Simplifying Influencer-Business Matchmaking
Prodcut
Role
Year
Since social media boosted, influencer marketing has become the most popular marketing strategies. Current influencer marketing marketplace focuses on serving reputable businesses and top-tier influencers, leaving small businesses and nano-influencers with limited options. Given their local focus and limited resources, there is a clear opportunity to connect these two groups and help them engage in this marketplace. Anonymous Agent is a mobile app that streamlines the matching process for small businesses and nano-influencers.
Final design preview
Kick-offs
The problem
The gap between nano-influencers and small businesses is resulting in their struggle to participate in the current influencer marketing marketplace.
What are we going to do?
1. Project scope: B2C product connects nano-influencer and small business.
2. Business goals: Bridge the gap between nano-influencers and small businesses; Enhance user engagement; Establish competitive edge.
3. Launch plan: ship the MVP in 3 months.
Who are we designing for?
Design strategy
Walk a mile in users' shoes
To empathize effectively with users, it's crucial to gain a comprehensive understanding of their characteristics. I began by looking at existing data and competitors as well as conducting user interviews.
By talking to them, exploring their current behaviors, preferences, and pain points in influencer marketing, I got a lots of valuable insights, which can help inform my design decisions and create a better user experience.
User research insights
• In the current marketplace, marketing tools and Public Relation companies provide mutual-selection between influencers and businesses.
• Over 50% of nano-influencers seek potential partners through social media platforms and by reaching out directly.
• Nano-influencers need a more efficient way to find ideal sponsorships, because the current collaboration process is complex and time-consuming.
• Small businesses have limited budgets and resources to do influencer marketing, they feel hard to find cost-effective influencers.
Prioritizing the most critical problem for resolution
Nano-influencer and small business struggle to find each other due to the complex and time-consuming collaboration process.
• Pre-campaign (up to five weeks): repeated introductions, discussions, back-and-forth negotiations.
• Post-campaign (up to one week): create campaign reports due to limited budgets for professional tracking tools.
Streamline the collaboration process and facilitate matching between nano-influencers and small businesses is a priority.
Ideation
To identify opportunities for simplifying the process, I created a journey map to gain a deeper understanding of the influencers' current experience. From the journey map, we can identify clear opportunities for improvement in the negotiation, content creation, and measurement phases. These areas can be explored further in brainstorming sessions to find potential solutions.
Brainstorming
I held a brainstorming session with the Product Manager to generate a list of potential solutions. Afterward, I involved the engineering team to gather their feedback and determine any technical constraints. Once we had possible solutions, I consulted with various potential users to gather their opinions and insights to ensure that the solutions we were considering addressed their needs.
Solutions
We identified a solution to avoid repeated negotiation by offering multiple tiers of contracts to meet the needs of influencers with different follower bases.
For content creation, since most small businesses have physical stores, they propose influencers physically come in, try out their products or services, and then share their real experiences on social media. This way, they can see the success in action!
To determine the metrics that small businesses care about the most and how they validate the campaign's success, we consulted with several small businesses. We found that they prefer an easy-to-track user engagement metric, such as "Likes." While "Likes" are vulnerable to fraud and may not necessarily translate to business success, it serves as a good starting point for our MVP. We plan to add more metrics in future product development.
Since both real experience images and user engagement screenshots are generated after the campaign, we are considering combining them as Tasks for influencers to complete before submitting the contract.
Interaction flow
After identifying the key functions, I proceeded to design the information architecture and create an interaction flow. The flow illustrates the relationship between pages and the functionalities of each page.
The key functions, which are the Tiers and Tasks, are nested within the Business page.
Business page information architectures
Business page explorations
The Details and the Tasks have a logical sequence, also, business information and contract terms should come first. Each section contains lots of layers, so I use a tab bar to organize the information.
It conveys sequence and logic but with a more clear hierarchy for nested content. The tab bar is located at the top of the page and is easy to discover and use. This design solution effectively conveys a sense of sequence and logic while also improving the organization of information.
Uncover user pain points
• Offer "Multi-Tier Contracts" to avoid repeated negotiation and increase the overall speed of the process.
• Establish "Unified Creation Guidelines" for content creation to help minimize the need for revisions and back-and-forth communication.
• Replace the measurement report with "User Engagement Screenshots" to make it easier to analyze and interpret the data.
Core features zoom in
Details section
The top of the Details section features business information and maps because most small businesses have physical stores.
Following are the general requirements and social media requirements. Social media requirements are different between businesses, so the tiers mainly show the differences in social media requirements.
For the Tiers design, I chose Card patterns, since using Card to showcase pricing tiers is popular among digital platforms. It is scalable, visually appealing, easy to catch key information, and also easily reach with a thumb.
Tasks section
Here we have arrived at the Tasks section. Once influencers have confirmed and initiated the contract, the page will automatically redirect to the Tasks section, where they can track the status of the contract. Influencers can follow the maps provided to visit the business stores to complete the required tasks.
After influencers have finished the campaign and collected the required images, they can return to this page to upload the images and submit the contract. There is no need for additional reports or actions.
1. Business information & contract status.
2. Clear visual hierarchy. Offer a step-by-step guide for users to follow throughout the entire process.
3. Image upload success indicator.
Mockups
Impact
• Daily user growth of 20%-30%.
• On average, it takes 2 minutes for the user from entering the Details page to confirm and begin the contract.
• Onboarded 900+ influencers and 132+ local businesses within the first 6 months.