10 mistakes most people make when they get into influencer marketing

10 mistakes most people make when they get into influencer marketing

If you've been living under a rock, you may not have heard of influencer marketing.  Basically this is when you hire someone in your niche who has a big following on social media platforms and they post promo's for you.  It could be anything from an article with a link to a simple image on Instagram with a link in their bio/profile.  Roughly 94% of people who are using influencer marketing are saying that it works well if done right.

A lot of people and companies are saying they now prefer influencer marketing rather than celebrity endorsements.  This is because the celebrity is already considered a sell out and will promote anything they can for a quick buck while the influencer isn't seen like that just yet and is more trusted.  You're paying both the celebrity and the influencer, but the influencer isn't seen in the spot light like the celebrity and is more trustworthy because of this.

With the few stats I listed above, it's not surprise that people are switching gears and aiming more towards influencer marketing than other options.

There is a downside to all this influencer marketing hype, and most of us are likely committing some of these mistakes.  With the increase of influencers and the hype behind the marketing trend, most of us just jump in and look only at the amount of followers one person has and consider them an influencer.  In this discussion I'll be going over the 10 most common mistakes that people make when it comes to influencer marketing.



1. Not understanding your main audience
If you're just starting out with marketing, you will learn quickly that you need to knwo who your ideal customer is.  If you don't figure this out quickly, you will just waste money on advertising campaigns, and that means more money wasted on influencer marketing.  If you can't figure out a specific marketing persona, you will need to put all your paid advertising on pause.  You will need to collect data and figure out what your audience likes, dislikes, their age range, their sex, and possibly some of their hobbies if possible. 

You'll want to understand what your audience's purchasing habits are, where they're from and how they act when they're online.  Most of this can be collected through Google Analytics but you will also have to take some surveys and send out emails to see what kind of responses you get.

After you figure out your ideal audience, it will be much easier to cherry pick the right influencers you want to work with.  If you don't target your audience, you're just going to be throwing money in the air and hoping you profit lol.  Get targeted with your audience and the influencers will be easy to pick out


2. Hiring influencers for the wrong channels and platforms
When it comes to influencer marketing, it's not as effective for every single brand.  It's different if you're targeting business to business or business to consumer, each has their own platforms you should target, and you could be doing it wrong already lol.

A good example of this would be if you were targeting business owners and posting to snapchat and Instagram.  Those two platforms have a younger demographic and will have less success at pulling in clients.  I'm sure that there are business owners on those platforms, but your time would be better spent on a platform like LinkedIn where 90% of the people own a business or are decision makers of one.

Figure out what you're targeting, business owners or consumers, and that will filter out some of the platforms that you should not be targeting.


3. Results don't come overnight
Some good influencer marketing campaigns can bring in results overnight, but it's not likely if you're just starting off.  I've been working on influencer marketing for a while now, and not every campaign is successful right away.  This is especially the case if you run an eCommerce type website and are looking to sell physical items to your visitors. 

You need to understand that influencer marketing is more of a method to increase brand awareness and not increase your sales right away.  You will get a few sales here and there, but it probably won't be as many as you'd like.  I like to use influencer marketing in order to get traffic to my website and catch users in my sales funnel.  Get people to your website, get their email, send them coupons/updates/newsletters

You'll have to do a few different marketing campaigns with influencers in order to build brand awareness and increase your sales over time.


4. Not using Google Analytics to measure your performance
If you're just hiring influencers to do your promotions and not tracking anything, you won't truly know what's working and what's not.  This is what a lot of webmasters fail at, they don't track and analyze everything that is coming into their websites and they eventually waste so much money that they have to close their business's doors.

It's fairly simple to set this up, it's just a snippet of code that you install on you website and it will track everything that is going on from where the person is coming from to what they are reading on your website to even where they left your website.  By knowing all of this, you can tweak your website in order to increase your conversions and even see which influencer is working best for your money.


5. Higher expectations for influencers
You need to make your expectations very clear when it comes to working with influencers.  If you just tell them to post about your website, they'll just post a link and say that they trust you.  now a good influencer will go above and beyond to make your promo the best it can be because they know that you will likely return for more promos if yours is done right the first time.

You need to go over what you want promoted, when it should be promoted, what link to have shown and anything else related to your promo.  If you don't, you can't be pissed off if the promo doesn't go the way you want it to.


6. Dumping infleuncer marketing because you failed once
How many times to do you think email marketing professionals stop sending emails because a few never hit the inbox?  NONE! 

For the same reason, you shouldn't write off influencer marketing just because you didn't do it right the first time.  There are plenty of campaigns that I've ran in the past, and likely the future, which won't work right off the bat.  It takes time to build the perfect influencer marketing campaign, so stick with it.


7. Not thinking clearly about your call to actions
A call to action is basically what the user will click on right before they are coming to your website to hopefully purchase something or sign up for your newsletter.  Ask yourself "What action do I want the users to do when engaging in my influencer promos?" if you can answer that, you will be able to figure out pretty quickly what types of call to actions you want or need.

Knowing what call to action you want to use will improve your conversions.  People seeing a "Buy Now" button will know that you're selling something.  If they're interested, they will click through knowing they are going to most likely land on a page where they can buy something.  If you use a "More Info" call to action and it links to a product page, you're not going to like the conversion rates lol.


8. Not thinking of your competitors
I do this with every single website I set up.  It's become more second nature to me when I'm thinking about setting up a new website in order to bring in some sales and traffic.  If my competitors aren't doing anything, then there's likely a reason for it, there might just not be as much money in the niche as I had anticipated and I might want to move on to something else. 

On the other hand, when I find a niche where a lot of people are using influencer marketing, I can analyze and figure out what will work before I ever jump in myself.  I can view everything on Instagram, twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. and see who is coming back for a second, third, and fourth time to purchase promos form specific infleuncers.  This shows me that the spot works and I should put it in my list of guaranteed influencers. 



9. Not knowing influencer marketing best practices
Before you go and attack influencer marketing, you will need to study it and figure out what the best practices are.  You can read up on a lot of this content here on SEOclerks, I know I personally have written a handful of discussions related to infleuncer marketing, and that can be your stepping stone to success

Knowing what to do and what not to do will make you successful quicker than just going at it on your own with no prior knowledge.


10. Hiring an agency with little to no experience to do it for you
Sure, there are plenty of agencies out there that can do this for you, but there aren't many that can do it well.  Most of them will charge you an arm and a leg then go and purchase a few promos from influencers that they "researched" but really did nothing except do a basic search for your niche and found some cheap influencers to push you content.  I'm sure you could make some money off of this, but it's not likely.

I would suggest doing your own influencer marketing so that you are more hands on and learn the ropes as you go.  You'll be able to build relationships with your own influencers and not just the company you're paying to build their relationships. 



In conclusion:
You need to know what you're doing before you jump into influencer marketing.  If you don't do some research prior to purchasing some promos from influencers, you're going to either be very sad you did or you might be pleasantly surprised because you found someone who actually did a great job lol.  But why wouldn't you want each promo to be golden and not just a few you go lucky with?  Do the research and you'll be glad you did.



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Thanks!

Razzy