When working with influencers and running influencer marketing campaigns, it’s almost impossible to avoid common mistakes, no matter which platform you’re working on: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or anything else.
And though these mistakes don’t diminish the influence and power of an influencer you’re partnering with, they can significantly affect the outcome of your campaign.
Here are the mistakes you’re probably making when launching your influencer marketing campaigns.
#1. Your Product Reviews Are Too Good
Nothing is perfect. And even your product has flaws no matter how hard you’ve worked on it. It means that even in sponsored campaigns you should avoid these polished flawless reviews.
Let the influencer reveal at least some disadvantages of your product and be a bit more objective. Allow influencers you’re working with to be honest with their audience, and you’ll see the outcome; flattering odes don’t look credible at all. People do not expect honesty from advertising. So surprise them by truthfully sorting out the perks and flaws of your product.
Solution: As an advertiser, don’t cut all the disadvantages that the influencer finds in your product. Nobody expects it to be perfect; this is unconvincing.
#2. You Give Too Little Information About Your Product
Influencers don’t like it when you provide them with too few details about the product you want them to promote. You can’t just give them a brief list of five or so features and call it a day.
With too little information, it’s impossible to make a high-quality review or a sponsored post.
Solution: Influencers should feel free to ask you for more product information, but you should also give them as many details as you possibly can. You can even create a guide or a PDF brochure with all features and product descriptions you want to include in the advertising.
#3. You Have Strict Guidelines
Make no mistake: influencers know their audience really well, they communicate with their followers on a regular basis so it’s up to them to decide how exactly they should talk to them, which tone of voice they use, and which images and videos they should post.
They also know which phrases and words seem convincing and which ones are scare people off, so don’t insist on full compliance with your guidelines. And don’t send the same copies to all influencers you’re about to team up with for a particular campaign.
Such campaigns don’t look convincing enough and are even comical when several influencers publish identical posts at the same time.
Solution: Let influencers be themselves and speak the way they’re used to speaking when talking about your product. Allow influencers to prepare their own copies and opinions based on your guidelines. Just trust them.
#4. You Don’t Analyse Your Campaigns
When you agree on a sponsored post or a video review with an influencer, control how the campaign is working, ask for statistics and insights. Don’t just disappear when the post is published without analysing the campaign.
Some influencers will send you the stats without your questions, but that’s not exactly their job to control everything.
Solution: Always ask for the influencers’ stats and analyse your campaign with your inner analytics tools.
#5. You Lie to Your Audience (or Try to Do So)
One of the best ‘native’ ad formats is a review since it looks as fair and convincing as possible. The advertiser provides the product and the influencer tests and expresses their honest opinion.
Even if the influencer doesn’t tell that this is an advertisement (which they should with the #ad hashtag), their followers will still watch it to the end to find out the opinion of a person they trust.
And here we get back to the first mistake about a product without flaws and absurd deceiving reviews.
Solution: Considering how much advertising is poured out on us every day, people now can detect it well and don’t like it when advertisers are too pushy and come up with unconvincing stories.
Influencer Marketing: Best Practices
Here are some tips on how you can get the most out of your influencer marketing campaigns. Implement these practices to drive more conversions, increase your brand awareness and grow your business.
Determine the right influencers
Identifying the right influencer is essential for improving your brand positioning, image and social media reach. If you team up with influencers who don’t share your values or have a questionable reputation, this could end up harming your brand.
Thus, the influencers you should partner with need to be genuine social media opinion leaders whose target audience is your target buying personas.
There are various types of influencers you can collaborate with. Some of them are:
- Nano-influencers — Bloggers with hundreds of followers. Their audience is typically their friends and family. Their followers consider them as their friends and their product reviews as honest recommendations, not touting.
- Micro-influencers — Opinion leaders without large followership (thousands or tens of thousands followers). They tend to have high engagement rates.
- Macro-influencers — They are popular celebrities with millions of followers. Their popularity and power to influence people makes them an ideal choice for your campaign.
Find relevant influencers
Identifying the right influencers is one matter. Searching for true influencers can be a tricky task, as well. Before you collaborate with influencers, you need to analyse their social media profiles to see if they’ve got legitimate followers and have suitable stats.
Here’s how you can look for influencers:
- Combin Growth: With Combin Growth, you can search for influencers with various narrow criteria. The tool allows you to look for influencers by posts specifying hashtags and locations, analyse your competitors’ followings, find relevant bloggers by one or multiple bio keywords. You can also combine several strategies to get the best results. With Combin Growth, you can target your search by selecting the gender, language, location, and even followers’ and following’s count.
- Google search: To easily and quickly find top influencers in your niche, run your Google search like this:
<your niche> + <influencer>
For example, <beauty> +<influencers>.
You can also add the platform you need to your search query, such as Instagram beauty influencer.
- Social media: It’s quite effortless to search for influencers on different social media platforms. All you need to do is include relevant keywords and hashtags in your search query.
- Influencer search tools: There are many solutions on the market that are specifically designed to help you find the most relevant influencers you possibly can. Some of them are Heepsy, Upfluence, Klear and more. All these tools work in a similar way: you set the criteria you need, add details about your campaign and the app finds influencers who it thinks suit better for your specific campaign. These solutions also allow you to track and manage influencer marketing campaigns.
Connect with influencers properly
A proper pitch to an influencer is as crucial as finding them. Here are some tips you can leverage when connecting with your influencers:
- Make a clear brief that states your expectations and the details about the campaign, such as its objective, message, the number of posts and/or stories an influencer needs to make, tone of voice, terms and conditions of your collaboration, and anything else you feel the need to include.
- Don’t be pushy and give them enough time and space to be creative. Remember that influencers know their followers better than you do, so they know how to talk to them to get the most out of their communication.
- Don’t pitch the idea for a partnership right after you text an influencer. Get to know them first.
Share campaign content on your channels
You can post your influencer marketing campaign content on your own social media accounts or repurpose it to get better ROI. It will work wonders if the influencer you choose for the campaign is a macro-influencer or a celebrity.
But before you share the content made by an influencer on your channels, you need to talk it through with the creator first. You can include this point in your brief to make sure your expectations correspond with the ones of the influencer.
Wrapping Up
Influencer marketing is not rocket science, yet there are several aspects you should consider when you only start working with opinion leaders or when your previous campaign didn’t bring the results you aspired to.
Mind the mistakes and best practices we talked about in this piece and your influencer marketing campaigns won’t seem so complicated. Instead, you’ll finally see that influencers are a great help that can take your brand to the next level.