WHAT GOES WRONG IN INFLUENCER MARKETING?
When the buzz around influencer marketing first started in the early 2010’s, there was a lot of talk about strategy that was just that: buzzing white noise. The potential for influencers was undeniable, but the uncertainly around how to treat it (or where influencer strategy should sit) meant that activity felt out of alignment with other areas of businesses.
Since then, we’ve worked with our clients to help shift old habits and build new, digestible strategies that use resources effectively and enhance their new launches, educational campaigns and social endeavours.
So if you’re just getting started, here are a few of the common mistakes to avoid. For a detailed guide to getting it right first time, check out our eBook, The Foundations of Influencer Marketing, for a step-by-step guide to help you carve out your own tailored strategies.
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1) Setting unclear goals
A key objective of running an effective influencer marketing campaign is for content to be posted with a core set of criteria so you can see how each individual element performs. Think of this as your control in an experiment, with each influencer acting as a variable you’re testing the success of. At the early stages of your campaign it’s crucial to focus on one key KPI (this could be awareness, education, sales or generating content for brand usage) and use this goal to influence wider strategic decisions for the campaign. Setting too many benchmarks for success and trying to achieve multiple goals within one campaign runs the risk of underdelivering across the board.
It’s advisable to have one objective as the primary focus as the more you set the more you dilute the potential impact of each objective. You can also share the KPI in the brief so influencers so they know how they can lend additional support to aid campaign success.
2) Picking the ‘wrong’ talent
It’s standard for in-house teams to have relationships and preferences on influencers prior to planning a campaign, which generally stem from a historic press relationship or even following an influencer personally. These relationships are highly valuable for a brand and should be maintained, however we advise tackling each and every campaign with a clean slate – if the talent’s content and audience are a great fit for the current KPI then that’s great, sign them up. Otherwise be prepared to find another opportunity; influencers understand that it isn’t personal, and won’t expect to be included in every single campaign a brand runs.
It’s also tempting to rely on large followings and generic engagement rates as the predictor of whether an influencer will perform. However, this can be a great way to spend budget and see little back from a campaign. Start by thinking about who exactly you want to reach, who is your core audience is and where to find them. You may love an influencer's fashion posts and think they look great on feed, but if you’re trying to sell a ethically produced, high RRP piece of clothing when they primarily wear high-street, this isn’t a strong alignment as their audience are there for budget buys and aren’t prepared to part with (or don’t earn enough) to make luxury purchases based on that influencer’s content.
Good influencer marketing means no budget is wasted so regardless of enjoying their content, if someone can’t perform based on your KPI it is simply not an advisable alignment. Let the stats do the talking when talent searching.
3) Relying on a vague brief and limited direction
Whilst it is truly important to allow influencers creative freedom to ensure their content aligns with their style, it is crucial to avoid sending out incomplete or vague briefs. Once you know your KPIs, you know the call-to-action you want influencer to make, and so you’ll need this included in the content. If your brief is insufficient, you’re likely to receive content that doesn’t align with your vision or doesn’t achieve what you need it to. This can lead to frustration on both sides when reshoots are required. Or worse, if you miss out on key details in the brief, then influencers are not contractually required to create additional rounds of content if they have adhered to the brief.
4) Inefficient use of resources
One-off campaigns can really pack a punch in the right context. However, to get the best results from your overall strategy, you should always ensure that influencers you pay are an established fans of the brand prior to working on a paid campaign. If social media audiences are seeing the product on an influencer’s feed for the very first time as part of an ad, you run the risk of the partnership feeling inauthentic, and seeing little-to-no impact from their paid activity. Additionally, it’s all about creating a “funnel” of influencer content that sits alongside wider promotional activity. It’s an age-old retail principle: the more a brand is seen, the more a brand is known, the more a brand is purchased. By ensuring that audiences are already familiarised, means they’re more likely to take action after seeing content from the paid campaign.
5) Skipping the post-campaign analysis
Once a campaign has concluded, take the time to gather all available data from the relevant influencers, and collate an overview. You’re looking for impact the influencers’ content has had on your brand: go back to the original conception of the campaign to see if it was executed as planned, what results you hoped to achieve, how the collective effect penetrated and how each individual performed. Influencers are incredibly effective at touching and communicating with organic, engaged audiences. When the right moving parts are aligned, it’s amongst the most effective ways to speak to core audiences, as specialised as you can imagine. Refer back to your main campaign objective (and why you selected the influencers in the first place) to give you an indication of which insights you should pay closest attention to. Only then can you interpret the data and determine if your campaign performed as predicted.
It's essential to look at the full picture to learn from your successes and failures as this can greatly help to improve your next campaign. It saves you time and resources in the long term and allows future campaigns to perform even better than ever.
That concludes our brief rundown of five elements we recommend that you avoid (and how to get it right). But if you want to truly ace your influencer marketing campaigns then follow the link to learn more about our eBook, The Foundations of Influencer Marketing here.