Influencer Networks and KOLs: How to promote using influencers

Influencer networks, also known as creator networks, helps brands find the right influencers for their campaigns. But it’s more than influencer sourcing. Influencer networks help you monitor your campaign results, pay influencers, and manage content rights.

Simply put, an influencer network deals with influencer sourcing, branding, content, and campaigns for influencers. A simple internet search would open up so many influencer networks. But here are our favourites:

1. FuzeMon
2. Viral Nation
3. NeoReach
4. Moburst
5. AFK Creators

What differentiates FuzeMon from others in the list is that its fully automated and involves no complicated-long processes. The entire journey from signing up to campaign creation takes less than 5 minutes. And the best part is, you pay only for the performance of the campaign. Apologies for the shameless plug.

AFK Creators is a talent management agency based in the UK and is prominent with gaming and esports influencers. Viral Nation, NeoReach, and Moburst are huge influencer networks managing thousands of influencers and well suited for large capacity campaigns.

So, why should one even consider influencer networks? Influencer networks make it easy to manage production intensive campaigns due to the logistical infrastructure they have. That would be my top reason to work with influencer networks. But there’s always minor bottlenecks – too high minimum campaign value, long turnaround time, and to name a few.

If you’re a company who’s exploring influencer marketing, the best advice would be to try on your own with a few micro influencers. The steps would look somewhat like this –

1. Find out who your audience follows i.e., where is your target customer in the pool of influencers’ audiences
2. Make a list of 25 influencers catering to your target customers
3. Send them emails to work with (you’ll find the template below)
4. Once you have some positive response, let’s say 5, figure out your plan to efficiently promote your product
5. Run a campaign to determine a KOL for your product for the audience above (we’ll cover who’s a KOL)
6. Keep tracking your campaign and communicate with your influencers

Once you’re through these 6 steps, you’ll have enough data to determine your KPIs. With that your marketing department can evaluate whether to go with influencer networks or explore other types of influencers based on your budget. If you need to understand how much do influencer charge, take a look at this blog. [INSERT LINK]

So, we talked about KOL. What does that mean? KOL stands for Key Opinion Leader and they are usually an influencer with significantly strong influence over their audience. And they usually drive a lot of sales.

An example would be Pokimane or Ronaldo or Messi. (We’ll be covering the entire KOL recruiting process in a different blog, so stay tuned)

So, how do we reach out to influencers to ensure higher response? Here’s a template we used to source 20 influencers for one of our campaigns a few months back.