Today, almost every company use influencer marketing, but not each company can boast high results. If you want to make your influencer marketing campaign successful, you should be aware of the mistakes made by other brands.
It will help you to improve your marketing strategy and avoid any trouble. Here is a list of nine mistakes that you should never make.
1. Don’t have a plan
First of all, you should answer the question of why you want to launch an influencer marketing campaign. What specific goals do you want to achieve?
Some companies use influencer marketing just because their competitors do it. But the point is that every company is unique. And marketing strategies that work for your rivals may not work for your brand.
If you want to avoid a big mistake, you should set the objectives and create a detailed plan in advance. You should analyze all the pros and cons of influencer marketing for your company before making an investment decision.
2. Collaborate with a random influencer
Some marketers wrongly believe that the best thing they can do is to collaborate with the most popular influencers on the web. They dream about collaboration with digital celebrities like Selena Gomez, Kim Kardashian, and Cristiano Ronaldo.
But the truth is if you want to get the most from your investment, you should collaborate only with niche influencers. Even more, if you want to generate the highest engagement possible, it’s better to work with not macro-, but micro-influencers.
If you want to boost your efforts, you should use influencer marketing platforms like Ifluenz. It will allow you to discover the best matching influencers in your niche.
3. Choose influencers with fake engagement
The influencer marketing industry is plagued by fraud. It’s sad, but it’s true. According to statistics, 50% of the engagement around promoted publications is generated artificially.
If you ever decide to collaborate with influencers, who buy likes and comments, your company will experience significant financial losses. You will invest lots of money in promotion, but will not get positive results.
If you don’t want your company to go bankrupt, you should review influencer’s profile in details. You should find out who generate comments and likes: real followers or fake accounts.
4. Collaborate with “bad” influencers
If you have found an influencer, who work in your niche and who can boast a high engagement rate, don’t rush to collaborate with him. If you want to avoid one of the biggest mistakes in influencer marketing, check his reputation first.
The problem is that some influencers become obsessed with making money. They collaborate with dozens of different brands, and they don’t really care about what products they promote.
As a result, followers lose trust in these influencers. And even worse, they lose trust in brands these influencers advertise. That means that if you collaborate with a digital celebrity who has a bad reputation, you may harm the image of your brand.
5. Do not calculate ROI and IMV
Everyone knows that influencer marketing is more effective than traditional advertising campaigns. However, not every marketer knows how to calculate ROI and get the most from collaboration with influencers.
If you want your marketing campaign to succeed, you should do your calculation. It will help you to understand how much money you should invest to get the results you expect.
Also, today, you can use NeoReach tool to calculate Influencer’s Media Value (IMV). This new indicator helps to identify how much money it’s necessary to invest in other promotional solutions to get the same results as generated by influencer marketing.
6. Do not monitor the quality of content
No matter how much you trust in the influencer, you should check the quality of every post he creates. Influencers are only humans, after all. And like all other people, they tend to make mistakes. They can make a spelling mistake in a caption or forget to tag your company in the post.
It may affect your marketing campaign, so you should have control over content creation. You can use such tools as Grammarly and TrustMyPaper to check content for grammar and syntax errors. It will help you to identify mistakes and typos and fix the situation.
7. Ignore the law
And as you know, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) requires influencers to disclose about their partnership. And of course, you can’t ignore this requirement.
Make sure that every social media post published by an influencer contains hashtags #ad or #sponsorship. Also, don’t forget to use the branded content option on Instagram and Facebook. A phrase “Paid partnership with Y brand” should be displayed on top of every photo or video uploaded.
8. Stick to one social media platform
Remember that if you have more followers on Instagram than on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that you should collaborate with Instagram influencers only. In fact, influencer marketing is a great tool to increase the traffic and follower count across all your social media accounts.
“If you are looking for a new way to expose your brand for a wide audience, don’t stick to one social media network only. Collaborate with influencers on a few different platforms to let more people learn about your brand,” says Neightan White, a blogger and writer at Studicus.
9. Have no posting plan
If you want to maximize your efforts, you need to create a reasonable posting plan and provide it to your influencer. It’s highly recommended to publish not more than three sponsored posts per week. Because if an influencer mentions your brand in every post and every Story, it will scare your target audience away.
Also, you should find out at what time of the day and week it’s better to publish sponsored content. With the right timing, you will be able to achieve higher results.
In conclusion
Now you know what common mistakes to avoid when crafting your influencer marketing campaign. So nothing will hold you back from achieving all your ambitious business goals. Learn from mistakes made by others and you will succeed in your career.
Author’s Bio:
Diana Nadim is a writer and editor who has a Master degree in Marketing. She combines her passion for writing with her interest in research and creates thought-provoking content in various fields. Besides working as a contributor writer for GrabMyEssay, Diana also runs her own 3to5Marketing blog. What inspires her the most in her writing is traveling and meeting new people. Follow her on Twitter.