Influencer List Refresh

Role Involved
Research, PM, GTM

Problem
Our legacy Influencer dashboard had become a competitive weakness. This resulted in some accounts churning and some head-to-head prospects going to our main competitor. In particular, there were various key metrics that we weren't supporting to help clients assess the ROI of their Influencer budget, such as Earned Media Value. Additionally, because the product team had not invested in this area for some time, there were a slew of additional usability issues and performance issues to tackle to better support our users’ ability to manage and report on a large number of Influencers at scale. 

Strategy
Because I was taking over a legacy product built by a team that largely had moved on to different companies since release, there was a lot of knowledge gaps to cover and a lot of stakeholders to get consensus from. To collect some intel, I synced with previous owners on the research they’ve done, collected feedback from our client facing teams, went through historically created tickets clients have written in about the legacy product, and hopped on client calls. I started to realize that although clients had fairly complex, customized workflows to tackle Influencer strategy, sometimes using multiple tools as well as agencies, there were four common themes of pain points that we could help them solve - discovery, management, activation, and measurement.

From my conversations with clients, it was clear that the two areas that caused more issues than others were management and measurement. Clients were spending a ton of time manually emailing each Influencer to provide feedback and collect their content, and when it came time to reporting it was difficult to collect and report on tangible numbers at scale to optimize their next campaign. Even investigating a series of Influencer-focused platforms, these were the same two areas that were most commonly pitched in their marketing materials.

At this point, I met with stakeholders of the project to get consensus around these pain points. I felt strongly that Influencer content organization and measurement fit well into our existing pitch and integrated best with our existing other products. In particular, it was important to get early sign off that despite all the pain points, we would focus on solving the ones that aligned best with our strengths.

With approval, I scoped a road map of features and use cases we wanted to iterate on based on priority and dev cost to tackle Influencer content management and measurement. There were several new features we wanted to tackle, as well as technical investments to boost performance. So as not to make clients wait too long, I split the features up into separate releases to incrementally improve the area and empower our sales and account teams to go to market with this plan as soon as possible.

After shipping some of the more competitive wins, we invested in rewriting the front-end tech stack to boost performance speed and introduced new Influencer design patterns we had ran usability tests on to give the overall area a much needed refresh. Although these later releases were quieter on the market front, they were important to tackle after the initial wins to ensure we were set up for continued success in maintaining and building on this feature in the future.

Results

After releasing these Influencer updates, the Influencer Dashboard pages received 180% more monthly visits, as well as a 45% increase of monthly active clients. In addition, the amount of Influencer lists that clients were creating on Curalate increased by 200%, and the amount of weekly tracked Influencers clients were tracking through Curalate increased by 700%. This means not only were more clients using us to solve their Influencer pain points, but they were doing it at significantly higher volumes than our legacy offering.

In addition to increased usage, providing the sales and account teams with a clear roadmap of releases to look forward to reportedly pushed several head-to-head deals over the line against our primary competitor, with many new accounts signing specifically due to our new Influencer features.