5 Influencer Marketing Challenges

When it comes to influencer marketing, several challenges can arise regarding running campaigns with influencers. It can be difficult to choose which ones to work with and ensure their success analytics are legitimate. Measuring the right aspects of performance is key to establishing good relationships and continuing them long-term. Here are a few challenges you may stumble upon in influencer marketing.

Choosing the right influencers to represent your brand

With thousands of influencers to choose from, it can prove difficult to choose the right ones to speak on behalf of your brand. An influencer’s demographic should fit your target audience to ensure the people they reach are the ones you hope will become customers. Audiences like to see genuine influencers who are authentic and stay true to their brand through the sponsored work they do.

Communicating with influencers and building relationships

Building strong partnerships with the influencers you work with is extremely important. Retaining the relationships you make with them, long-term, can open new opportunities for both the brand and the influencers alike. Something to remember is that influencers are likely receiving offers from more than just your brand, so they can choose which brand deals they want to accept and who they want to work with based on their audience and personal brand. In cases like these, make an effort to form meaningful professional relations with influencers to ensure both parties have a positive experience with the campaign.

Measuring performance with the right analytics

When measuring the success of an influencer campaign, vanity metrics tell you little about the relationship between the influencer and their followers. Likes, comments, and number of followers means little without high engagement and the analytics to prove good performance for the campaign. An individual can have hundreds of thousands of followers, but if half of them are bots giving them fake likes, you’re going to see poor performance in the end. Be sure to use key performance indicators when tracking success with an influencer.

Seeing through fake numbers

See an influencer with 500,000 followers only getting a few thousand likes on their posts? Or something the other way around? They may have fake followers or be utilizing social media groups to gain likes even if their following is smaller. Manipulated engagement analytics are a brand’s worst nightmare considering their hope is for the influencer to engage with their followers to raise awareness and drive traffic to the company. It’s important to research influencers when it comes to the analytics of their following. Oftentimes, micro influencers have the highest engagement rates because they tend to be working with a smaller scale audience and can be found more relatable than macroinfleuncers or celebrities.

Balancing company control with creative freedom

Companies obviously want the influencer they work with to promote their product or service, but may have a hard time relinquishing complete creative control to the influencer when it comes to the content they produce. Though it often requires approval before posting, creativity is the job of the influencer. You definitely don’t want their content to come across scripted or ingenuine and giving them the freedom to try something new with their content could end up benefiting the brand in a positive way.

Overall, influencer marketing is a great way to reach an audience that fits a brand’s target demographic. Though there are challenges like handing over creative control or measuring performance that goes deeper than just likes and comments, success with the right influencer is achievable once brands know where to start and how to overcome these challenges.

Check out the Snips Tutorials on analyzing your audience & content and navigating your account for tips on how to measure success and performance, as well as use the tools we provide.

Happy Snipping!