Team AdfluenceInfluencer marketing is all the rage these days. From million dollar companies to smaller ones, almost every business entity is getting an influencer to do their marketing. However, in their eagerness to try out new strategies, a lot of companies don’t think things through and end up making rookie mistakes that can cripple the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
Here are the common pitfalls you should avoid when considering influencer marketing:
1. Not Having A Concrete Plan
All the influencers and their followers won’t be able to help you if you don’t have a concrete strategy guiding your campaign. Instead of blindly jumping on the influencer bandwagon and washing your hands off any planning, map out a detailed marketing plan. Have a clear vision of the campaign, its purpose, what you want to achieve, and how you’re going to measure the results.
Once you have a clear vision of your goals, involve the influencer and have discussions about how they can help you achieve them. It’s essential that there’s no room for miscommunication or the end results of the campaign can be affected significantly.
2. Not Finding The Perfect Fit
Not all influencers will be a fit for your brand. You can’t bring in someone who’s into cosmetics to endorse gadgets. That would be an obvious misfit. But it doesn’t simply end there. Before you join hands with an influencer, check their community, where their interests lie, and what they usually promote. That will give you a better idea about whether the influencer matches your campaign concept or not.
For instance, if you’re a restaurant that serves vegan food, you cannot partner with a food critic who has recently attended a sushi-fest or an all-you-can-eat meat barbecue. It’s obviously going to send out conflicting messages to your audience. Selecting the right influencer is key to the success of your campaign, so make sure you study all potential partners thoroughly.
3. Looking at Just the Followers
One of the biggest mistakes that brands make when choosing an influencer is depending solely on the number of followers they have. Remember this – a bigger number doesn’t necessarily guarantee better reach. A more insightful metric would be engagement rate. Any influencer who’s made the effort to build a genuine community is likely to have more likes, retweets, shares, and comments on their posts. Go through their profile and scroll through their posts to see how they’re engaging with their followers. That will tell you all there is to know about the authenticity of the influencer.
4. Sticking to Just One Platform
It is possible that you already have a considerable amount of following and interaction on one platform. Instead of roping in an influencer from the same platform, it would be beneficial if you branched out to other social media platforms. Of course, you also have to keep in mind that not all platforms will be suitable for your product or services and some are likely to deliver better results than the others. Once you’ve figured out which platforms are appropriate for your products and services, choose an influencer relevant on your target platform to increase traffic and follower count.
5. Restricting the Freedom of Influencers
A lot of brands don’t realize that in the process of giving the influencers guidelines and do’s and don’ts, they end up stifling their creative inputs. A general guideline for the campaign is necessary, but it’s important to give them freedom too. Once you know that they understand your concept and you share the same vision for the campaign, let them decide how they’d like to spread the message to their audience.
Don’t force their hand into making generic, run-of-the-mill posts about your product and services because then, getting an influencer would defeat the purpose. Let them add their personal touch to it. They know from experience what their audience wants and how they can engage them best. So, if they want to make a meme for your product, let them. You never know, it could go viral!
Influencer marketing is a comparatively new strategy, and there’s bound to be a learning curve. However, in the time that it takes you to understand this medium and use it to your advantage, you can expect some ups and downs and speed bumps along the way. Knowing the common mistakes that others have done before you will prevent you from falling headlong into the same pothole that greeted them. Besides, why make the same goof ups if you can simply borrow a page from the others, right?
So, the next time you think of influencer marketing, leave no room for failure by making sure you avoid the mistakes we’ve talked about here. Here’s to successful campaigns!
