Four Things That Can Go Wrong with Influencer Campaigns
Even the best influencer campaigns can face challenges.
Just as content marketing was on everyone’s lips a few years ago, 2023 was the year of the influencer. Influencer campaigns involve working with content creators who have large social media followings to promote your brand. This is enticing and can be a great way to reach untapped audiences. However, influencer campaigns are not as easy as you think—and they do not always go as planned.
Even with the most strategic and well-planned influencer campaign, issues can arise. Marketers may face a few problems and need to know how to deal with them.
You can’t find enough perfect influencers.
There are indeed millions of bloggers and content creators out there. Still, it’s not always easy to find influencers who fit your exact strategic specifications — perhaps those who live in a specific geographic area, have particular buying habits or have never touched a competitor’s products.
How to prevent it: No discovery tool is perfect because each has a specific place in the influencer landscape. Use various tools to search different corners of the internet and take advantage of each one’s specialities.
For instance, you may have a broad network of female style and fashion bloggers. At the same time, a discovery tool, Façade, allows a high level of granularity within its search criteria.
How to fix it: Look in unconventional places outside of what your tools recommend, like suggested users that Instagram serves up natively after you follow someone.
Expand on the influencers you have already identified and love; comb through their blogrolls, guest bloggers and people they interact with online to find other influencers like them.
Don’t hesitate to ask your influencers for specific recommendations. Have you scoured every last corner of the internet yet? If not, keep digging in.
If worse comes to worst, determine where you can be lenient on your influencer specifications without sacrificing your strategy. You may be willing to work with slightly more micro-influencers or expand your geography.
Don’t make these decisions lightly. Let your influencer strategy guide you here, and be prepared to justify your “quality over quantity” approach.
Influencers don’t like the terms of your contract.
You’re getting questions about your terms and conditions, and influencers seem wary of working within the guidelines you’ve set.
How to prevent it: Determine the contract’s must-haves (like rights usage) and what you’re willing to be looser about for the perfect influencer (like timelines and payment schedule, perhaps). Determine as much of this as possible for swift approvals when issues arise.
How to fix it: To be completely honest, you probably can’t. Suppose the agency, brand, management platform and other interested parties have decided on the contract terms. In that case, it’s hard to justify changes for even the most perfect influencer unless you negotiate contracts separately for each content creator you work with.
Instead of creating content in their voice, an influencer posts brand messaging verbatim
You spend hours crafting the perfect influencer brief, meticulously characterizing the brand’s feeling and tone with compelling reasons to believe and a clear call to action. An influencer loves your work so much that they copy and paste large pieces into their blog post. What now?
How to prevent it: It’s your responsibility to empower your influencers with everything they need to create original content. Give clear guidelines without dictating every step.
For instance, our influencer briefs include a variety of content ideas intended to inspire creativity and provide some guardrails to ensure the influencers’ original content drives our campaign goals.
How to fix it: Be straightforward about your expectations. Something like “We’d love for you to include this in your own voice” goes a long way.
Keep in mind that it’s always easier to speak in your own voice when you’ve experienced something firsthand (like touching or using a product), so when influencers weave in elements they haven’t experienced, like a product’s history or background on a brand’s mission, this can be tricky for them.
Have the influencer focus on their firsthand impressions of these elements—for instance, their thoughts or feelings—rather than just retelling the story.
Content approvals should be shorter.
Content approvals are dragging, and deadlines are looming. Delays from the internal team or your client may not be your fault, but they are your problem.
How to prevent it: Set clear guidelines on the approval process. Who owns the process on your end and with the brand? Determine who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed every step of the way.
Be extremely clear about exactly what you’re asking of each person you send content to. Our rule of thumb is always to ask influencers to correct misspellings and typos. However, we are much more lenient with grammar mistakes.
We want to be sure the content reads well and doesn’t poorly reflect the brand, but we are by no means checking it for perfection (so you may want to caution your internal team about getting caught up in ensuring perfect grammar or AP style). We tend to leave stylistic choices alone and only ask content creators to update something unclear or a mistake.
When the content reaches the brand, it should read well, be typo-free, and be reviewed strictly for brand standards and voice. Make this clear.
How to fix it: Educate everyone involved on the value of authentic content. Content should feel as if it came from the mouth of your influencers; that’s why you chose them to work with in the first place.
In short, They know their audience, and you see the brand. Let content creators speak as authentically as possible to their followers while you protect brand voice and campaign strategy. LinkedIn Group.
Via Marketing Land