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Influencer Marketing: Are You Making These 4 Silly Mistakes?

As the New Year takes a turn, everyone is raving about influencer marketing as a new phenomenon to position their brand.

But what influencer marketing is all about?

In its simplest form, it is a modern marketing technique that is directed towards an industry influencer to create awareness of your brand and generate the hype from word of mouth publicity.

For example, if you run an online smartphone store you can hire someone to write a product review on his website to redirect visitors on your landing page.

Similarly, you can engage with a social media celebrity to endorse your newly-launched cosmetic product and you will have hundreds of potential leads in your pocket.

This is the force we call “influencer marketing”.

How Businesses Do It? As its name suggests, influencer marketing is run by the influencers. What you need to do is to engage with opinion leaders who can lend their voice to your brand.

Let’s say you are an online supplier of frozen foods wanting to earn a name in food industry, you can find a food expert to promote the nutritional value of your products on Twitter. What you get in return are instant engagements as a result of phenomenal following of the influencer.

As a relatively new trend, influencer marketing is still an enigma for many businesses and no wonder so many of them commit silly mistakes while practicing it. But, if you want to make the most of influencer marketing, you need to avoid the following 4 silly mistakes:

1.Lacking a Strategy First thing first.

The success of your influencer marketing lies greatly on a viable strategy.

As influencer marketing is still in its formative years, many businesses lack insights into this marketing technique which is why most of them fail to develop a strategy that can produce the desired results.

However, planning a strategy for influencer marketing is a different ball of game.

Since you are orienting your marketing activities on an industry expert, you have to align your strategy according to objectives of your chosen influencer and how he goes about promoting ideas to a target audience.

This is particularly important when you are paying to someone to talk about your business. In that particular case, you need to sit down with your influencer and develop a strategy that befits both to your brand and personality of your influencer.

Depending on your goals and needs of your influencer, you need to discover marketing ideas to channel your brand to your target audience.

2. Lacking an Effective Communication With Influencer Despite being an effective method of promoting your brand, a large number of brands fail to get leverage of influencer marketing.

Why?

Because, most businesses fail to effectively exercise the exchange of thoughts with their influencer.

Remember that the success of your influencer marketing is largely based on how well an influencer understands your brand strategy and the objectives you want to get from it.

Without these crucial details, the influencer will not be able to identify your brand and fail to create the right perception to the intended audience.

What you need to share with your influencer are the ethos of your brand and the goals you want to achieve using his face value.

Let us help you with these tips in this regards:

•Convey your brand philosophy – Impart the product message, ethos and values you share with your audience.

•Communicate your goals – Define objectives you want to gain with your relationship

•Share a marketing calendar with your influencer – Include important dates and events your brand celebrates every year.

•Delegate a content management strategy – Give your influencer details about major keywords, important topics, frequency of posts, timings of posts and style of posts.

3.Networking With Wrong Marketers Too often, businesses engage with wrong influencers who are a misfit for their brand. They either engage with an influencer who lacks the right attitude to match a brand stature or someone who has no experience of the industry.

Remember that your target audience searches you in the same manner as you would find your favorite brand.

Will you find any help on website of a horoscope guru when you are searching for yoga tips?

Similarly, if you are an apparel retailer, you cannot expect your audience to show up on website of a graphic designer. So, there is no point of engaging with an influencer just because he has more than a million followers.

To get the best out of your efforts from influencer marketing, you need to partner with influencers that match with your business credentials. Consider the following questions prior to engaging with an influencer:

•What particular expertise he has in your industry?

•What is his online reputation?

•How does he project himself?

And most importantly…

•What is his Klout score?

Keeping these variables in mind will help you find right influencers to position your brand to your niche audience.

4.Faking Your Business In an attempt to create the hype, businesses often exaggerate or amplify their brand to influencers that only hurt their brand reputation.

Remember…

Influencers are people who lend credibility to your business. By talking about your product, they vouch for its authenticity and benefits it offers. In other words, they endorse the genuineness of your products.

Let’s say you are a cotton supplier that claims to produce the biggest staple of cotton that you are not in reality, then you are misleading your influencer and the people who trust his words.

Using the channel of influencers to magnify your business makes you come across as a dishonest business and can have severs repercussions on your brand reputation. It also affects your relationship with the influencer who is representing it on your behalf.

Influencer marketing can be productive only when you avoid the above-mentioned 4 common mistakes made by the businesses. Wishing you all the luck for your influencer marketing campaign.

Katie Petrachonis is the founder and owner of a reputable organisation based in England. She has wide range of academic knowledge projects where student ask can you write my dissertation and loves to share her perspective and views with the current students. She works with online hub where she can write academic articles that support and assist students.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Katie Petrachonis .