Often seen as unnecessary stakeholders by brands, talent managers and agencies are downgraded to being a trivial part of the influencer marketing industry. When in actuality, they play a crucial role in the professionalization of the business and ecosystem. First of all, let’s go ahead and open our Influencer Marketing Glossary to understand what it really means to be a talent manager.
| Talent managers act on behalf of their respective clients and work on seizing opportunities for them. Their work consists of recruiting and working alongside the influencers, seeing campaigns through from beginning to end, not only that, but they are also a mentor and guide for content creators. |
But, hey! They are not to be mistaken as the influencer’s assistant.
Talent agents are the real Jack-of-all-trades, capable of wearing different hats and changing them in the blink of an eye. They know how to be lawyers to formalize contracts, financiers to manage invoices, sales directors to develop business on behalf of their clients and creative directors to adapt the brand briefing towards their talent’s narrative.
These influencer marketing wizards are an indispensable bridge when it comes to building understanding between brands and influencers. They comprehend the relevance of ‘brand safety’ and know how to craft a briefing, whilst at the same time being a full-time companion to influencers.
Not only do they know the routines and concerns of each and every influencer, but they are able to put themselves in the shoes of the brand. They are oriented towards the brand’s goals and will advise on the most appropriate activities to achieve results, on-time and on-brand.
Their main objective? Giving influencers the time and space they need to shine, whilst ensuring that they stay on track. Overall, talent managers allow influencers to focus on crafting high-quality content and engaging with their audience, enabling them to reach and go beyond their full potential.
The 3 biggest challenges that talent managers face
But let’s keep it real, most talent agents follow tedious processes that lack any kind of automation. From creating media kits to content clipping and campaign reporting. With so many processes to follow (and hats to wear!), there are many challenges and concerns that agents face.
We spoke to some of the biggest talent agents and agencies in Europe to understand the causes of their headaches, here’s what they had to say.
Lack of autonomy
If you are a talent manager, you have been there: having to regularly request talent’s demographics and audience insights. If not, let them tell you: ‘when brands request demographics of our talents, we must ask for screenshots from influencers and patiently wait for their response’. Not only that, but they also have to rely on the talent to access the performance of each post.
Wasted time
Ever felt the pain of the tedious task of reporting? Talent managers who don’t use influencer marketing technology, need to request screenshots with the results of each published content and put it together in an excel sheet. They pretty much ‘dump’ all the information from the screenshots into an excel or pdf file at the end of each campaign. This translates into vast amounts of wasted time.
And with ‘wasted time’ we don’t only refer to working hours, but off-time as well. Many managers find themselves working during the weekends and enduring seemingly endless periods of time for an influencer to post a story and then take a screenshot for the clipping.
Lack of centralization
And by ‘lack of centralization’ agencies and freelance talent managers mean ‘the hassle of logging in and out of each influencer’s account, across every social media platform’. In some cases, influencers trust their agents and share login details with them, for them to be more autonomous. However, this gives agents the task of having to log in and out from each influencer account. The more influencers they represent, the bigger the struggle.
On How Influencer Marketing Platforms are Helping Talent Managers
And we don’t just mean the biggest talent agencies
IM platforms empower managers to handle daily tasks with ease, speed, and efficiency, meaning they get more return from every relationship. This is how an influencer marketing platform helps them in their day-to-day work in a more agile way:
On the one hand, thanks to influencer marketing platforms such as Primetag, managers are able to create and send reports autonomously. Never again will they have to ask for a screenshot late at night to update statistics.
It also allows them to work less while doing more at the same time. For example, Primetag includes real-time content monitoring, automatic content clipping and goal-oriented reports. So that talent agencies have time to focus on what really matters. Overall, technology allows them to upgrade their business and to offer all their clients a premium service, in a centralized manner.
The life of a talent manager can be chaotic: they must be prepared to improvise, adjust and change hats in an instant. Contrary to popular belief, there is affordable IM technology for all talent managers, big and small.
Primetag helps them centralize their activity with talent and clients and gives them more time (and energy) for what is really important: building bridges and creating new business opportunities for their clients.
