Avoid these mistakes in your influencer digital marketing strategy

Imagine having the ability to make other people buy things just by posting on you like it on social media. That’s exactly what influencers do.

Have you ever purchased something because of a recommendation from someone well-known, well you fell for influencer digital marketing in action. You’ll see it daily on every social media network.

It can be a huge driver for sales for brands, an example, a food startup called Klean Plate used influencer digital marketing on social media and increased its sales 14 times and got 204% more traffic in just 4 months.

This wasn’t a fluke, these can be fairly typical results for brands who work with the right influencers.

Whether it involves a review or product promotion, influencer digital marketing can work almost like magic.

Why does it work so well? It’s all about proof.

The idea is really simple: If we see other people doing something, we’re more likely to do that same thing and especially if we see someone we look up to or respect doing something, we’re way more likely to do it too.

Makes sense, right?

So when influencers and celebrities promote certain products, that product usually sells like crazy. Influencers have a lot of power because their followers want to be more like them.

That said, there are some definitely mistakes to avoid when creating an influencer digital marketing strategy.

It’s not as easy as just choosing an influencer that is seems right for your brand and throwing money at them. If you do that, you could waste thousands of pounds.

Don’t just choose any influencer

This is the first mistake that digital marketers usually make when creating an influencer campaign strategy.

Many will just understandably pick someone in their niche and DM them on Instagram. This is a pretty bad approach.

The influencer you choose has to not only fit your brand but they have to share your values and believe in your product. You want an influencer who will act as a brand ambassador which means finding someone who has a good reputation.

There are some terrible digital marketing failures that have happened when influencers go against the values of the brands they support.

Do you remember in 2016 when Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte was dropped by four sponsors after he lied about being robbed at gunpoint? Three of those contracts were worth more than $1 million together, and Lochte lost them all.

It’s not just Lochte this has happened too, many influencers have lost favour and been dropped by brands. It happens all the time.

If you choose an influencer without researching their background and values, you have no way of knowing if it’ll be a hit or a miss. Influencers won’t let you know that their values don’t match because they wo'n’t want to miss out on money.

You have to remember some things are totally unpredictable and you can’t help that, but there are some things you can do to pick someone who has a good chance of helping and not hurting your brand.

You should do heavy research different influencers in your field and determine who aligns with your brand.

Different types of influencers are right for different brands. So it’s crucial that you find the right influencer for you.

There are obvious red flags look out for. You don’t want to make the mistake of choosing someone who was involved in any violent acts or has a police record. There will be specific things to look for that are relevant to your brand.

For example, if you run a vegan store, you wouldn’t want to hire an influencer who has history in hunting. (That’s a dramatic example, but you get the point.)

However, don’t be alarmed that finding the right influencer seems to be taking a while. Launchmetrics found that 75% of brands think finding the right influencer is the hardest part of an influencer digital marketing strategy.

Don’t do cold outreach

Cold contact (reaching out to someone that you don’t know) is nothing new and has been a staple of B2B and B2C industries for decades.

Many people still use it today, especially in B2B. For some marketers, it’s their only method for contacting influencers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always produce the best results and can incredibly time wasting.

This is mainly down to the fact influencers get so many cold emails, and they’re unlikely to help out every brand knocking at their door.

To make cold outreach work, you need to put work into your message and make it friendly and personalised with a clear CTA.

If you’re looking cheap promotion

Let’s imagine you’re looking for an influencer to promote your mobile phone.

All you have to do is find the right person and then give them a quick thanks in return for their endorsement, right?

This isn’t always the case.

While some influencers might be generous enough to just keep your product and promote it as “gifted”, most influencers require payment on top of that.

That’s why brands are increasing their influencer marketing budgets. You can’t expect to pay good quality influencers by simply giving them exposure from your brand or even free stuff, they have bills to pay like us.

It’s would be the same thing as paying for an Instagram ad. You’re paying to get your product in front of more people. Influencers do the exact same thing, and that’s why most of them understandably will require payment.

“Copy and paste”

Once you’ve finally found and connected with the right influencer, the job isn’t done.

Communication with your influencer is super important. If you don’t have a strong relationship, you could find your digital marketing strategy falling apart.

There are lots of ways your strategy can fall apart, but probably the most embarrassing is the “copy and paste” syndrome.

It happens like this. You give an influencer directions for something like a social media post but instead of following the directions, the influencer copies and pastes those exact directions and posts them.

It’s a marketing nightmare, and it’s real. That’s exactly what reality TV star Scott Disick did. Check it out.

It’s hilarious but it’s also a huge influencer digital marketing failure. It has happened with Adidas and Naomi Campbell.

This is why it’s so important to communicate with any influencers you work with.

Your expectations and directions have to be crystal clear. If they’re not, you could be the next victim of copy and paste syndrome, we recommend having the copy of the caption alone in its own Word document to avoid the message being picked up. Influencers unfortunately often do the bare minimum, including not even reading what they’re sharing so bare that in mind.

Asking too much

Think about the types of people who are influencers.

There are all sorts of influencers:

• Celebrities

• Millionaires

• Athletes

• Bloggers

• Entrepreneurs

• Tech experts

• Politicians

Do you know what they all have in common?

They’re all incredibly busy. Usually when you reach out to an influencer, you’ll probably get sent to their PR team.

And even if the PR team accepts your pitch, the influencer most likely will never see any of your messages or know of your existence.

Which brings me to a giant mistake that most people make when they do outreach: They ask way too much of the influencer.

You want the influencer (or their team) to do as little work as possible.

If an influencer has to jump through hoops to respond to you, then you won’t get a response.

Keeping a tight leash

Have you ever seen an ad that seemed too perfect?

You probably got skeptical and didn’t trust that it was an honest representation of the product or service being advertised.

This Instagram post by Chriselle Lim is a good example.

The copy isn’t casual enough for an Instagram post, and this is clearly a staged photo. (And while it has a lot of likes, remember that the number of likes is a vanity metric.)

Because it’s so forced and fake, it automatically loses some credibility.

This happens a lot, and it’s usually the result of digital marketers giving influencers very strict directions.

The marketer wants to be in control, so they tell the influencers exactly what to do instead of letting them promote in their own way with their own style.

This is a huge mistake.

The whole point of influencer marketing is to let influencers promote your product in a way that is unique to them.

If you give influencers some breathing room, they’ll make your campaign more unique, engaging and much more likely to see conversions.

Measuring only the amount of new followers

We recently met someone who was telling me about their latest influencer marketing campaign, and they emphasised the fact that they got a ton of new followers.

Most marketers think that’s the ultimate goal of influencer marketing. Getting more followers is great, but it’s not the main thing you should be measuring.

In many ways, your number of followers is somewhat of a vanity metric. A vanity metric is a metric that doesn’t tell you anything helpful about your marketing.

If you think about it, the number of followers you have is a vanity metric.

Even if you have a million followers, that doesn’t really mean anything for your bottom line.

If none of those followers buy anything or take actions, they serve no purpose other than to give you the ability to say you have a million followers.

If you get lots of new followers from an influencer marketing campaign, that’s awesome, but it’s not the only thing you should be measuring.

You need to measure actionable metrics that reflect your results.

If you have thousands of likes but few sales, you know that you have some work to do.

On the other hand, influencer digital marketing might get you just a couple hundred users but lots of sales. That’s a good thing, even though it seems a little counterintuitive.

I know it’s tempting to say, “I got 500 new followers from this influencer. This campaign was a success!”

It makes you feel good even if you know that you’re looking at vanity metrics.

But you have to resist the urge. The numbers might not look as nice as you want them to, but you’ll have a better view of which goals you’re achieving and which ones you’re not.

Conclusion

At Honest London, we have tons of experience with influencer marketing which has taught us a lot about what to do and what not to do.

We’ve made every single one of these mistakes before.

Check in on my digital marketing campaign and see that I got a thousand new followers.

Ask influencers to do a lot of work right off the bat.

Sent rubbish emails to people, only to never hear back from them again.

Most of the marketing efforts didn’t do anything for the brand

We wasted time and my money. That taught us the hard way to really analyse influencer marketing and think about it differently.

In fact, we had to spend a lot of time figuring out what we was doing wrong and then fixing it. It wasn’t fun.

We’ve seen others make these mistakes too. We’ve known entrepreneurs who have lost thousands and thousands of pounds on influencer marketing hoping their brand will be a huge success after a few influencer post their caption about it.

People think that it works overnight and gets you loyal followers for life. I wish that were true, but it isn’t.

Influencer digital marketing isn’t a magic wand that you can wave to grow your brand. It’s a strategy that you have to use — well, strategically.

It can work wonders for you, but you can’t rely on it one hundred percent. You have to be realistic about your expectations. Not to mention that influencer marketing can get expensive, so the more mistakes you make, the more money you’re just throwing down the drain.

Leveraging the power of influencers is really no different from any other digital marketing strategy, so don’t treat it like it’s anything special.

If you’re interested in learning about Honest London’s digital marketing offerings, check them out here. We’re offering 20% off all services until then end of 2020!