Influencer marketing: 5 mistakes to avoid for effective campaigns
Today, most brands understand the value of influencer marketing for promoting their products, services, and image. It's also true that the market's growth potential is enormous. However, to succeed with influencer campaigns, it's crucial to avoid certain mistakes—traps that many brands unfortunately still fall into. So, to help you avoid the same pitfalls, So Bang offers some tips for effective campaigns.
1. Not clearly defining your objectives
Every marketing campaign needs clear objectives if you hope to see a return on investment. Before embarking on a collaboration with an influencer, it's therefore important to ask yourself what you want to achieve. Do you want to increase brand awareness ? Boost your conversion rates? Collect data or ideas?
One of the biggest mistakes in influencer marketing is focusingsolely on what's called Return On Ad Spend, or ROAS. Essentially, this is the ROI of your advertising spend. However, to launch an effective influencer campaign, it's much better to first focus on your influencers' engagement rate. This is truly the metric that should guide your actions even before you think about money.
2. Working with the wrong influencers
While there are many potential pitfalls when venturing into influencer marketing, choosing the wrong influencers is undoubtedly the most critical. So, how do you find the best influencers to make your brand shine on social media? And are you looking for influencers or content creators? These two profiles are not quite the same.
First and foremost, the initial step in choosing influencers is to researchtheir online reputation. Are they known for their professionalism and authentic content? Are they known for their strong relationships in their collaborations with other brands?
To help you cast your influencers, you can also look at their communication skills. Do they interact regularly with their audience and respond quickly to comments? Do they easily follow client briefs or engage respectfully and courteously with their community? All these indicators should help you identify the right candidates.
Similarly, seek out influencers or creators whose communities align with your target audiences. These users will connect more easily with your brand. Never force a relationship between influencers and your brand. Doing so risks breaking the bond of trust with users. Trust your influencers. Let them represent your brand naturally and authentically.
3. Treat your influencers like your employees
Once you've found the right influencers for your brand, it's crucial to remember the nature of your relationship. Your influencers aren't your employees. While they collaborate with you, you must grant them autonomy if you want to reap the benefits of your partnership.
It is indeed their content and their community that you are acquiring, and therefore, if you decide to engage with them, you must accept their way of working. Remember: the influencer is a brand, and you have yours. Both parties must work together effectively to achieve mutual benefit.
Of course, you can guide the work of influencers through creative briefs, but the key to a good collaboration lies in sincere and authentic communication between you and your ambassadors.
4. Offering insufficient compensation to your influencers
When it comes to compensation, there are no strict rules clearly defining the amount involved in collaborating with an influencer. In fact, several models are possible.
The simplest approach is to pay influencers per post. This Pay Per Post system involves paying the influencer when they publish marketing content about your brand. This content can include a blog post, an Instagram post, or a video story.
Another compensation model is cost per engagement (CPE). This involves paying a certain rate for each type of engagement generated by a post. For example, if a creator generates 10,000 views on their natively recorded ad within their video streams, you would pay a rate per view, or more generally, per 1,000 views.
Regardless of the compensation model you choose, you must understand that payment plays a significant role in the success of an influencer campaign. This is easily understood because the more you value your influencers, the more motivated they will be to give their best. Conversely, neglecting their compensation risks leading to bland or even mediocre collaborations, lacking effort and creativity.
5. Sacrifice quantity for quality
Today, most influencers and other content creators often focus on a single social media channel. Why do you think that is? Simply because managing multiple social media accounts is time-consuming. Furthermore, an influencer will often have a greater affinity for one platform or another. For example, one influencer might be more comfortable on TikTok, while another will more naturally use YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram.
Even if you plan to post on several different social media platforms, it's important to consider this single-channel approach, as it guarantees high-quality influencer campaigns. Therefore, it's better to collaborate with several influencers, each specializing in a single platform, rather than a single influencer present on multiple social media platforms simultaneously.
Final tips
Launching an influencer marketing campaign requires considerable expertise and careful planning. For a brand, there's nothing worse than a rushed and poorly executed campaign.
Successful influencer campaigns hinge on effective and relevant collaborations between brands and influencers. An influencer agency like So Bang can help you navigate this process successfully and avoid the many pitfalls. This ensures a strong ROI.