Who in our influencer community can help us carry out our crisis communications strategy?
Have we communicated with all influencers in our rolodex about this situation? If not, why not?

3) Stay in the conversation to own the conversation.

Brand marketing teams are full of creative, talented people. Unfortunately, these teams often create bubbles of thought and strategies incubated with blinders on, because they are not talking to anyone outside of that team. The conversation about your brand is already happening beyond the bubbles you may have unintentionally created. Daily Harvest had a front row seat to the crisis that was unfolding. Influencers weren’t going to be the only consumers to become ill, but they could have served as the proverbial canary in the coal mine, if the brand had been unafraid to hear bad news from them.

Ask:

Are we monitoring every step of our influencer outreach process to gain deeper insight into our consumer?
Are we creating open feedback loops with our influencers (who are in direct contact with our consumers)?
Have we developed appropriate guidelines for nurturing our core influencers “in sickness and health?”

Working with influencers is not hard, but it must be done right. And, as Daily Harvest has shown, there is a right way and a wrong way. Leverage these questions to position your brand to reap the benefits, minimize the risk, and fuel brand growth with direct consumer engagement and insight via influencer marketing.

To help you get started, we’re sharing our Influencer Checklist to ensure your next campaign is a success. Download that here.

At Maverick Mindshare, we are celebrating 12+ years of helping smart brand managers own the conversation with consumers. Contact us at hello@maverickmindshare.com or (484) 240-5880 to discuss custom influencer marketing and consumer engagements strategies for your brand.

Influencer Marketing: Agency Impact Without the Agency Overhead

admin — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 05:15:57 +0000

Influencers: A Team of Elite Creative Professionals

Working with influencers is like paying bargain basement prices for a team of elite creative professionals to bring your brand to life with consumers. That’s because when influencers partner with your brand, they function very much like individual creative agencies without the bloated agency price tag.

Case in point: influencers in the Maverick Mindshare network have dedicated themselves to developing expertise across a wide spectrum of marketing specialties in order to grow their platforms:

Narrative + storytelling	Editorial calendars
Photography	Public relations
Video	Graphic design
Social media	Brand messaging
Community building	Consumer education
Content marketing	Website design and development
SEO	And more!
Keyword optimization

Each campaign that we run taps into a robust marketing toolkit collectively delivered by each participating influencer. Imagine getting all of that in one campaign, many times over!

Let the Influencers Shine

We stand apart from other agencies by designing and developing client programs with that influencer expertise in mind. In fact, our exceptional results stem from our deeply held belief that the best campaigns allow the influencers themselves to shine and strategically set them up for success.

Beginning with the application stage, we encourage our influencers to engage authentically with the brand/sponsor. When we move into the implementation phase of a campaign, this includes providing tools to support the influencers’ work, in the form of:

Product sampling	Store locator/where to buy
Brand messaging	Branded experiences
Education/research/studies (links/white papers)	Branded events
Brand graphics	Access to experts
Brand video	And more!
Brand imagery/photos

Then we step back and let the influencers do what they do best: engage their audience.

When done right, this phase of influencer marketing can feel very quiet to our clients. That’s because the influencers are busy combining their creative specialties with our program resources to make magic. And we’re busy monitoring, supporting, guiding, responding, and communicating with the influencers and their specialized content. Which means, each campaign can reach its full potential without trapping our clients in the weeds of micromanagement.

Building Your Influencer Dream Team

admin — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 05:15:40 +0000

Influencer marketing is a powerful tool. Enlisting the right influencers for your project is a critical element of your success.

At Maverick Mindshare we take extraordinary care in assembling your team of influencers. We know that only influencers who are already connecting with your ideal consumers in a meaningful way will move the needle on your marketing goals. We also know that a misstep at this point in the program can irrevocably damage the results you’ve invested in, and we know exactly how to avoid early errors and eliminate marketing waste at this stage.

We start with our strategic analysis and roadmap. Through our research and analysis, we create a succinct influencer profile that guides our next steps.

Global Network of Influencers

With that clear profile in hand, we activate our global network of influencers by building and launching a custom application. Highly polished influencers opt-in to the program, providing their professional details and background, including relevant personal statements about their mission and alignment with the program.

Our application is unique in that it offers a preview of the energy and professionalism the influencers will eventually bring to the program (which can be energizing for our clients at this stage as well).

Quality Assurance System Makes the Difference

As the applications roll in, our team goes to work carefully vetting the applicants. This is not a job for AI or algorithms. Our team pores over websites, social media channels, bios, and more to determine who is qualified to participate. Our secret sauce is our stringent, proprietary quality assurance system, that each influencer must pass in order to be added to the team. Once we’ve curated the ideal team, we begin onboarding the influencers.

Our onboarding process establishes guardrails for your brand’s investment. On the administrative side, we handle negotiation, contracting, invoicing, tax documentation, regulatory and global guidelines, and more (taking all of these tasks off of your plate). From a campaign implementation side, we set up project management workflows for communicating with the influencers, including providing brand messaging, answering project questions, sharing assets, and addressing concerns that pop up.

When it is time to move into the implementation phase, we have a finely-tuned team of motivated influencers prepped and ready to bring your campaign to life and deliver over-the-top impact!

Reporting: Good Data Starts with Good Strategy

admin — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 05:15:23 +0000

The number one rule in setting up influencer marketing campaigns is to always begin with the end in mind. Most brand managers are excited about working with influencers and tend to rush headfirst into partnership without carefully setting up the campaign strategy. Lack of clarity around what influencers can deliver (or assuming that all influencers and campaigns are equal) frequently leads brand managers to be disappointed in the eventual results of a campaign.

However, it’s not that the campaign didn’t deliver value, it’s that the value wasn’t being measured correctly because the strategy was not lined up to those initial expectations.

Foundations of Campaign Success

At Maverick Mindshare, we establish the foundations of campaign success by infusing each campaign with a 360° perspective on consumers, trends, best practices, and your marketing goals via our suite of strategic assessments (links to articles on influencer calibration and strategic analysis).

The resulting Strategic Roadmap and GO Plan become an essential guide in designing, developing and delivering a successful campaign, culminating in robust reporting once a campaign has wrapped.

Campaign Reporting

Reporting on campaigns kicks off with our team collecting data from participating influencers, which we then catalog, review, and analyze from a top line perspective.

Then, we dig deeper. We analyze trends, insights, observations, anomalies, and unique attributes found in the data and consumer engagement to assemble a comprehensive understanding of the program, results, and our recommendations going forward.

Recommendations and Insights

These recommendations and insights are presented to our clients via a Strategic Brief and Insights & Impact Report. These two reports weave together the full spectrum of metrics, from hard numbers—like reach and engagement—to intangibles such as our proprietary Consumer Sentiment Benchmarking tool. All of our presentations double as “ready-to-deliver” success showcases for our clients to present to their stakeholders.

Once a campaign has concluded, we go the extra mile to make sure our clients understand how the strategy we implemented for their campaign has delivered the impact they were expecting (and beyond!). We slice and dice the data in several formats, from multiple angles, so that everything you need to understand the impact of your investment is at your fingertips and easy to find.

You’ll know exactly how your program performed, how to talk about your success in specific terms with your team, and what your next best steps are. While we’re at it, we’ll help you increase buy-in from the boardroom to increase the budget for your marketing plans.