Is Influencer Marketing Really Dead?

Influencer marketing is alive and well. Compared to traditional marketing where companies control what is advertised, influencer marketing means handing over control of your brand narrative to someone you haven’t trained and may not even know in person.

This is scary for brands, but from a consumer perspective, this provides a more objective opinion of the product or service and keeps the trust between influencer and their audience.

A common misconception about influencer marketing is it only works for famous brands with the most popular influencers. This idea may appear true; however, influencer marketing is for any brand who wants to expand their reach through individuals in their niche on social media. These individuals can be micro-influencers who don’t have millions of followers but receive a higher rate of engagement.

In short, influencer marketing is a social media advertising strategy that leverages the social clout of influencers.

Why Influencer Marketing is Failing for Brands

Influencer marketing isn’t an exact science and we’ve seen some serious influencer marketing flops, but the strategy is nowhere near obsolete. It’s been alive and well since savvy marketers started leveraging celebrity images and endorsements to sell more products. However, it has evolved. The boom of social media has allowed anybody with a large, devoted following to influence our thoughts, opinions, and purchasing habits.

The infamous 2017 Fyre Festival is a case in point. The festival organizers paid models $250,000 (including Kendall Jenner) for one post and sold out their event within hours. Despite this festival’s overall epic failure, it’s a fantastic example of how influencer marketing can still generate huge profits and spread brand awareness.

Though it can be lucrative, influencer marketing is a gamble. Before you pay to play, it’s important to understand the pitfalls and problems that may come your way.

At GVT, we will help you to map out your influencer marketing plans, designs and executes comprehensive, scalable campaigns, also consider what type of campaign will best help you connect with the type of influencers you want to work with.

• Collaborating with the Wrong Influencers

Brands tend to believe that bigger is always better. With influencer marketing, this is definitely not the case. While searching for social media influencers, marketers should remember that picking out niche influencers is vital.

The simple reason is that niche influencers are people who create content on a certain topic of interest. This makes them subject matter experts; their expertise makes their content authentic and allows them to have heavy influence over their audience.

A common mistake brands make is that they look for top influencers and overlook whether or not they’re relevant. A popular influencer’s content may not necessarily align with your brand’s image, products, or services.

For example, it may not be a good idea for a software company to partner with a popular movie star, who solely influences people in the entertainment industry. One of the best ways you can avoid this influencer marketing fail is by conducting thorough research.

What to take into Consideration?

The right influencer

Based on your marketing goals, you should look for influencers with the right audience who provide the required level of engagement. To run a killer influencer campaign, you need to find the people your audience trust and look up to, not just the ones with big numbers.

Thought leaders create conversations with their audience. Rather than looking at how big an influencer’s following is, look at engagements. Someone with tons of followers with little engagement means that your product may not reach an audience effectively. Someone with a small following but big engagement means their voice resonates with your target audience.

At Global Vision Technology Our matching engine & dedicated team takes over to support you with shortlisting the right influencers and activating the campaign. Influencers apply by accepting the campaign brief, or by sending bids on how best they can contribute.

We bring your brand story to life through harnessing the power of authentic connections.

• Failing to Understand Your Audience

If you don’t truly know your customer, you will never be able to create an effective long-term influencer marketing strategy. Marketers who have not yet developed a clear marketing persona should place their programs on hold until there is a clear understanding of who the customer is and what the customer is interested in achieving from an interaction with your brand.

To create a marketing persona (some brands have multiple personas), you’ll want to understand purchasing habits, pinpoints, demographic information and psychographic information. Usually, all of this data can be collected through customer interviews.

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, it becomes much easier to identify the appropriate influencers to work with. Furthermore, you will be able to provide influencers with a clear brief that will help them to better serve your marketing goals and business.

What to take into Consideration?

Your audience

For any influencer campaign to be successful, you need to define who you will influence. Be specific and narrow down your audience. Your goal is to target a small niche of people who will be your loyal fans. Once you hit your biggest fans, they will promote your product, share your content, and grow your brand’s reputation.

Just because one influencer has over a million followers doesn’t mean they are the people to buy your product. With Global Vision Technology, you can use our simple technology to gather reliable customer insights directly from real customers, while you advertise. This ‘double whammy’ is what sets us apart from other influencer companies.

Global Vision Technology helps brands engage and activate audiences worldwide through top influencers. We develop and execute creative influencer marketing strategies to amplify your brand story at scale and reach millions of people.

• Over-reliance on Meaningless Metrics

The only way to truly know if an influencer marketing campaign is effective is to use an analytics platform to measure results. The need to measure performance is especially true for those interested in Instagram-based influencer marketing campaigns.

Influencer marketing can be a powerful marketing strategy, but as with any marketing strategy, it does have limitations. As a marketer, you need to ensure you are using influencer marketing appropriately. Starting an influencer marketing campaign that is designed to influence KPIs related to bottom-of-the-funnel behaviors is usually not ideal.

If you didn’t connect with the right audience and you didn’t move the needle on any of the key metrics that matter to your business, then that money would have been better spent elsewhere.

What to take into Consideration?

The ROI

Think about what industry you are in, how much you want to invest, and choose your influencers wisely. A trustworthy influencer can easily skyrocket your profits and expand your brand awareness to thousands of more people.

Currently, most influencer companies only tell you how many likes, shares or comments your campaign receives with the influencer channels you book and pay for. We don’t think that’s good enough, so our team at Global Vision Technology provide you full funnel reporting on every campaign, plus you receive reliable customer insights on every campaign, so you can continuously give your customers what they actually ask for, not just what you think they want. That’s how we help you gain new competitive advantage in market.

• Using Influencer Marketing in the Wrong Channels

Influencer marketing is not equally effective across all brand channels. Effectiveness will vary by channel depending on your customer focus (business to business or business to consumer) and your target audience.

For example, an influencer marketing campaign that is designed to target members of Generation Z will be less effective if executed on Facebook and Twitter than on Instagram. That’s because the Generation Z market overwhelmingly prefers using Instagram. Conversely, an influencer marketing campaign designed to engage Generation X customers will probably be more effective on LinkedIn or Facebook.

With many tools and platforms boasting millions of influencers it’s really easy for brands to be become giddy with the volume of numbers and ignore compatibility. To create a credible and tangible engagement with followers, influencers must fit the brand, the product, the performance or the service. The most successful way to enlist the most appropriate ones is to ensure influencer selection is based on a well-defined catalogue of compliance and criteria.

What to take into Consideration?

Your niche

There are a few variables that influencer how your campaign will travel with influencers, which is why having an agency partner like Global Vision Technology that has operated hundreds of campaigns is critical. Effectiveness will vary by channel depending on your customer focus (business to business or business to consumer) and your target audience.

At GVT, we create the most authentic connection between a brand and an influencer using our unique and longstanding expertise. We then develop and execute these strategies to amplify your brand story at scale. We’re a bunch of experienced entrepreneurs, marketeers & tech geeks who believe that we can help better the way marketing is done on the biggest social media platforms.

Our proprietary technology enables us to classify & identify the right influencers on basis of their reach, relevance & resonance. This rich data, along with smart analytics, helps us make the influencer loop measurable & deliver best ROI.

Conclusion

If you wish to make your influencer marketing campaign successful, you should definitely avoid these three mistakes, as they are the most common reasons why brands fail at influencer marketing. While it does have its challenges, it is definitely not dead. Influencer marketing is stronger than ever, and all indicators point to its growth in popularity over the coming years.

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