Over 80% of consumers are open to influencers impacting their purchasing decisions, presenting a significant opportunity for brands to lean into influencer marketing.
An influencer marketing platform can help you keep all conversations in one place and manage briefs, contracts, and payments easily.
But investing in an influencer marketing platform is a big decision—it involves not only a financial investment but also changes to your work processes.
Whether you’re a marketer interested in working with influencers for the first time or an influencer marketing manager looking to streamline your day-to-day, here's the ultimate guide to securing approval (and budget!) from your boss to invest in an influencer marketing platform.
Table of Contents
Step #1: Know What You Need From An Influencer Marketing Platform
When choosing an influencer marketing platform, it's essential to clearly understand your requirements to ensure you select the best fit for your needs.
We recommend starting with these three considerations to keep in mind:
Necessary features for the work you’re doing today
Features you will need to scale in the future
Keeping an open mind for how other features can help you grow
Our recommendation is to look for an all-in-one influencer marketing platform, so you don’t need to make any painful (and costly!) changes down the line.
Later Influence is a comprehensive platform with dedicated professional services that makes influencer marketing simpler, managing all components of your campaigns from A to Z.
Key Later Features:
Influencer Database: Discover and connect with influencers that match your brand's vision. Easily search and filter to find the perfect creators for your campaigns.
Contracts & Payment Management: Simplify your influencer collaborations by streamlining contracts and payments. Ensure smooth and secure transactions with built-in tools designed to keep your partnerships professional and hassle-free
Expert Professional Services: Enhance your influencer marketing strategy with expert professional services. Later’s dedicated team offers personalized support to help you execute campaigns efficiently and achieve your marketing goals.
Later Influence can also scale with your organization. The Starter package gives you the tools you need to operationalize your influencer marketing efforts and enterprise features add additional services, support, and team licenses to build a nuanced, custom, scalable program.
Step #2: Build Your Business Case
A great business case demonstrates how the platform you want to invest in will help you and your company achieve goals faster, more efficiently, and reach targets that were previously unattainable.
1. Identify what tasks are taking up the most time and costing the most money.
Are you doing tasks manually or using a platform with limited features? What about the cost of labor?
2. Define your goals and objectives.
Are you hoping to work with more influencers to generate higher returns or focused on improving efficiency within the company?
3. Demonstrate value.
What features will allow you to achieve specific, necessary tasks more quickly? What features will set you up for success in the future?
Then, look at the metrics and analytic reports offered by your preferred software —this will be key to showing real business results, such as earned media value and overall campaign ROI.
4. Present your business case in simple numbers.
Quantifying the benefits of an influencer marketing platform can be compelling. Here’s an example of how to do this:
You currently spend 5 hours per campaign sourcing influencers. An influencer marketing platform like Later Influence could help you do this in 1 hour, saving you 4 hours in cost and time. Plus, additional tools such as influencer management are included!
With that time saved, you can focus on refining campaign briefs, an area that needs improvement within your team.
Further, Later Analytics can help you tie social media wins to business results, eliminating the need to make guesses or use manual calculations.
By presenting these clear and tangible benefits, you can demonstrate the significant value an influencer marketing platform brings to your team.
Step #3: Compare Options & Alternatives
Your boss may agree with your numbers, but still question whether you could achieve similar results with other options and alternatives, such as:
Working manually: You would save money on a platform, but it might cost more money in the end if you have to hire more team members or forgo growth opportunities.
Hiring an agency: Agencies come at a fairly high cost and might have minimum retainers—software empowers your in-house team to retain creative control at a lower cost.
Use resources for other types of marketing: Consumers trust influencers more than brand messages, so pivoting to something else might actually produce a lower ROI.
By carefully evaluating these alternatives, you can reinforce the advantages of using an influencer marketing platform.
Step #4: Improve Your Pitch With Examples From Real Brands
Show how other brands are already successfully leveraging influencer marketing. This makes it tangible—it’s not just stats and projections but actual business results.
Here are case studies capturing brands that had success in influencer marketing:
American Greetings ran an influencer campaign that generated 8.6M impressions and 255K engagements.
Reebok X Zumiez developed 60 pieces of influencer-generated content to reuse throughout campaigns, garnering 927.6K impressions at a 55.6K engagement.
Rosefield launched a brand ambassador campaign that resulted in a 400% increase in sales and a 167% ROI
Eggland’s Best created a campaign that boosted 5.8M impressions and engagement (7.9X the industry engagement benchmark)
By showcasing these real-world examples, you can illustrate the powerful impact of influencer marketing on business outcomes.
Step #5: Make Your Pitch
Now it’s time to make your pitch and get your company’s decision-makers on board.
Remember, you’re not just asking to spend money; you are asking for resources to get a tool that will help you and the company drive business outcomes.
Focus your pitch on these 5 key points:
Your goals and desired achievement
Current roadblocks or missed opportunities due to lack of resources
How an influencer marketing platform can remove these obstacles and drive better business results
How you will demonstrate results through metrics, reports, and dashboards
The opportunity costs or expensive alternatives if your request is denied
This is where an influencer marketing tool like Later Influence can be valuable—standard features include an influencer database, campaign management, influencer payments, and influencer analytics.
Bring Technology Into Your Team
The right influencer marketing platform can supercharge your abilities.
Making a business case for budget requires understanding what outcomes you need to support, showing how influencer marketing can scale with real-world examples, and explaining the opportunity costs of not investing in a platform.
Remember: You’re investing to grow the business and deliver real outcomes from social media and influencer marketing. That requires powerful tools to get the job done properly (and efficiently).
Book a Demo of Later Influence today to see how the platform can support all your influencer marketing needs at any scale.
