How to ensure your influencer marketing campaign goes to plan
When done correctly, influencer marketing is an amazing tool that can help you to maximise your digital marketing spend, raise brand awareness, and increase your sales. However, when campaigns are set up incorrectly or are missing the fundamentals, they don’t always go to plan.
Ensuring that your influencer marketing campaign works for your brand requires groundwork and planning. Here, we’ve put together a number of steps to ensure that you succeed.
Why Do Influencer Marketing Campaigns Fail?
There are a few reasons that influencer marketing campaigns can fail. These include:
Working with the wrong creators
When choosing which content creators to include in their influencer marketing campaigns, brands can sometimes be distracted by vanity metrics such as follower count or the number of likes a creator receives. In reality, what is really important are the deep engagement metrics, such as shares and saves, and the target audience. If you work with creators whose audience doesn’t reflect your target audience, or an audience that you’re at least interested in exploring, then your hard work will be wasted. Finding the right creators for your influencer marketing campaign is essential.
Lack of authentic content
When brands work with creators, sometimes it can be easy to forget that authenticity is still one of the most important aspects of content creation. No matter how much you want to push a product or promote your CTA, you have to ensure that the creator genuinely believes in what they’re saying. Influencer marketing campaigns can fail if the content or messaging seems inauthentic or forced, so making sure your content is authentic is key.
Lack of data
Combing data and human creativity is key to building the best influencer marketing campaign possible, and without the data to back up the strategy, campaigns can fail. Data provides crucial insights into audience behaviour, the effectiveness of certain content, and how a creator performs historically to give you a good idea of how the campaign will perform.
Lack of long term strategy
While one-off partnerships between brands and creators can sometimes work, most successful influencer marketing campaigns include long-term partnerships between brands and creators, run over a longer period of time. Long-term partnerships build campaign authenticity and trust between brands and the creator’s audience.
They have no defined objectives
Defining the objectives of a campaign is very important in the planning stages. Without a clear direction, creators and brands alike can end up creating content that doesn’t have a goal. Having clear objectives and a CTA in mind can help to create content that really converts, and also helps with measuring the campaign’s success further down the line.
Creators are too controlled
The final (and perhaps saddest!) reason why influencer marketing campaigns fail is that brands try to control the creator too much, to the point where the content that is produced doesn’t speak to the creator’s audience, the brand’s target audience. Ultimately, the creator knows their audience the best. Brands should write a clear brief, outlining their aims for the campaign and work in collaboration with the creator to guarantee a killer influencer campaign.
How Can You Ensure Your Influencer Marketing Campaign Doesn’t Fail?
The best way to ensure that your influencer marketing campaign doesn’t fail is by creating a genuine relationship with the creators you work with and using data to generate a strategic campaign with authentic content.
Measuring the impact of your influencer marketing is also essential as you navigate through the campaign, and having the technology on hand to do that can be essential. If something doesn’t look right, or one creator doesn’t seem to be resonating with your audience, you should remain agile and be open to changing your approach
