Much has been written and said about the ROI of influencer marketing, to the point that 84% of marketers are using it in their marketing strategy this year. If you’re among the 84%, then you’ve implemented an influencer marketing program and are engaging influencers to help you promote your brand, product or service. Great! But how do you know it’s working? It may be awhile until you see an impact in product movement, subscriptions, etc. but there are other indicators of the success and failure of your influencer strategy. Here are four signs your influencer strategy may be on the road to failure:

You’ve made the investment but there is little to no conversation around your product.

No, the solution to this problem isn’t “find more influencers” or “do more outreach”. The adage, “quality over quantity”, applies here. While this seems straightforward, there’s more to determining “quality” than a gut check or the number of followers a Twitter or Instagram user has.

Wrong decisions are made everyday because influencers weren’t thoroughly vetted and, as is more often the case, flat analytics were used in making the determination.

Let me explain…

Let’s say you’re a mid-priced nutritional supplement sold online and in workout facilities. Your target market is 25 – 45 year-old everyday athletes who love Crossfit, biking or running.

It’s easy to look at a Twitter user who Tweets about Crossfit and nutrition and has 25,000 followers and consider them to be a great option for generating conversation around your product. Or the fitness enthusiast who frequently Instagrams images of her endurance sports training and supplements she uses. But consider this, first…

While they seem to fit the bill at a high level, how is their engagement on social media? Do they actively engage other people and have two-way interactions, or is it mostly one-way communication? If the latter, the odds of their ability to support conversation about any shares of your product are less than optimal. You want to work with influencers who get their community involved in the conversation.

Other things to consider include the amount and types of responses their followers share with them. Do their followers mention a desire to buy or use what they’re talking about?

Which leads me to the second sign.

There is no “second order” effect, meaning, nothing is being shared by your influencer's network. 

How does this happen?

It could be that your content isn’t interesting or otherwise appealing, but let’s just say that you have great content. So why isn’t it being shared? On what type of analytics did you base your decision of which influencers to target?

All too often, I see clients who have been lulled into a sense of comfort by big numbers and flat analytics. Having 25,000 followers doesn’t mean much if the content an influencer is sharing isn’t shared by others who can help translate the message into greater exposure and engagement. You want to understand an influencer’s network reach because it signals credibility and strength of network. Twitter users, in particular, can achieve large follower numbers in a myriad of ways, including paying for them. Basing your decisions upon flat analytics like number of followers is a recipe for dead-end conversations about your product…and ultimately, a waste of precious marketing dollars.

Remember that influence is not about numbers, it’s about driving action. You want influencers who drive action. 

New demographics are not emerging as customers.

While the social media universe is large, it’s not so large that you can continue to follow the same influencer strategies that brought you to the dance in the first place; you need to be exposed to new consumer segments to gain exposure and incremental customers. How do you achieve this? Revisit quality over quantity.

Yes, it’s important to keep the pipeline full with fresh, interesting content that your current influencers will want to share but make quality the starting point. Think about how you can remake and redirect your current content in ways that a new breed of influencers will value and share. The right content put in the right context expands upon the message or story you’re telling and will deliver value to new influencer networks.

One word of caution about quality: Don’t be so focused on creating the ‘perfect’ content piece that you can’t be agile. 

Leads within the business development team are not increasing.

Your influencer strategy will fail if you don’t understand how social media influencers feed and fit into the consumer-buying journey. Think about where influencers’ likely audiences are within the purchase decision timeline. Are they just learning about the products, considering the options or ready to buy? Align the tone of your outreach (and the content shared with influencers) with the buyer’s journey to improve the odds that you’re presenting the right solution to them at the right time.

Another important approach is to ensure that your business development team is a partner in influencer strategy - not just at the beginning, but daily. Understanding their insights and takeaways from customer interactions will make your influencer outreach and content smarter and better poised to introduce solutions to real world problems at various points along the buyer’s journey. If you can achieve this, the effort will come back to the business development team as more qualified leads.

Final Note

There are plenty of platforms and databases out there that you can subscribe to and secure a list of influencers under your category or specific topics but it’s on you to ensure that the influencers you choose to work with have the right presence and community engagement. Also, with the marketing technology industry’s growth comes the growing accessibility of influencer and content analytics. This is great news for the end user but I caution you to be wary of flat analytics that don’t dig into an influencer’s network reach, circles of influence and the impact they create as they share content. Net/net: While marketing automation is great, there’s no way to automate intuition or interpretation. Look to technology-enabled services for a healthy mixture of humans and technology.

Contact us if you want to learn more about how VizSense is solving and simplifying the influencer marketing conundrum for today’s most visionary brands, corporations and agencies. We also urge you to download our free eBook, Making Sense of Influencer Engagement: The Essential Elements of a Successful Influencer Outreach Program.