Tagger Media aims to assist brands and agencies in connecting with creators and developing effective influencer campaigns. The company’s Professional Services offering helps clients with various aspects of influencer marketing, such as campaign management, influencer discovery, and reporting. Tagger’s data-driven social intelligence platform plays a crucial role in shaping campaigns and evaluating success while ensuring effective communication and collaboration between clients and influencers throughout the campaign lifecycle.

Peter, can you give us a brief overview of Tagger Media and its mission?

Peter Kennedy is the founder of Tagger Media. The company started about eight years ago, and they strive to help brands and agencies worldwide connect with creators and understand the strategies around the influencer campaigns they’re running. 

The company comprises different people, and its process starts with influencer discovery. For example, suppose a brand or agency wants to do something in the oral care market. In that case, Tagger Media will research to understand which influencers matter most in that industry and what conversations are happening in the market to build a strategy around what they call the “Who, What, When, Where, and Why.”

Next comes the campaign management workflow, which is usually difficult because brands and agencies must find influencers. They need to reach out to them, send them contracts, and pay them. Fortunately, Tagger Media does all of that seamlessly. The company also offers reporting features to help brands and agencies determine their campaigns’ performance. 

Tagger Media has offices in every region of the globe — Africa, all throughout Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, and North, South, and Central America. They have clients everywhere as influencer marketing has become the fastest-growing media today.  

Can you explain the motivation behind launching Tagger Professional Services and how it aims to enhance influencer marketing campaigns?

The company found out that more of its clients, both brands and agencies, were looking for extensions of their teams. This needs to be heightened as the economy shifts and brands and agencies have to lay off some of their employees. 

As such, the complexity of influencer marketing increases. Not to mention that these campaigns are composed of various components, ranging from discovery, outreach, research, payment management, and many others. The company saw how their clients needed help with their entire campaigns or certain areas of their campaigns. 

Tagger Professional Services started with the goal of helping these clients. They come in and help clients with all of their influencer marketing needs — whether that’s managing several campaigns simultaneously or inputting first-party data at the end of every campaign. 

What specific challenges do organizations face when it comes to executing effective influencer marketing strategies, and how does Tagger address those challenges?

“I think where most people fall short when they’re coming up with influencer campaigns is understanding the strategy,” Peter shares. He thinks most people lack the understanding of why they’re running a campaign in the first place and believes in the importance of answering the who, what, when, where, and how when looking at a specific topic or industry.

Peter has talked to several clients in the past, and when he asked them why they chose a specific platform, they just “assumed” that that’s what the industry requires. But in reality, when looking at the industry or that topic, it’s not the right platform. 

He expresses the importance of having a content strategy and understanding how the competitors are spending, where they are spending, and the ROI of their spending. 

Peter feels like most brands and agencies don’t look at influencer marketing from a bird’s eye view and consider other different components. “If they’re using our platform, they are, but a lot of time, they’re not doing that,” he explains. 

Could you provide some examples of how Tagger Professional Services help clients optimize their influencer campaigns and achieve their business goals?

According to Christopher Gesualdi, Global Head of Professional Services at Tagger, honing in on the objectives and the KPIs upfront are really critical. He has seen people who run campaigns and then try to go back into the KPIs as a way to determine success. 

But he believes that KPIs should always be the first step in the campaign process for brands and agencies who want to drive business impact and move the needle. And that is what Chris’s team does — they have a series of ways to go about articulating KPIs using the Tagger platform combined with the many years of experience they have. These enable them to measure the full funnel of the campaigns.

One example where Tagger Professional Services were maximized was when they worked with a company in the artificial intelligence space. The company was trying to get a well-known individual to work with them to generate AI content and then distribute that to a more specific audience. They were tasked to find a big celebrity or any personality whose audience resonated with the audience the company was targeting.

Chris’ team looked at several celebrities, artists, and musicians who spoke about artificial intelligence. Next, they took a portion of the company’s target audience and figured out who among those personalities resonated well with that audience. 

Peter takes pride in the level of detail they provide to their clients. He believes that if the brand and the influencer’s audience don’t resonate well with each other, influencer marketing will not work; on the contrary, it will only fall flat. 

How does Tagger ensure seamless integration and collaboration with clients’ existing marketing teams while providing professional services?

There are plenty of ways Tagger ensures integration and collaboration. First, they ensure that every step of their campaign is transparent and visible. They’re not doing things behind a curtain and then just sending a final report at the end of the activation; they let the client log in to see every step of the influencer discovery and approval process in real time. 

Additionally, Tagger Media provides visibility in terms of how much they’re paying the creators and their own fees. As a result, clients know what Tagger Media’s margin is on their business. 

What role does Tagger’s data-driven social intelligence platform play in shaping influencer marketing campaigns under the Professional Services offering?

Tagger’s data-driven social intelligence platform is crucial. They’re putting very robust strategies in front of their clients, and these proposals are empowered by the data that they have within their Signals engine. Signals is extremely flexible in being able to pivot data in whatever ways clients have to extract the insights pertinent to what they’re trying to do in their campaigns. 

Another key part of Tagger Media’s offerings is the efficiency of their client’s media dollars. In general, influencer marketing is a media execution or paid media campaign. What this means is that when clients look at Tagger’s platform, they’ll understand their share of voice in certain parts of the world. As a result, they’ll know where to better allocate their media dollars and avoid spending them on areas where they have already reached a sufficient percentage of share of voice. 

How does Tagger approach influencer discovery and selection for client campaigns? What criteria are considered during this process?

Tagger looks at the market to find influencers who did historically well within that topic. For them, it’s no longer solely about influencers who talk about a certain topic or whose audience makes sense. They’re focused on finding influencers who did really well in that topic as they’ll have better chances of succeeding in that campaign. 

Can you elaborate on the media buying aspect of Tagger Professional Services and how it contributes to driving desired actions and outcomes for clients?

With influencer campaigns, media buying and boosting content is important in order to extend the reach and engagement that clients are doing for their campaigns. Tagger helps its clients get the additional reach and engagement that they need for these campaigns, so they’re an important part of it. Media buying also allows Tagger to find audiences that are harder to find. 

What metrics and measurement techniques does Tagger employ to evaluate the success and ROI of influencer marketing campaigns managed through Professional Services?

It all goes back to the KPIs the clients are marching towards before the campaign starts — whether it’s upper funnel awareness or all the way down to conversion. 

Peter wants to correct a common notion that influencer marketing campaigns are all about engagement and likes. These are just vanity metrics and are just a part of the bigger picture, not the entirety. 

Tagger also measures influencer marketing campaigns the same way they measure other media campaigns. In addition, they measure their clients’ cost per mille, cost per engagement, cost per conversion and cost per click. Because of this, their clients can easily compare the progress and success of their influencer marketing campaigns with Tagger with their other marketing activities. 

Tagger can also drive down to the conversion on the influencer level, campaign level, or post level. This allows them to know whether a certain influencer drive more conversions or a platform created more conversions. 

Another thing that Tagger does is to create drift metrics. This usually means taking two metrics and then diving and subtracting them based on what the client’s needs are. This shows how flexible Tagger’s platform is in creating derivative metrics within any campaign setting. 

Chris also sees a larger appetite for their brand health studies. People in influencer marketing often talk about the upper- and mid-funnel, but they’re not empirically measuring important factors like awareness and consideration. “I see all these briefs, and they say, ‘We want to drive purchase intent,’ or ‘We want consideration amongst a new usage occasion,’ but there are no corresponding brand lift studies associated with the campaign,” Chris adds. 

Measuring campaigns without any brand lift studies may cause clients to interfere with other factors like comments and others. 

Tagger works with a rich network of partners to create lift brand studies that will measure different brand health constructs concurrently. This is something they’re often doing whenever they see any one of those brand-health-related KPIs. 

They can also work with their media buyers and run a campaign where they’re solely optimizing to drive trials. This information will be on top of the report when Tagger sends reports to their clients.

In either of those contexts, they’re still extremely comfortable running campaigns that, candidly, other influencer marketing agencies might be a little intimidated by. Tagger doesn’t have any issues putting themselves in any of those situations because they’re confident of their capabilities to succeed.

In what ways does Tagger support its clients throughout the entire lifecycle of an influencer marketing campaign, from planning to payment?

One thing that makes professional services great is that Tagger can be part of a client’s marketing campaign from start to finish, or they can be present in only some of its aspects or areas. For instance, some of their clients will only need help with researching and creating proposals, while others will require assistance for the entire program. 

When running full campaigns with clients, the process starts with a brief understanding of what their KPIs are, their target audience, their metrics, and how Tagger can maximize content beyond the campaign, so they can ensure rights for the content to be used anywhere. 

Chris’s team will build the strategy, get approval, complete the discovery process (find influencers and reach out to them), do the contracting and payments, and content approval. The last process is a big piece of ensuring that influencers actually upload content that the clients approve of and are happy with.

Once the content goes live, Chris and his team track everything, like ensuring that the content maps to what the influencer did and what they said they were doing to do for Tagger and the client; the content stays live based on the agreed lifespan, and the KPIs projected are met.

How does Tagger ensure effective communication and collaboration between clients and influencers during campaign execution?

Tagger’s platform guarantees transparency. They can communicate with creators in one of two ways: through the platform’s creator portal or through email. 

The client can either log in to their account in Tagger and see real-time updates of their campaigns. The platform also has a collaborator portal, which allows clients to log in separately, where they can approve the influencers on the platform and the content they make and view the summary of the campaign. 

In short, clients can see every email communication and each influencer’s process throughout the campaign. 

Can you discuss any unique or innovative strategies that Tagger has implemented for its clients through the Professional Services offer?

Tagger had a client from the fashion industry that wanted to partner with a music festival. They integrated AI into the process, so they can take all the content online and understand what artists are talking about the most. This helped them determine which artists missed their last shows, allowing them to suggest the best artists their clients should work with. 

AI also helped Chris and his team to see what people were talking about, how these topics related to the music festival, and the types of fashion they were talking about. By having access to a variety of cultural information, the team was able to develop an influencer campaign that was appealing to the target audience in terms of the type of music, messaging, and communication. 

How does Tagger stay updated on industry trends and changes in the influencer marketing landscape, and how does that knowledge inform its Professional Services?

Tagger has offices and clients around the world, so it’s important for them to stay updated. They achieve this goal using different methods. One, they have a client visionary board, which is made up of key customers who are leaders in the influencer marketing space and are located in different parts of the world. 

“They help with a vision, not only for their area but also the industries that they’re in,” Peter says. He understands how different industries or niches have different trends. For instance, trends affecting spirits and alcohol clients might not always affect clients in the music industry and vice versa. 

Tagger also has customer success managers all over the world who are listening to every concern every client has. These managers communicate to Tagger what’s happening in their respective industries and what the company has to focus on. 

In addition, Tagger has a team that partners with all the platforms to understand what’s coming down the pipeline. They have lawyers all around the world who are up to speed on data privacy regulations and have become drivers for the changes they make in their platform. 

The team also utilizes a sophisticated Signals platform that gives them visibility into what’s going on across the industry. “We know the topics that are trending, and we’re certainly on the ball with all the great publications coming out of all the reputable places out there,” Chris adds.

As the Founder and President of Tagger Media, what are your long-term goals for the Professional Services offering, and how do you envision it evolving in the future?

Tagger’s long-term goal is to help all of their clients and become an extension of their teams if they need it. And they’re finding out that their clients actually need this service. 

“We’re growing into it slowly. The backlog that we have, we have more clients who want it than we’re able to provide it to them, and we’re doing that on purpose because we want to make sure that we’re over-delivering and not over-promising, which is important,” Peter states. 

Tagger could become one of the largest influencer marketing managed services tomorrow but will not take that direction as they’re slowly growing the company. They’re also not competing with their customers as half of their customers are agencies. Most of Tagger’s workload comes from these agencies because they’re overworked and need help. 

As such, Tagger’s goal for the future is to grow the company slowly and help clients when they need it. They recently found out that providing help to clients the moment they need it is an amazing and effective retention tool. 

Finally, what sets Tagger Professional Services apart from other influencer marketing solution providers in the industry?

One thing that makes Tagger Professional Services different from its competitors is that they have the data and they understand the strategy is going to be successful. They have an in-depth understanding of the industry, meaning the who, what, when, where, and why. For Tagger, this is the ethos that drives their professional services team. 

For Chris, Tagger has the right balance of art and science, especially in his department. He believes that having the right balance of qualitative and quantitative data in influencer campaigns is important, which is why they launched a media arm in their department.