4 common but avoidable influencer marketing mistakes
When brands get influencer marketing right, it can take them and their products into a whole new dimension of success. Influencers offer access to warm audiences of loyal fans happy to adopt brands and products based on their recommendations.
However, if brands get influencer marketing wrong, it can tarnish their reputation and burn the very bridges they wanted to cross. And unfortunately, this happens way too often. Not giving enough attention to setting up campaigns properly, selecting the wrong influencers, and ignoring valuable data are all avoidable influencer marketing mistakes
Here are 4 of our top influencer marketing mistakes, and how to dodge them:
Careless influencer selection
Just because they have thousands of followers, doesn’t mean you should partner with them. Selecting the right influencers takes time and due diligence. Your selection process should take into account multiple factors and how they align with your brand, such as:
Their content niche
Content style
Content quality
Size of audience (followers/subscribers)
Engagement rate (likes, dislikes, comments, shares etc)
Sentiment to previous brand partnerships (did their audience react well?)
These factors, plus others, can differ depending on the platform and nature of the campaign objectives you’re working with, but making sure you consider them all will yield far, far better influencer partnerships.
Not setting clear KPIs
On that note, when planning your influencer marketing campaigns, setting clear KPIs is key to measuring how successfully they perform. Ensuring that you and your team know exactly what success looks like (and again, this can change contextually, from awareness, to engagement, to click-through rates, to conversions, etc.) will allow you to inform and improve your campaigns over time.
Uninspired outreach
How many times have you received a weak, untargeted email or DM and totally skipped past it? I guess dozens, if not hundreds. Good influencers can be contacted by tens of brands and influencer marketing agencies every week, so making sure you stand out is vital to getting a good response rate.
You should be personable and informative enough about the campaign for them to be interested enough to reply and want to find out more. Make it clear you know and understand who they are, and make a point of connecting around the specifics of how you want to work with them, and why. If your influencer selection process is on point and your choices are a genuinely good match for your brand/campaign, sending a really compelling message should hit the spot.
Taking too much control
Influencers have attracted thousands of followers because people love their content. Their followers have welcomed them into their everyday lives and know what to expect from them. Your trying to take too much control of the style, form, and tone of their content will be noticeable to their audience and come across as inauthentic.
The best brand/influencer partnerships happen when the product and brand message fit seamlessly into their lives and compliment their content in ways that suit the formats and culture inherent to their platform. However much you know about current YouTube trends, or the ins-and-outs of how Twitch works, you should ultimately always trust creators on how to communicate with their audience the best.
