Just in time for the official NFL Season Kickoff today, we’re talking about the three biggest bloopers in influencer marketing and providing tips on how you can avoid them. Influencer marketing has quickly been gaining popularity over the past few years – which is no wonder when it delivers an average $6.50 ROI across all industries. This year we’ve seen veterans investing more marketing dollars than ever before and rookies joining in on the game too. It’s a great way to gain access to trusted audiences and have your brand discussed among your target market in an authentic way where consumers are already spending many hours a day. But, before kicking off (no pun intended) your next campaign, be sure to watch out for these common influencer marketing bloopers and follow these quick tips to ensure your team wins big!
Blooper #1: Only Focusing on Celebrity Influencers
Celebrity influencers are probably one of the earliest forms of influencer marketing, and today they remain an important part of many brands’ influencer strategy. However, if your strategy stops with celebrities then you are missing out on a very effective piece of the influencer puzzle – Mid and Micro Level Influencers. Mid and micro level influencers have smaller audiences (typically 1,000 – 100,000 followers) that are highly engagedand also have developed great trust for the influencer. The content they share tends to be more authentic as well, because they’re often “every day people” sharing content with like-minded audiences. You want to find an influencer to share about your laundry detergent, toothpaste, hotel or restaurant – mid and micro level influencers are your powerhouses and should be a top go-to for your next campaign. Another huge plus when it comes to working with this group of influencers is that there’s more of them – so instead of only investing in one or two big celebrities, spread your dollars out and build a whole team of micro and mid-level influencers to share about your brand. To read more about this powerful group, check out our blog post from last fall here.
Blooper #2: Not understanding your influencers’ audiences
When it comes to influencers they are all different and guess what – so are their audiences! That is why it’s important to research and get a full understanding of an influencer’s audience before engaging the influencer in your next campaign. And, I’m not just talking about high-level demographics such as age and gender, but going deeper to understand audience location and important psychographics, interests and values. Here at Mattr, we use our proprietary Personamesh™ Audience Matching technology to provide all these important insights with every single recommendation because we know when an influencer’s audience is aligned with your brand, you’ll see a significant increase in campaign performance.
Blooper #3: Thinking only about reach and/or impressions
How do you measure your influencer campaigns? If reach and impressions are your leading metrics – you’re doing things the old school way and you may want to start thinking about engagement – likes, shares, clicks, etc – which are more closely aligned to the impact of your campaign. Here at Mattr, we think engagement is such an important indicator of campaign success that it’s how we price out our campaigns. Our thought is that if you don’t pay a flat rate for digital – why would you for influencer? Instead pay for performance and make your influencer budgets go further. By paying for engagement you reduce the risk of launching a campaign that gets a lot of impressions but doesn’t make an impression. But, no matter how you’re paying for your campaigns, make sure when you’re measuring metrics you’re looking at all the numbers to get the full story on how you’re performing.
So, there you have the top three biggest bloopers (and what we think are three of the most costly mistakes). Of course there are lots of other things to watch out for – make sure you’re following FTC guidelines, work closely with influencers to create the right authentic story, don’t give influencers too little (or too much) creative freedom and the list goes on and on . . . We’ll be sure to cover more of these in future posts, but for now if you stay away from these three bloopers you should be that much closer to having a winning campaign!
About MATTR
MATTR is the only full-service influencer marketing provider with detailed audience insights from PersonaMesh™. We go beyond demographics into psychographics such as values and interests so that your influencer campaigns align with your campaign targets.