9 Influencer Marketing Mistakes You Might Be Making
Tips for making influencer marketing an effective acquisition channel
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Almost every consumer brand does influencer marketing in 2021: over the past two years, its market value has more than doubled, growing from 6.5 billion to 13.8 billion U.S. dollars.
But just like any other acquisition channel, it requires the right approach in order to produce a proper ROI on these marketing dollars.
Keep reading to find out what the 9 most common influencer marketing mistakes are and what you should be doing instead.
Never checking audience stats.
You wouldn’t want to promote a product that’s only available in the UK to people living in Canada, right? Or, worse yet, to bots.
Use a tool like Modash to check the influencer’s basic stats before reaching out with an offer. Make sure they don’t have too many fake followers, their engagement rate is decent, and their audience matches your target one in terms of age and location.
After your chosen influencer shows initial interest in the collaboration, you can ask them for even more numbers. Metrics like Instagram story swipe-ups or sticker taps for previous partnerships in a similar niche can help you further evaluate if it’s a good fit.
A vague brief.
Most influencers are pretty good at content creation — but they have no idea what works for your particular brand. A brief should include specific key messages and fairly detailed guidelines to help them produce an effective ad.
Key messages come from your product’s USPs. Don’t try to cover all of them, though — focus on one or two that are most likely to resonate with the creator’s audience. Someone whose profile is all about the zero-waste lifestyle can talk about your product’s sustainable packaging, for example, and a creator known for their personal finance tips might focus on how affordable it is.
Then, describe what kind of content you’re looking for. Let’s say you’re promoting a clothing brand — a TikTok haul, a YouTube vlog mention, an Instagram story series with a selection of their summer must-haves are just some of the options.
It shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all: spend some time studying the influencer’s actual content to understand what might be the best fit for them.
Finally, emphasise any links, promo-codes, mentions, or hashtags the influencer has to include. (Don’t forget #ad to make sure the content is compliant).
Lacking a tracking system.
It might be tempting to rely on vanity metrics like reach or engagement — but influencer marketing can and should get you actual sales.
You can track them via personal promo-codes, UTM links, or dedicated landing pages.
Usually, a promo-code is the best option: it serves as an extra incentive to try out the product and helps with attribution. Purchases don’t necessarily happen right after someone comes across the content — they won’t save the link, but they might remember the code.
Foregoing approvals.
Even with the most detailed brief, something can always go wrong. Maybe your product is barely visible in the video, or the influencer mixed up their promo-code value, or the caption sounds a little too sales-y.
It’s a lot less hassle to ask the influencer to edit something before it goes live.
Relying exclusively on free product.
You can’t really request content to follow a specific brief and have the creator approve it unless you’re actually paying them.
How much should you offer? A good formula to start with is multiplying the CPM of your Facebook ads in the same country by x2-5 depending on their engagement. By “engagement” I don’t just mean the engagement rate — thoughtful comments and high click-through rates for previous partnerships are much better success predictors. Then, estimate roughly how many impressions the content is going to get based on their current average reach on the platform — and you have your number.
However, that is not to say that free product is never a good idea. If you send it to someone who you know is going to love it and find a way to make it personal, you just might end up with authentic, genuine content. But it’s always a bit of a gamble — it may sound unintuitive, but the more limited your budget is, the more you should focus on paid partnerships.
Being limited by organic reach.
Ad platforms allow you to take the creators’ unique content and have it reach a much wider audience.
This is especially relevant for TikTok. Their advertising motto is “don’t make ads, make TikToks” — native-looking content has much higher chances of success on the platform. You can easily tell that by browsing their open ad library.
When it comes to Facebook and Instagram, there are two ways to go about it. One is their Branded Content feature, which allows you to promote sponsored Facebook/Instagram posts about your brand through the creator’s handle. This is fairly easy to do: you just need to have the influencer give you permission to do so when publishing the post.
The second option is using the content in your regular ad creatives: with your own copy, logo, and so on.
As with almost everything in the world of paid social, both are worth a test.
Missing T&Cs.
You should always try to make the terms of your partnership as clear as possible during the email exchange, but it still doesn’t hurt to have the influencer’s checkmark next to your Terms & Conditions.
There’s no need to create a different contract for every new influencer you’re working with — it’s enough to create a general document that they can agree to using a Google Form.
It should describe how compensation works, influencer’s obligations (e.g. approving the content), deadlines, content usage rights, and anything else that might be relevant for your influencer marketing activities. These are the T&Cs we’re using at Bolt.
Avoiding smaller influencers.
Often, an influencer with 3000 followers is a better choice than one with 300,000.
First of all, smaller creators often have a more loyal follower base. Secondly, if you have a niche product (and choose a relevant influencer), it’s a lot more likely that most of these followers will actually be your target audience. Finally, smaller influencers often put more effort into their content as they tend to get less collaboration requests.
Expecting amazing results right away.
It will absolutely take time to find the right messages, influencers, platforms, and content types for your brand — don’t go in expecting to make 1000 sales from your first partnership.
But after some months of testing, analysing, and documenting, you will likely find that influencer marketing can be a very effective acquisition channel.