/ Background
Why is BEYOO necessary?
Before answering this question, let me introduce our boss. She is a lady with 15 years of marketing experience, deeply understanding and experienced in completing campaign projects. She has a rich network of brand contacts and influencer resources in the industry. Believing that the value of life lies in achieving one's dreams, she resigned from her job with an annual salary of 130,000 Canadian dollars. Then, she quickly connected with me on LinkedIn, and we had a pleasant discussion, deciding to start an Influencer Marketing Platform.
Moreover, I've learned that my boss and the Marketing Coordinator she worked with had already started looking for suitable influencers for the brand campaign before she resigned. Through the progress of the projects, they managed to accumulate and sign almost 200 influencers under her wing. We agreed that influencers need a platform to find brand campaigns that match their posting style, just as brands need to find influencers that fit their brand's tone. After reaching consensus on the business goals, our task was to transform this into a design problem, leading us to start detailed planning.
Phase 1.
Starting with the creation of an internal portal.
Before we dive into the project, first, we want to start by creating a portal for our agency. During casual conversations with our staff, we learned that all campaign processes were completed manually without an internal portal to record all campaign data and their associated posts. The only tool they used was Google Sheets to record and update post data, which they then shared with clients.
Google Sheets vs. Portal
First, we want to start by creating a portal for our agency. During casual conversations with our staff, we learned that all campaign processes were completed manually without an internal portal to record all campaign data and their associated posts. The only tool they used was Google Sheets to record and update post data, which they then shared with clients.
/ Design Challenge of Phase 1
A business problem to a design problem
"How might we design an influencer portal that allows admins and brands to track post data under campaigns so that they can monitor the quality of their campaign posts?"
/ Screening Interview
Generate campaign workflow
Since our agency has always been involved in ongoing campaign projects for brands, we are quite knowledgeable about the whole campaign process. Therefore, I conducted a brief user interview with my boss to determine their past comprehensive campaign project workflows, which are divided into five steps.
Workflow chart
In this flow, the admin's involvement is only in steps 2-5, which are the steps after the campaign has officially started. Therefore, our Phase 1 portal will only focus on the design of this part, leaving the first step of persuading brands to place orders, choose influencers, and select packages for our official app development.
/ Outcome
Internal portal set a good fundation for our next phase
For the portal, we quickly designed a simple Information Architecture (IA) and created a mockup. The challenging part of the process was designing how to assign campaigns to influencers. This required several rounds of discussion with my boss, where I needed to confirm whether an influencer could be assigned to multiple campaigns and whether there could be multiple posts from different influencers under one campaign. Based on my boss's responses, the final design approach we settled on allows admins to assign multiple campaigns to multiple influencers.
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App Map
Dashboard
Manage Influencer
Assign campagin flow
View post under target campaign flow
The benefits of officially starting this project with the finish of Phase 1
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Laying a solid foundation for subsequent brand user interviews, allowing me to understand that clients value data the most. This understanding serves as a starting point for inquiring about more details.
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At this stage, we established a basic design style and developed a preliminary design system, including elements such as buttons and typography, paving the way for further development of the design system.
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Establishing an information database for influencers and brands in advance can improve development efficiency.
Phase 2.
Starting with the creation of an web platform.
Thanks to the preparatory work in Phase 1, our team is more confident and assured as we begin the first phase of our official platform development. In this phase, the challenge we aim to address is how to attract more brands to purchase our services and collaborate with our influencers. Therefore, besides setting reasonable prices for our packages, our visuals also need to be concise and aesthetically pleasing to attract others and increase their desire to purchase.
/ Initial Assumption
What makes it a good influencer platform?
Before officially starting the design of the platform, several questions have been swirling in my mind: What does a good Influencer Platform look like? Do brands and influencers have different views on what makes a good platform? Should we focus more on serving brands or attracting influencers? What possibilities could it have?
It could serve as a meeting point for influencers and brands. It might function like a job board, similar to Linkedin, offering influencers a way to find sponsorship opportunities. Alternatively, it could be a community space like Discord, where brands post sponsorship opportunities. Or, it we just make it as a social media app, like Tiktok and IG?
This initial research would help me understand users' expectations. What do they expect from a influencer platform? Why is one influencer platform preferred by some over another?
/ Qualitative User Interview
What do brands & influencers expect from a influencer platform?
I conducted four interviews for this project, each lasting between 20-30 minutes, with two Marketing Coordinators from brands and two Influencers. My script mainly focused on asking them "what, when, where, why, and how" to roughly get an outline of what they expect from an Influencer Platform. For example, I asked questions like "What type of content do you consume on your device?", "What app do you use to find influencer/brand collaboration opportunities?", "When and where do you use them?" and "How do you use them?"
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After I finished asking my script questions, the interview turned into a more casual conversation. From the subsequent relaxed discussions, I was able to capture and unearth the underlying logic and reasons behind their actions, whether it was searching for influencers or seeking brand collaboration opportunities. I asked many questions starting with "why," aiming to cut to the heart of the users' motivations and behaviors.
What trends do we discover from influencers?
From the 4 interviews, I wrote down the most salient points on Post-Its — a color for each user — to begin affinity mapping, a design process to help organize and synthesize data to better reveal patterns, relationships or themes in the research.
As it turns out, for the Influencer I interviewed, social media is practically hard-wired into their daily lives. Operating their social media accounts, receiving likes and shares, and seeing their content positively influence others give them a sense of being needed. This is precisely what makes them feel their lives have meaning and, of course, is also a reason for becoming an influencer.
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In the case of the marketing specialists I interviewed, their reasons for using an Influencer Platform are primarily based on the trust established through long-term collaboration with companies and agencies. They choose to hire in-house influencers from these agencies and use the agency's own Influencer Platform. So, for them, what they are using is more like a Campaign Management Portal, where they aim to find the influencers most suitable for their own campaigns within this agency.
/ Design Challenge of Phase 2
A user problem to a design problem
"For brands, how might we design an influencer platform that allows brands to find influencers with the demographic and account data suitable for their campaign, in order to achieve the goal of signing a contract with us?"
"For influencers, how might we design an influencer portal that allows them to input information about their demographics and the profile they wish to showcase, so that they can increase their chances of being chosen by brands for collaboration?"
/ Sketching
Turn the ideas to sketching
With my problem and solution set, I began skteching out ideas for how to make an appealing, highly functional influencer platform for users. Using a Sharpie, I put my ideas to paper. In the beginning, to match trends in my interviews, I designed the app to allow brands to select influencers by filtering influencer features.
/ Prototyping
Brand facing flow
Step 1
First, select the different package price lists from our agency.
Step 2
Brands can use filters to select suitable influencers, allowing them to find influencers who match their campaign more quickly.
Brands can use filters to select suitable influencers, allowing them to more quickly find those who match their campaign requirements directly.
Step 2a
Brands can also click in the influener card that they interested to see influencer's demographics and past post performance.
Step 3
Proceed to check outs
Influencer facing flow
Filling in personal info
Filling in demographic info
Finishing sign up
Landing on Homepage
Add the post they wanna share
Based on brands' filtering habits, influencers need to enter their niche and the account they wish to showcase. Influencers can directly paste the link to their social media account, and their social media name, number of followers, and other data can be synchronized automatically, so they don't need to fill in each detail individually.
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/ Testing
Whether influencers can successfully complete the entry of their information.
After producing the mockup, we immediately sent it to 200 in-house influencers for them to fill out, conducting the first round of mass distribution. We gathered three influencers for a user testing interview workshop to seek detailed feedback, focusing on whether they could complete a full profile registration, fill in information, and successfully upload a post. Through three rounds of testing, we verified that our Influencer portal fully included the information influencers wanted to provide to clients and showed their anticipation for upcoming campaign opportunities. After making adjustments to the tone and UX writing, the registration rate for our portal in the second round of mass distribution increased by 20% compared to the first round.
/ Next Step
To officially release the first version of the brand-facing app
The next step after successfully launching the Influencer portal is to launch our Influencer Platform. Currently, I am collaborating with developers to ensure that any questions related to the prototype during the implementation process can be answered. For example, during the implementation process, we made significant changes to the sign-in step. Ultimately, we decided to use Google sign-in for the user sign-in process, instead of the original email sign-in method, to greatly reduce their development difficulty.
I will continue to update the progress of this project, so stay tuned!