Photo by Maddi Bazzocco
Many brands try to navigate the waters of influencer marketing on their own, without knowing who to hire, how to measure success, and place too much dependence on influencer marketing platforms with unknown vetting methods to guide their strategy -- leading to little success and menial trust in influencer marketing.
Trust the experts! Influener marketing can be a powerful tool with the right strategy in place. As a leading influencer marketing agency, we’ve worked with dozens of brands to lead successful campaigns that raise awareness, drive sales, and convert consumers. We know it works, but we also know what doesn’t! Here are the common mistakes we see brands make when they take on influencer marketing on their own, and how we can help:
Not Doing Your Research
You may think you know your audience, but there is always more to find. One of the keys to successful influencer campaigns is ensuring your messaging resonates with your target audience. At VizSense, we take this a step further with our in-house market research experts and proprietary technology. Through our extensive brand research process, we are constantly looking for opportunities to capitalize on a larger conversation within a brand’s audience, or where a brand may be missing a big demographic or messaging opportunity. From our research, we are able to successfully increase a brand’s market share campaign after campaign by approaching each step -- from demographics, influencer identification, and content messaging -- with data and social science.
In fact, oftentimes our research is used by brands in new product enhancements and future marketing activities company-wide.
Not Integrating Influencer Into Your Overall Marketing Strategy
Influencers are a great marketing tool, but it shouldn't be your only marketing only tool or an afterthought to your overall strategy. We find our best successes when the brand fully integrates us into their overall marketing plan and objective. When not integrated and transparent about other marketing activations, events, or advertising campaigns, influencer marketing strategies seem disjointed and off-brand. Not to mention, further integration can lead to a bigger return on investment and an opportunity for endless uses of influencers across marketing activities.
Opportunities for event promotion or other deeper influencer relationships may be missed when treated like a side piece to an overall brand strategy. Influencer marketing can go beyond social media when it is tapped into strategically and purposefully by integrating our team with yours for the most successful collaboration.
Not Being Upfront About Objectives and KPI’s
As with any marketing campaign, establishing a clear objective is the first step for success. However, many marketers and brand teams struggle when deciding how to measure and attribute success during influencer activations, or even completely ignore meaningful metrics.
Generally speaking, there are two types of influencer marketing campaigns our Viz team runs: brand awareness and direct response. KPI’s, such as reach or total sales, will vary depending on the type of the campaign, and campaign creation is dependent on the end goal. Making your campaign objectives clear in the beginning allows our team or yours to curate a campaign that will be most effective for your overall objective. At VizSense, we design campaigns to introduce, inform, and convert. We establish clear KPIs with our clients before launching a campaign and combine first and third-party data to measure and attribute success to avoid any dissatisfaction in the end.
Only Utilizing One Platform
Instagram has long been the influencer marketing platform of choice for many brands and marketers. While Instagram has certainly earned its place as king in the influencer marketing realm, other platforms like TikTok and Pinterest offer valuable benefits for brands and marketers. 83% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on the content they saw from brands on Pinterest, while TikTok, which started as a Gen Z social outlet, has now increased their downloads with Gen X and Millennials (thanks quarantine!) to allow your brand to reach a wider variety of consumers. Don’t be afraid to experiment with them, they just may surprise you!
Utilizing lesser-known and emerging platforms for influencer marketing can give marketers and brands an edge amongst their competitors by reaching audiences with a high propensity to buy. Getting in early on these newer apps can be cost-effective, and get your brand in front of audiences that are more engaged in the exciting creative content these apps have to offer.
Ignoring FTC Guidelines
Not only is the FTC starting to crack down on the rules for both brands and influencers on current and emerging social media platforms, but the platforms are also becoming more vigilant of the issue too. Not complying with the FTC guidelines could be a recipe for disaster for your influencer campaign and a nightmare for your PR team. While influencers are supposed to be in charge of ensuring their branded content is FTC compliant, many are simply not aware of the guidelines, and the burden will ultimately fall on your brand when your influencers get sloppy. Not only will the FTC hand out hefty fines to the offending company, but platforms are becoming smarter about it too. Instagram has gone far enough to shadowban content that is not FTC or Instagram compliant, completely wrecking any chances of a return on investment and a waste of content. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube will even go as far as to remove the content from the platform themselves.
Not Authenticating Your Influencers
Nobody wants to feel like they are being sold to 24/7. That’s why many brands have turned to influencer marketing for authentic promotion and engagement with real people. Authenticity is important when choosing influencers for a campaign, as well as during campaign execution. But keep in mind, not all influencers are authentic in who they -- or their followers -- are. There are red flags when it comes to choosing the right influencer, from how often they promote sponsored content to how engaged their audience really is. With more and more influencers trying to break into the space and many doing so in phony ways, it’s no longer enough to just look at their engagement rate and follower counts. You have to have the right tools to fully vet each influencer, from bot analysis to engagement group identification, all proprietary tools we use on the daily at VizSense.
Not Trusting Your Influencer’s Creative Strategy
You hired your influencer for a reason, so trust them! If you’ve done all your research effectively and have partnered with a content creator whose audience is engaged and fits your brand’s messaging, then your influencer will know the best way to convey those messages to their followers. Many brands try to control the influencers’ narratives, completely rewriting captions for influencers so that it doesn’t even sound like their voice anymore! This is only hurting the brand and making the content look fake and disingenuous. As we’ve established, authenticity is KEY in influencer marketing, so let your influencer be authentic about your product! Followers know when something looks fake. We always review content and captions to ensure claims are accurate and imagery is on-brand, but trying to micromanage the content too much will only result in a below-average engagement, and your brand and the influencer may be called out for it.