SUMMER
2023
FLEXIBILITY
Standardized but Inflexible Processes: Our legacy workflow suite was designed to guide marketers and creators through every step of campaign execution, from creating briefs and negotiating offers to content submission and payouts. However, the diverse working styles of creators meant that a one-size-fits-all workflow couldn’t accommodate all unique needs, leading to inefficiencies.
Decreased Marketer Productivity: The rigid tools began to slow down marketers' workflows, causing delays and reducing overall campaign effectiveness. As a result, marketers shifted away from using the platform as their primary point of contact with creators, yet they still had to recreate campaigns within the platform to access essential analytics.
Decreased Marketer Productivity: The rigid tools began to slow down marketers' workflows, causing delays and reducing overall campaign effectiveness. As a result, marketers shifted away from using the platform as their primary point of contact with creators, yet they still had to recreate campaigns within the platform to access essential analytics.
Why This Workflow Isn’t for Everyone
Our original step-by-step workflow was designed to unify the entire campaign process, ensuring a smooth path from invitation to final payment. However, real-world influencer relationships rarely follow a single approach, making a one-size-fits-all sequence feel rigid and impractical.
If a creator refuses to sign up or comply with each stage, everything grinds to a halt—there’s no easy path to skip or revert steps. The result? Manual overrides, wasted time, and mounting frustrations for both marketers and creators.
If a creator refuses to sign up or comply with each stage, everything grinds to a halt—there’s no easy path to skip or revert steps. The result? Manual overrides, wasted time, and mounting frustrations for both marketers and creators.
Research
Research
Process
1.
One-Size-Fits-All Approach
Legacy workflow guided marketers and creators through a standardized campaign process; however, the single workflow couldn’t accommodate all unique campaign needs.
Most of my campaigns are pretty straight forward, and I only want to use a portion of the campaign workflow. But I am forced to go through the entire flow.
- SaaS User
2.
Disjointed Platform Usage
Marketers sometimes used different software for specific creator needs but had to recreate entire offers in IZEA for get content analytics, making the process time-consuming.
For about 30% of the campaigns, we're working with creators off the platform to meet their niche needs since the platform doesn't support them.
- Campaign Manager
3.
Constant Social Platform Changes
Continuously adapting to social platform changes required significant engineering resources, often taking months to support new features before they became obsolete.
We are losing deals to competitor platforms because the platform lacks the ability to support new emerging platforms.
- Sales Team Member
Process
4.
Reliance on Manual Overrides
The Engineering Team is constantly receiving requests to manually override workflows when marketers needed to skip steps or revert actions as a result of platform inflexibility.
It happens about 10 times a week. I feel bad for always asking the engineering team to help us manually override a step in the workflow.
- Support Team Member
5.
Mandatory Creator Participation
Creators were required to sign up and use the platform to participate in campaigns. If the creators refuse, marketers had to act on behalf of the creators to complete the workflow.
Sometimes clients want to work with creators who are not in our marketplace, but the high profile creators don’t want to sign up and use the platform.
- Campaign Coordinator
6.
Limited Data Connectivity
The platform lacked integrations with third-party software such as conversion tracking and web traffic. Exporting data from our campaigns to other marketing software was also challenging.
It’s difficult to demonstrate the ROI of influencer marketing to clients when we cannot track end to end conversion.
- Sales Team Manager
Modular Campaign Management
Offer a la carte modules such as Campaigns, Contacts, Tracking Links, Content, Payments, and Contracts, enabling campaign managers to tailor workflows to their specific needs.
Seamless Associations
Allow campaign managers to effortlessly connect items across different modules, establishing relationships that streamline campaign management and enhance data coherence.
Adaptable Platform Foundation
Build a scalable backend and intuitive user interface that can easily adapt to evolving social platform updates and support diverse business requirements.
Actionable Insights
Utilize associations to deliver comprehensive insights into campaign performance, highlighting top-performing content and creators, and accurately measuring ROI.
Flexible Creator Engagement
Enable marketers to execute campaigns even when creators do not want to sign up or use the platform, minimizing the need for workarounds and maintaining seamless workflow continuity.
Enhanced Data Connectivity
Seamlessly connect with third-party platforms for conversion tracking and web traffic analysis, while allowing easy customization of module columns and effortless data export.
Customizable Campaign Management
Flex CRM is a brand new platform designed to overcome the limitations of our legacy workflow suite. Recognizing the need for diverse and adaptable strategies in influencer marketing, Flex CRM offers campaign managers a customizable, a la carte experience. Managers can choose from modules like CRM, conversion tracking, payments, contract management, and form building, allowing them to tailor workflows to different influencer and campaign needs. This flexibility streamlines campaign execution and enables the generation of actionable insights without being restricted by rigid processes.
Scalable and Adaptable Foundation
Built on a scalable foundation, Flex CRM adapts to the ever-changing social media and influencer marketing landscape. It empowers campaign managers to execute their campaigns more efficiently and stay competitive in a fast-paced industry.
Research
The Flex CRM data model is structured around distinct campaign elements: Contacts, Campaigns, Payments, Content, Tracking Links, and Contracts.
Marketers can seamlessly associate records to effectively keep track of the relationships between these elements. Whether you're linking creators to specific campaigns, tracking interactions between creators and their talent managers, or connecting contracts to payments, Flex CRM's association functionality ensures that all relevant data points are interconnected and easily accessible.
This provides a highly flexible data model that accommodates diverse and complex campaign requirements. Marketers can create custom associations across a broader range of campaign elements, enabling tailored workflows that meet specific needs.
Marketers can seamlessly associate records to effectively keep track of the relationships between these elements. Whether you're linking creators to specific campaigns, tracking interactions between creators and their talent managers, or connecting contracts to payments, Flex CRM's association functionality ensures that all relevant data points are interconnected and easily accessible.
This provides a highly flexible data model that accommodates diverse and complex campaign requirements. Marketers can create custom associations across a broader range of campaign elements, enabling tailored workflows that meet specific needs.
Flex CRM provides a collaborative and user friendly environment where teams can effortlessly gather all t data in one place and create a single source of truth for your marketing efforts.
The table interface enhances data manipulation and analysis, allowing users to customize their workspace by selecting which columns to display, pinning important columns, and rearranging their order to fit your workflow.
Each column supports robust sorting and filtering, enabling you to quickly locate and manage the information you need.
Additionally, Flex CRM offers seamless data exporting, allowing you to generate customized views for reports and presentations.
The table interface enhances data manipulation and analysis, allowing users to customize their workspace by selecting which columns to display, pinning important columns, and rearranging their order to fit your workflow.
Each column supports robust sorting and filtering, enabling you to quickly locate and manage the information you need.
Additionally, Flex CRM offers seamless data exporting, allowing you to generate customized views for reports and presentations.
Relationship Management
Easily see your relationship and partnership history with the creator all in one place. Refresh your memory on how the creator performed in the past campaigns or how the contract was negotiated in the past.
Contact Performance
Keep track of the creator’s performance across campaigns and benchmark them against other creators.
Social Insights
Understand the creator’s influence on the social platforms with data points such as audience demographics, audience affinities, top brand mentions, and more.
Shopify and Google Analytics
Understand the full customer journey from clicking on the link to making the purchase. Optimize your influencer marketing campaigns with your conversion insights.
Tracking Links
Create tracking links and assign them to creators to track which creator is driving the most traffic and sales. Integrate with Shopify and Google Analytics to make your tracking links more powerful.
Product Insights
Decipher which of your product is selling the best from your influencer marketing campaigns and which tracking link your customers used to make those purchases.
Any Platforms
Our sophisticated scraper is able to gather content and performance metrics from any platform to provide you with insights and analysis.
Content Performance
Understand the performance of the content and how it benchmarks against other content on the same platform.
Content Analysis
We provide an analysis on the content to allow users to search by attributes such as colors, brands, tags, themes, and more. You can also related content that shares similar attributes.
Payment Details
Easily pay creators and vendors in the platform. Create detailed line items per payment to match your accounting expense reporting. Track the payment activity to ensure payment was processed successfully.
Value
Understand how much value you are getting from the money spent when you associate the payment with Content, Tracking Links, Shopify, and more.
Payment Approval
Set up payment approval flow to have designated financial administrator approve all outgoing payments for accounting internal control.
eSignature Integration
Seamlessly manage contracts by setting up and collecting electronic signatures directly within the platform.
Audit Trail
Track document statuses and monitor all actions taken by recipients for comprehensive accountability.
Template Library
Access a diverse library of contract templates tailored to fit various campaign requirements and needs.
Request Forms
Create content request forms to efficiently collect content from creators and manage their submissions.
Share Form with Creators
Distribute private forms via email or share public forms through URLs to gather content and responses from creators.
Custom Survey Questions
Incorporate custom survey questions into the request forms to gather additional insights alongside content submissions.
Associate to Generate Insights
Curate your own dashboard and insights by creating associations between Payments, Contacts, Campaigns, Content, Tracking Links, and more. Easily understand the driving force behind your campaign performance and benchmark against other associations.
Campaign Dashboard
Associate Tracking Links, Payments, Content, and more to keep an eye on how your campaign as a whole is performing.
Campaign Goals
Easily set up and keep track of your campaign goals to make sure you can hit your targets.
Rankings
Keep a pulse on the best performing content, tracking links, and products to optimize your campaign strategy.
Rollout
Phase 1: Testing the Water with Private Beta
- Introduced core modules: Contacts, Payments, Campaigns, Integrations, Tracking Links, and Content.
- Beta testers praised the platform’s ease of use, validating our direction. However, most users signed up looking for an influencer search tool, pushing us to prioritize migrating search features from the legacy platform before the public launch.
Phase 2: Preparing for Public Launch
- Migrated Creator Search, VizSearch, and Creator Profiles to the new platform.
- Introduced two additional core modules: Content Request Forms and Contracts with eSign integration.
- We were trying to pack as much functionality into Flex CRM as possible to attract a larger user base and make it look like really great deal.
Phase 3: Life After MVP
- Signups were strong but usage remained low. users were curious about the platform, but the new concept wasn’t compelling enough to replace their existing workflows.
- Released several quick-win features, such as AI Storyboard and Gmail Integration, that were great for PR and marketing, but failed to improve retention.
- We realized that the platform would not be sticky enough unless we start focusing on automations, especially an offer workflow that streamlines campaign execution and automates associations.
Strong Signups & Competitive Pricing
Signups grew 40% month-over-month in the first 6 months, driven by competitive pricing and feature-rich offerings, attracting users looking for an affordable alternative.
High Churn & Low User Stickiness
However, users left as quickly as they joined, struggling to justify switching from their current platforms. The discovery tools were not as strong as competitors focusing solely on search, and the workflow features were too simplified to replace existing solutions.
Expanded Support for New Campaign Types
Flex CRM enabled new deal types, including a 7,000+ creator UGC campaign, helping the company win business previously unsupported by the legacy platform.
Less Efficient for Traditional Campaigns
However, over 80% of the company’s campaigns were still traditional influencer deals. Internal teams chose to stay on the legacy platform despite its limitations because it was still more efficient than Flex CRM for traditional influencer marketing campaigns.
Scalable Infrastructure for Future Growth
The new architecture enabled flexible workflows, and powerful automation potentials, ensuring the platform could adapt with evolving industry demands.
Delayed Automation Hurt Adoption
However, workflow automation was continuously deprioritized in favor of feature expansion, leaving campaign execution manual and inefficient. Users lost interest and abandoned the platform, opting for more traditional marketing tools despite their limited flexibility.
