Most businesses envision influencer marketing to only be all about finding the right influencers. But miss out on how integral it is managing the campaign workflow when gifting products and managing affiliates. And all without having to devote innumerable hours to maintaining multiple spreadsheets, tracking product delivery, and managing payments.

AI-driven influencer management platforms like affable.ai simplify this influencer-brand collaboration workflow with its seamless influencer onboarding, product seeding, and payouts. From sending campaign briefs to collecting shipping addresses, product preferences, affiliate tracking, distribution, and the ability to make direct payments - affable.ai's creator portal feature makes it all possible. 

The creator portal is a useful tool for any D2C brand with a Shopify store. "It's an all-in-one campaign management workflow for brands, from shop to ship," says Sumit Deshhmukh, Senior Product and GTM Manager at affable.ai.

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What is Creator Portal? 

According to Deshmukh, the creator portal eliminates some of the major bottlenecks that D2C brands may encounter when executing influencer campaigns. "When recruiting influencers for multiple campaigns across multiple social media platforms, keeping track of proposals, product send-outs, reviews, and payments for different influencers becomes tiresome every time," he says.

The creator portal automates and simplifies each of these steps. It kicks in after the brand user identifies the campaign's influencers and assists in streamlining the task of:

• inviting  influencers to participate in the campaign
• seamlessly managing communication and reviewing influencer proposals
• sending out products to them with one click and track their deliveries without jumping platforms
• reviewing influencer content before publishing
• acquiring content rights
• sending payouts / commissions and tracking ROI.

Let's take a closer look at how the portal streamlines the entire process.

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How The Creator Portal Works

1. Campaign Brief

After identifying and compiling a list of influencers with whom to collaborate, the brand user must create or edit a creator portal in order to create a campaign brief. You can create an entire campaign brief, including the campaign title, description, and image. The portal has pre-configured templates that help you optimize the time and effort spent writing and designing emails while reducing the chances of mistakes and errors.
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2. Influencer Product Seeding 

The creator portal is useful for D2C companies having Shopify stores. It  connects with Shopify stores, helping you easily import products that you want to offer as gifts to influencers. It lets you select the size and variety of product to be offered. Also, you can specify number of products influencers will be able to choose from.
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3. Fixed Pay

The feature enables direct payment to influencers by letting the brand user set up or configure the price they want to offer to influencers for the post. Even influencers can propose a counter-cost. You can go over their proposals and negotiate pricing, commissions, and so on. And collect influencers' PayPal email ID  so that you can make direct payments without any hassle. The fixed pay feature functions similarly to affiliate pay. Payments can be marked as paid if they are made offline or through affable.ai.
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4. Affiliate Marketing  

It is a powerful creator portal feature that allows D2C brands with Shopify stores to create affiliate codes and links. In general, brands create influencer-specific discount codes within Shopify while ensuring they only apply to specific products. They manually copy and paste the affiliate links and coupon codes into the proposal. Influencers enter the discount code on the Shopify brand store when placing an order for those specific products. This entire process is time-consuming for both brands and influencers, with the possibility of human error at multiple touchpoints.
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You can use the portal to select a discount code group they have already set up in Shopify. These affiliate codes and links are generated automatically and sent directly to each influencer. So each influencer receives a unique coupon code or discount code that can be attributed to that specific influencer. They can also choose what percentage or value they want to offer as a commission or a fixed value per sale.
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5. Influencer Tasks and Content Rights

Using the portal, you can create a brief for each task. For example, whether or not a specific task is required. You can also obtain content rights from influencers if you intend to reproduce the content that has transferable rights and licenses.

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How Creator Portal Establishes Two-Way Communication

You might wonder how influencers can navigate through the campaign and be a part of the workflow. Interestingly, each influencer gets a unique link to the site where they can go through the entire campaign. They can select the product they want and enter their shipping address.

They can also look for the affiliate discount code or the unique affiliate link that can be associated with them. Before submitting the final proposal, influencers can also propose a cost and agree or consent to the content rights.

"All pre-submitted proposals will appear in the proposal tab without the need for constant back-and-forth to establish communication." "The brand user will be able to view and check all proposals, what kind of products influencers have requested and need to be shipped," Deshmukh explains.

You will also get an idea of the proposed costs for the content suggested by influencers, whether they have approved or declined the proposal.
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Once the influencer approves the proposal by mentioning their product preference and shipping address, you can easily send orders to respective locations. "It is possible to ship and track without switching platforms. You can create the order entirely within affable.ai without visiting the Shopify store. It will be generated along with the map order ID so that you can track the shipment status, whether the product has been delivered or not," Deshmukh explains.

Coupon codes, affiliate links, payment owed to influencers, how much payment has been made, and the number of orders created can all be tracked. It also simplifies the payment process, and you can make payments based on conversions at the agreed-upon commission rate.
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Summary

There can be multiple ways to run influencer marketing campaigns. However, the ideal process is to get the desired results with minimum effort. Inbuilt features within affable.ai help agencies, enterprises, and D2C startups run influencer programs without any struggle to identify the right influencers based on data and help you manage them at every step to get maximum ROI. 

‍Get a free trial with affable.ai to run an influencer marketing campaign in a better way! 

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