3 Common Influencer Marketing Campaigns Mistakes & Ways to Avoid Them
Some brands and marketers commit some common mistakes which lead to the failure of their influencer marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at three of the most common reasons influencer marketing campaigns fail and how to avoid these mistakes.
Did you know that when you invest $1 on influencer marketing, you can generate returns as much as $18? This is why more brands are using influencer marketing as part of their marketing strategies. However, brands still struggle to design robust and fail-proof influencer marketing strategies.
1. Teaming Up With the Wrong or Fake Influencers
One of the most common reasons for the failure of influencer marketing campaigns is to collaborate with the wrong or fake influencers.
Let’s say you have a travel brand. And for your marketing campaign, you collaborate with an influencer who is an expert in fashion. This collaboration will likely not be successful.
In addition to the mistake of partnering with the wrong influencer, if you are not careful, you may end up teaming up with a fake influencer. A large number of followers doesn’t necessarily get you a high engagement rate.
Hence, in the process of identifying influencers, you need to avoid fake ones. These are people who’ve likely bought their followers (usually bots or fake accounts).
Fake influencers will not help you drive more high-quality traffic and generate more sales for your brand. So, it’s of utmost importance that you identify genuine and relevant influencers for your brand. Make sure that your potential influencer is an expert in your niche.
4 of 10 marketers report that it’s challenging to find the right influencers. To make your job easier, there are platforms which can help you connect with relevant influencers from your niche.
Image Source - Influence.co
But how can you identify fake influencers?
You can check the engagement rate on the last 20-30 posts from the influencer. Poor engagement rates, when compared to their follower counts, are an indication that they might not be genuine influencers.
Additionally, you also need to check the quality of engagement. If the comments look spammy. Irrelevant, or similar to each other, they’re likely bots.
2. Not Monitoring Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
You may have identified your goals, target audience, and the genuine influencer and designed a robust influencer marketing strategy. However, if you don’t monitor the performance and progress of your campaign, you won’t know whether or not your campaign is successful.
Hence, it’s important that you monitor and evaluate the performance of your campaign against your marketing goals. Regular evaluation of your campaign performance will also help you improve the effectiveness of your current and future campaigns.
Let’s say one of your marketing goals is to increase sales and conversions. And your content is able to generate likes, but it’s not able to generate conversions or boost sales. If you’re not analyzing the performance of your campaign regularly, you may not realize such crucial insights until it’s too late.
Marketers and brands agree that monitoring campaign performance is challenging. In fact, 76% of marketers report that evaluating influencer marketing performance is one of their biggest challenges.
So, let’s see how you can effectively measure the performance of your influencer marketing campaign. There are three key metrics which you need to evaluate to understand the performance of your campaign.
Those metrics are - engagement rate, conversion rate, and website traffic.
Your engagement rate will give you a fair understanding of the success of your campaign. Your engagement rate is crucial because it’s directly related to your customer’s loyalty and trust.
To calculate your engagement rate, you need to track all types of engagements such as likes, comments, clicks, share, and reactions. Add all of these engagements together and then divide the total by the number of users followers or subscribers the influencer has. Multiple that by 100, and the result is your engagement rate.
When calculating your conversion rate, you need to consider the increase in sales and/or responses to calls-to-action. When done correctly, your conversion rate will help you understand the influencer marketing ROI of your brand.
To measure website traffic generation effectively, you can use tools like Google Analytics. Google Analytics will help you track and measure the website traffic generation from three different sources - Search, Direct, and Referral Visitors.
3. Asking Influencers to Work for Free
Assuming that influencers will work for free is probably the most common yet biggest influencer marketing mistake.
Influencers put in a lot of effort into creating quality content for your brand. Content that can help you generate more sales and gain new customers. So, it’s only fair that you fairly compensate them.
Being an influencer is a full-time job for many people. So, you need to compensate your influencers fairly for their hard work. If you have a small budget, you may want to consider working with micro-influencers or nano-influencers so that you can make sure that you’re able to offer them fair compensation.
The compensation you offer speaks volumes about how much you value an influencer. And being fair about compensation can help you foster great relationships with influencers. However, many brands don’t realize this crucial aspect of influencer marketing.
Some micro-influencers may be happy with free products in exchange for their services. However, most of them will likely prefer some sort of monetary compensation depending on their follower counts and engagement rates.
Feel free to negotiate, but make sure that your offer is good enough to motivate them to put in their best work.
You can use this study as a reference to calculate the correct monetary compensation that you should offer to a particular influencer. However, use this only as a starting point and be open to negotiation.
Final Thoughts
When done correctly, influencer marketing can help you generate more sales, drive high-quality traffic to your website, and increase brand awareness. Additionally, it can help you stay ahead of your competitors.
The three common influencer marketing mistakes mentioned above can cause your influencer marketing campaign to fail. But now you know how to avoid these mistakes and run a successful influencer marketing campaign.
Do you know any other common influencer marketing campaign mistakes? If so, then please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.