What’s The Difference Between Self-Service Platform & Managed Services?

NeoReach provides influencer marketing solutions for global brands and agencies. We have two primary offerings: a Self-Service Platform and Managed Services. While these 2 offerings can be complementary, they address different customer needs.

The Self-Service Platform is designed to help companies that have an in-house influencer marketing team organize and scale their influencer programs. On the other hand, the Managed Services offering is meant for companies that want a team of industry experts to design and run influencer campaigns for them.

Self-Service Platform

Over the last 12 months, an increasing number of brands and agencies have built their own in-house influencer marketing programs. They established in-house teams and processes to direct outreach to influencers and coordinate campaigns.

The advantages of an in-house influencer marketing program are that you hold a direct line of communication with influencers. This generally yields better results because you can communicate your brand’s needs directly to influencers and you can circumvent the fees charged by influencer marketing vendors.

However, running influencer marketing in-house carries its own set of challenges. In particular:

1. It’s challenging to identify brand-appropriate influencers: Currently, most marketers use Google to find influencers, which can take days, or weeks. Making matters worse, most marketers have little to no data upon which to make decisions about the influencers they select.
2. Managing and measuring campaigns is labor intensive: Running an influencer program requires being on top of many moving pieces, including influencer relationships, price negotiation, contract management, post-approval, calendar management, and reporting.
3. Teams operate in silos: Although many people at the brand or agency are working with influencers, they operate in silos, each with their own process and relationships, generally logged in a spreadsheet. This means that influencer relationships are not shared, processes and reporting is not standardized, and learnings are not shared.

The NeoReach platform solves these problems, thereby increasing the efficiency of in-house influencer marketing teams and enabling companies to build their own influencer networks. The platform offers the following functionality:

1. Search: An influencer search engine enabling you to search the entire social graph. It offers over 3M influencers, searchable by keyword, performance, and audience analytics.
2. Manage: Workflows for automating your campaigns and influencer relationships. It includes tools to manage influencer communication, content calendars, content development, influencer contracts, and influencer payments.
3. Track: Dashboards and analytics to measure the performance of your programs.

To learn more, download our FanDuel case study or sign up for a live demo!

Managed Services

Although building an in-house influencer marketing team tends to yield the best results, it is not for everyone. Many brands and agencies either do not have the bandwidth or knowledge to run influencer programs themselves or are just starting to try out the space and have to see more proof of concept before bringing it in-house.

The NeoReach Managed Services offering is designed for these customers. We’ve built a team and a process to run campaigns for customers, doing everything from campaign planning to influencer management to campaign execution. Our team has launched hundreds of campaigns across platforms and industry verticals. Here is how we differentiate from other influencer marketing vendors offering Managed Services:

1. Data-driven influencer identification: How do you know what influencers will have the greatest impact? Most people just guess…instead, we use audience and performance data, sprinkled with some machine learning, to predict influencer performance.
2. Service + Software: NeoReach marries software and services to deliver the best results in the industry. Our platform helps us automate campaign management and get deeper performance analytics, cutting costs and improving performance.
3. Experienced team: Our people are some of the influencer marketing industry’s best creatives and program managers. They all have over 3 years of industry experience and have managed 7-figure influencer programs for many of the world’s largest brands.

To learn more, download our XX case study or request a call with an account executive.

How both offerings work together

Although often purchased separately, both offerings are complementary. First of all, one of the reasons our Managed Services team has developed a strong reputation in the space is because of their usage of the NeoReach platform.

Secondly, we have had several customers starting out with Managed Services and then transition into Self-Service customers once they proved out the value of influencer marketing and built an in-house team. Finally, we often have Self-Service customers running Managed Services campaigns with us because they need the extra bandwidth.

More questions? Connect with us here!