A decade ago, the influencer marketing arena was limited only to celebrities and a few dedicated bloggers. Now, the trend of social media influencers has increased. Influencer marketing is now an established form of online marketing. It has been a buzzword for a while now, and the mainstream media regularly refers to it. Now it’s almost a must for some industries. The influencer marketing industry is worth more than $10 billion. This means that your competitors are using influencer marketing as an important tool heavily. So, you should invest in influencer marketing also but there are five common mistakes that you should avoid getting full efficiency.
Mistake #1: Moving without a Game Plan
First thing first, you need a game plan. There is a need for structure and clarity. Without a framework, and a roadmap, you won’t be able to address how influencer marketing fits with your overall marketing strategy. Mostly, brands conduct campaigns without planning their key aspects, such as clarity of end goals, geographic areas, and type of influencers. Campaigns are failing or producing limited results due to the lack of planning.
Mistake #2: Focusing Heavily on Sales
Of course, one of the most popular use cases of influencer marketing is to increase sales. But it is not the only use case of it. There are many important other use cases for different industries. For example, showcasing the latest product line, spreading awareness, increasing customer awareness are the most popular goals to define success for the fashion and lifestyle industry. In addition to this, the banking and finance industry uses influencer marketing to build trust, boost customer response and find the right customer. Especially, if you have a high-end premium product or service, probably you will not generate thousands of impulse sales from one post that the influencer posts on Instagram, but it will help to create brand awareness.
Mistake #3: Prioritizing Reach Over Content Fit
As a brand, don’t choose creators for the only number of their followers. Reach is not everything, focus on engagement rate and content fit. Sometimes 1000 micro-influencers could be more effective than Cristiano Ronaldo in terms of cost/ad impression. These creators can still interact with their followers and organize Q&A sessions.
Also, a context fit is everything. If your brand doesn’t make sense with an influencer’s content, then it’s not going to resonate with their audience no matter how many followers they have.
Mistake #4: Creating Short-Term Relationship Rather Than Long Term Relationships
Influencer marketing is not a one-off campaign. Most successful influencer marketing programs create a long-term partnership with an influencer to utilize it at best. Influencers’ audience follows likes, shares them because they can relate to and trust the creator. This trust comes from consistency. The more a consumer hears a brand recommendation from an influencer, the level of trust in that recommendation increases. Try to create long-term partnerships and ambassador programs to get better results with influencer marketing.
Mistake #5: Limiting the Creativity of Influencer
The superpower of influencers is being themselves. In the last 10 years, 50 million creators have existed and to survive among them, creators should be unique, and this is possible only if they are being their selves. So successful influencers have their style and their followers know, track and love their style. So you have to avoid limit influencer's creativity because it will affect the credibility of content for sure. You may check the content before they publish and schedule the publish time but do not limit their creativity.
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