The #1 mistake marketers make with Influencer Marketing

A few words of advice from our Founder to help you avoid making these mistakes!

Influencer Marketing is the new word-of-mouth. It has been around since the dawn of time. Cave men sharing with other cave men where they might find food. Your girlfriend sharing their latest frosé find with you. A recommendation from a friend or family member is word-of-mouth, but it’s only one-to-one. Influencer Marketing gives this old idea scale. By tapping into bloggers or social media influencers and their huge

follower numbers you get word - of-mouth , but it’s now one-to-many. Got me? Good!

Just like when you give a recommendation to someone, the likelihood of them actually listening to you depends on who they are. Your dentist probably doesn’t care about how Instagrammable your frosé was, but your bestie does. So when you choose an influencer for your brand campaign, why the heck don’t you look at who they are speaking to?

Influencer marketing is advertising. Even if your goal is awareness, there is no point in creating awareness with people who don’t care about your vertical or product. The audience matters. Big time.

When you advertise on Google, you don’t care how good Google looks in a bikini, and you don’t do it ‘just coz everyone else is’. You engage a highly skilled agency with a proven track record to analyze and recommend the right keywords and audience targeting to increase the likelihood that your ads will convert. And you regularly check in on your results, tweaking and optimising to improve your conversions over time.

So why the heck aren’t you doing that for your Influencer program?

Influencer audience data exists. And you don’t even have to email the Influencer and try to explain to them how to screen shot their analytics to get it.

Before you select an influencer to work with, we recommend assessing the following data:

Follower count

While it’s still a top line metric, it is important to know how many followers an influencer has as it will help to calculate the exact number of people that might see your campaign. Influencer’s also price on how many followers they have, so it’s a handy way to create a campaign budget.

Engagement rate

The engagement rate is the % of an Influencer’s followers who take some kind of action on their content. For example: liking, commenting, sharing etc. We suggest making the calculation on the last 30 days of their content for accuracy. Once we have the engagement rate, we can understand how many followers will see the campaign.

Audience location – country, city, suburb

This is where the audience lives, NOT the Influencer. If you have a product or service that is impacted by geography – like you are a physical retailer or you can only ship to a certain location – it is critical to understand where the audience lives.

Audience age

This is how old the audience is, NOT the Influencer. If your product or service is more suited to a particular age group, or there are advertising restrictions for your product (for example: alcohol), then it is critical to understand how old the audience is that will see your campaign.

Audience gender

This is what gender the audience is, NOT the Influencer. If your product or service is more suited to a male or female specific audience, then it is critical to know what gender is seeing your campaign.

This is what ethnicity the audience is, NOT the Influencer. If your product or service is more suited to a specific ethnic group, then it is critical to know what ethnic group is seeing your campaign.

What topics does their audience care about?

This is NOT the topic the influencer posts about. These are the topics that the audience posts and cares about. Sometimes influencers change their content topic as they mature which can put the audience out of synch and result in a drop in engagement. Additionally, there are some complimentary topics that audiences are more likely to care about when they follow an Influencer in a particular niche. This enables brands to tap into a larger pool of influencers to hit the right audience.

What handles and hashtags do their audience regularly post about?

These are NOT the handles and hashtags the Influencer posts about. These are the handles and hashtags their audience posts about. Understanding the people, brands and hastags an audience gets behind can help to tailor the creative strategy behind an Influencer campaign for best cut-through.

What topics does the influencer post about?

Yep, this one IS about the Influencer. If an Influencer posts about topics that are in your niche, then they are more likely to be interested in working with you.

Content aesthetic (this one is objective based on your perceived brand alignment)

Finally, this one is up to you. And a quick-flick through an influencer’s content will highlight to you whether they will produce content that aligns to your brand identity.

Why is this important? Because, your boss (even if you are your own boss) wants some kind of ROI.

A live example:

If you are a lipstick brand that distributes to the USA only. You want to work with an Influencer who’s audience is predominantly female and lives in the USA. There are beauty bloggers out there that, due to their sexualised content have high proportions of male followers, and due to the global nature of the topics in their content have a highly distributed geographical follower base. Which begs the question. If you are paying for an influencer with
1 Million followers. Are you happy that only 20% of their audience is even the right demographic for your product? Then minus a hit for Instagram only showing their content to 5% of their followers. Then minus another hit for the conversion rate from Instagram to your website, then to final purchase.

What if you could give your campaign the highest chance of success by tapping into Influencer audience data, before you even started talking to the Influencer? What if after the campaign, you could report on the demographic of people who engaged with the influencer content?

You can. And you should be.

Why don’t you book a time with our Co-founder & CEO Danielle, to find out more?