Influencer marketing may deliver amazing results, but that doesn’t cancel out the fact that there are tons of things that could go wrong. You all know how disastrous the Fyre Festival was, and influencers being at the center of its advertising campaign, lost people’s trust.
In fact, 100 influencers from the campaign faced a class-action lawsuit because they failed to disclose that they were profiting from promoting the festival. So besides failing to follow the FTC disclosure guidelines, what are some other mistakes you could make in influencer marketing?
Check out these five influencer marketing mistakes you should avoid at all cost:
1: Not Vetting Your Influencers Properly
One of the worst mistakes you could make is working with fake influencers or influencers who don’t hold up their end of the bargain. CNBC reported that fraudulent activities in influencer marketing cost advertisers $1.3 billion during 2019.
This makes it crucial to thoroughly vet your influencers before you decide to work with them. Are they relevant to your brand? What’s their audience quality like? How much authentic engagement do they get? Do they create quality content? How did their previous brand partnerships go?
Use platforms like Traackr to speed up your influencer vetting process and analyze the audience quality, authentic engagement rate, and follower growth rate of each influencer. Platforms like Influence.co also let you view an influencer’s previous brand partnerships and sponsored content to further your vetting process.
2: Taking Charge of an Influencer’s Creative Process
You work with influencers because they have influence over your target audience.
This influence doesn’t come from nowhere—they built it through years of producing quality content using their creativity and expertise. That’s the main reason why their followers tune into their channels and feeds to listen to their advice.
You’d be making a grievous mistake if you were to get in the way of this creative process. For instance, you may want the influencers to say something specific about your product. So you give them a script to follow or a caption to copy and paste.
This can sound robotic and scripted, which totally deviates from the influencer’s natural voice. Even if the influencer doesn’t make a copy-pasting mistake like Naomi Campbell or Scott Disick, their followers can still smell scripted content from a mile away.
3: Resorting to One-Time Collaborations
One-off collaborations may be easy, safe, and inexpensive.
However, they won’t always have the kind of impact you would expect. Imagine if you saw an influencer creating a single post in which they’re promoting a brand they hadn’t even talked about before. Wouldn’t it seem out of place if they never talk about the brand again besides that one-off post?
If you want to get more out of influencer marketing, try running an always-on campaign. This not only increases the authenticity of your partnerships, but it also strengthens your relationship with the influencers.
4: Relying Solely on an Influencer’s Organic Reach
One of the reasons why you work with influencers is because they have hundreds of thousands of followers.
So the natural assumption is that you’ll gain visibility among a massive audience. While that’s true to a significant extent, algorithm changes have affected organic reach on social media. During 2017, for instance, brands saw a 34% decline in organic reach on Facebook.
If you want to see exponential growth from your influencer marketing campaigns, it’s time to stop relying on an influencer’s organic reach alone. You still need their influence and creativity, but you should look for opportunities to amplify their content to further expand your reach. Perhaps you could repurpose their content into social media ads, for example.
5: Not Having a Proper Measurement System in Place
You’ve been running influencer marketing campaigns because everyone’s doing it. Yet you have no idea whether you’re getting good returns on your investment. This is another major mistake you could be making with influencer marketing.
Since other people are creating content on your behalf, your performance analytics may be all over the place. So it’s challenging to accurately measure your performance and campaign ROI.
To avoid this mistake, it’s important to start with a proper goal in place for that specific campaign. A defined goal makes it much easier to identify which performance metrics are relevant for you. You should also consider investing in platforms like Grin that will let you measure your overall campaign ROI as well as the individual performance of each influencer.
Get Better at Influencer Marketing
When you’re in charge of influencer marketing, there’s a lot to take care of and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Your job doesn’t end at drawing up a strategy for your campaign. You have to search for influencers, vet them, reach out to them, and more, not to mention avoid all the mistakes highlighted above.
If it all gets too much to handle, try outsourcing some of your tasks to Fiverr’s handpicked freelancers who specialize in influencer marketing. This will free up time so you can focus on the operational and administrative aspects of your business.
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