The Campaigns feature in Onalytica programs is one of our most recent additions to the platform. We created Campaigns in response to a problem we’ve seen crop up regularly for clients – the lack of a defined workflow to shortlist, vet, approach, negotiate & collaborate with influencers in B2B marketing.
We knew that lots of agencies or marketing teams have a solid process worked out, but those just getting started on their influencer marketing journey might want more structure and guidance in the early days. Add to this the challenge of creating a single, shared view of project process in a world of hybrid working, the Onalytica product team had not only the “Why” behind this feature but the “Why Now”.
With that in mind, the first version of Campaigns, released late in 2021, came to be. We decided to start by focusing on solving one problem first, before moving on to tackle the rest, which led us to look at shortlisting and vetting in distributed teams.
What does it help you do?
In our 10+ years of helping to connect brands with influencers, one of the most common ways to spend calls with our clients has been sharing updates on the progress of vetting shortlists and then beginning outreach.
The aim of the first Campaigns homepage was to create a single place where teams could record the latest updates against each influencer’s profile.
The process of choosing an influencer to collaborate with involves understanding their areas of topical expertise, reading through recent posts across multiple social channels & finding examples of previous content they may have produced. Onalytica’s influencer profile is setting a new standard for how to do this – with a combination of social analytics, data sourced by our team and contributions direct from influencers through our MyOnalytica portal.
So, when we came to design a simple in-app workflow to facilitate this process, we knew that easy access to the influencer profile needed to be part of the feature specification. Other concerns were ease-of-access to the latest notes left by the user, or someone on their team, and clear labels to display the status of each influencer in relation to the campaign. I’m confident that what we have delivered goes some way to addressing the needs of marketers in this initial phase, although future updates will layer on further functionality to allow more than simply creating and updating this shared view of campaign progress.
With this first step in place, we moved to another crucial part of the planning process – content. For every influencer collaboration, brands need to decide what type of content they might ask influencers to produce, discuss it with each influencer and amend the expected outputs based on those discussions, all while keeping track of the metrics which determine how each piece of content has performed.
Knowing that this process can get surprisingly complex and that the clarity provided by a shared view of progress could also be valuable for planning influencer content, we started work on a new workflow for Campaigns: Deliverables.
Working with an influencer on some content won’t be the same experience as working with your colleagues or an agency, but that’s exactly why they’re valuable – they bring skills, experience & an audience that you don’t already have.
However, we could see that users were struggling to keep track of planned content once they started trying to include external content creators & experts. After a week of sync calls to discuss the upcoming campaign with your chosen influencers, it’s to be expected that plans might adjust as they make counter-proposals, suggest ways to tie your content into their other activity or share their availability. With Deliverables open in front of you as these conversations take place, you can update this information with a few clicks – hit save, and it’s visible to your whole team.
In summary, the campaigns section lets you:
- Create a shortlist of influencers tied to a specific campaign with documented objectives, topics & metrics.
- Collaborate with colleagues as you progress your campaign by updating each influencer’s status and adding upcoming actions.
- Document what each influencer you collaborate with is due to produce, down to due dates & additional social promotion.
What could it look like in future?
We’re not done with Campaigns yet. We want it to sit within a family of features connecting the largest online marketplace for B2B experts, content creators & influencers. We expect the next stop on this journey will be building a bridge between Campaigns & MyOnalytica, giving influencers and brands the ability to share plans in-app before documenting the final version. Brands will gain the power to advertise new opportunities to our influencer community by uploading them through campaigns, with influencers subsequently browsing a list of upcoming collaborations they can express an interest in.
This phase will build on the same principles that have taken us this far – tackling a single stage of the process, adding functionality to help users address the problem and then following up to understand if we’ve solved it. But with every new power it puts in the hands of Onalytica users, I’m confident that Campaigns will become an integral part of our platform and the B2B influencer marketing space.
TL;DR – Our plans for Campaigns include:
- Allowing brands to upload collaboration opportunities direct to a Jobs Board that influencers can view & express interest in
- End-to-end messaging between brands & influencers
- Allowing influencers to approach brands with proposed collaborations
- Automated dashboards to collate your campaign results
- A payment processing workflow