How Influencers impact your brand, whether you work with them or not.

Jeff Bezos (founder & CEO of Amazon) most famously said: 

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” 

When brands think of Influencers, they tend to think of the Instagrammer with thousands of followers. But the reality is that social media has made everyone an Influencer in their circle. 

If one of your customers has a bad experience, there’s nothing stopping them leaving a bad review on your website, google or a review site. 

If said customer happens to also have several thousand followers, then all of a sudden there are a lot of potential customers privy to this bad experience. Whether it was a one-off experience or not. 

On the flip side, Influencers are consumers as well. And contrary to popular belief it’s not all free product every day of the week. A lot of them, especially when they are starting out, are buying their own products and creating content just so they’ve got something to post about. So they are generally posting about brands and products that they already love. 

As a brand, if you can capitalise on Influencers who already love your brand it’s an opportunity to build a powerful community.

In both of these instances, the brand had no power over what the influencer said or posted, so it’s up to the brand manager to be vigilant about what is being said about them online and leverage the good and the bad to their benefit.

So how do you do this?

When it’s bad… a negative experience is an opportunity to leave a lasting good impression by the way you handle it.

• Make sure you reply to all negative reviews, apologise and direct them to your contact email to resolve.

• Can you send a replacement product or free gift?

When it’s good… a positive experience is a marketing opportunity.

• Share any content that is put out on your own channels.

• When you have a new product launch go back and gift all the Influencers who spoke about your brand.. The repetition with their audience is like gold. 

A pro tip.

If there’s not a lot of information about your brand available online OR if you’ve got some negative press/reviews you need to counteract, then Influencers can be a great way to bolster the positive messages online about your brand.

Lemme give you an example.

We work with an egg brand. And as you might imagine about any fresh food in retail, they can only put the best looking products out for sale. So to reduce wastage, they’ve created some products that take the funny looking eggs that they can’t put in a carton and have created a pre-made scrambled egg product in a sachet. What a great solution! HOWEVER… some customer feedback has been ‘why would you take eggs out of their natural casing and create packaging waste?’… these consumers didn’t have the full picture. So by leveraging Influencers, they can explain what a great solution this is to a bigger wastage problem.

This is a great example of leveraging Influencers to overcome negative messages that might be out there about your brand.

If you need to take stock of your brand online and how you might leverage content to create more positive awareness and reviews, we’d love to brainstorm with you any time!

Check out our done-for-you blog writing or Influencer coverage.

OR grab a time in our CEOs diary that suits you!