The Biggest Mistakes Brands Make with Influencer Marketing and How to Fix Them

My wife and I no longer buy much of anything without first checking social media. Whether user-uploaded Instagram photos or YouTube reviews of our intended purchases, we’ve come to rely heavily on this form of validation before hitting the buy button.

This isn’t just because we both happen to work in the industry and need to embrace social media for business’ sake. Our purchasing behavior is fast becoming commonplace and exactly why influencer marketing—which involves brands collaborating with third-party online personalities with dedicated followership to market its products or services—has skyrocketed from a $1.7 billion industry in 2016 to an anticipated $21.1 billion this year. Countless studies have shown that the majority of people trust and prefer the opinions of “regular” folks over brands to help them make their purchasing decisions.

Marketers themselves understand this is the future. Sixty percent now agree that influencer marketing has a higher ROI than traditional advertising and within the next 3 to 4 years, over 88 percent will have an influencer marketing strategy in place. In the US alone, they’ll be spending an estimated $4.62 billion per year on influencer-related marketing campaigns.

The most crucial factor for success, however, is not whether marketers adopt influencer marketing in the first place, it’s how they execute it. As the CEO of a company that has helped shape the industry since its very beginnings, I’m certain they must avoid the following all-too-common mistakes to ensure their influencer marketing pays off:

1-Not allocating the budget it needs to succeed.

We’ve seen notable brands like Glossier, Frank Body, Fashion Nova, Endy Mattress, and MrBeast Burger, as well as celebrity influencers like Rihanna with Fenty and the Kardashians with their multitude of businesses, achieve astronomical growth and success relying almost entirely on influencer marketing. Yet, even with a plethora of such examples out there in the market, larger brands are still only lightly dipping their toes into influencer marketing, continuing to make a heavily lopsided investment towards other familiar channels. And they wonder why influencer marketing for them isn’t “working” yet.

This pains me, because if bigger brands were to merely divert their traditional marketing spend entirely to influencer marketing for even just one week, the results would be astonishing. Not convinced? Let’s say a major global brand needs to promote a new product. They typically plan on spending around $30 million on a mix of traditional advertising, like TV, programmatic, and out-of-home with the intention of reaching their target market. On the other hand, a top-tier YouTube influencer charges around $200-250K to reach 6 million people. If the brand were to spend the same $30 million on a comprehensive influencer marketing campaign spanning a variety of influencers and platforms, the influencer campaign could easily reach a staggering billion viewers —the vast majority of whom are actually consuming and watching the influencer content organically. It’s a powerful reminder that influencer marketing can offer exponentially greater value compared to traditional advertising methods.

I will bet my career on that if a major company were to invest in influencer marketing with the same budgets they are putting into their traditional advertising and marketing, they would blow up the online world and never turn back. Who’s ready to join the revolution?

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2-Measuring influencer marketing—the way they’re currently measuring it.

According to a recent survey, 74 percent of marketers and agencies already track sales from their influencer campaigns. That the majority are doing so is not at all surprising as now, more than ever, marketers are being forced to justify budgets amidst an ever-expanding arsenal of channels and uncertain economic climate. It’s a challenge I intimately understand, as we at Viral Nation are working hand-in-hand with our customers to further develop technologies to help them more accurately deliver real attribution to campaigns and influencer engagement.

However, even with such technologies on the table, the problem specifically with measuring influencer marketing—and this is a hot topic amongst the global marketing leaders I meet with frequently—is that there is currently still no sufficient way to capture its true breadth of results. Fundamentally, social media platforms will do anything to keep users from leaving, making it very challenging for brands to track the growth and sales social media content is driving. Another challenge in tracking influencer marketing performance is that it has a range of intrinsic and long-term metrics that are, to no fault of marketers, still not being properly tracked or overlooked. Let me explain with a common example: A brand hires a YouTube influencer and offers her $25,000 to review their product, only to track $10,000 in sales 60 days later and conclude the campaign was not as successful. But this assessment discounts some critical factors. Firstly, the $25,000 influencer video is an authentic, positively focused long-form piece of content that has a far longer shelf life than most other types of comparative marketing content such as social media ads or commercials. Influencer-produced content like this will continue to foster awareness and generate sales for an average of 4 to 12 months, with YouTube videos stretching out to years. Unfortunately, we are not yet coming close to tracking the value of influencer campaigns according to this unique longevity factor. Next, consider if a brand chooses to go the old-school route of outsourcing a commercial for that same product and campaign to a creative agency. This would not only cost substantially more, but it would also simply not come close to providing the long-tailed value of most influencer content. Finally, influencer-produced content done right can also provide brands with SEO value, something that is almost always overlooked as ROI. The type of custom digital content influencers produce can help brands build a diverse and strong link profile, which can have a meaningful impact on important areas like search engine ranking.

Currently, it’s estimated that marketers make five dollars for every dollar they spend on influencer marketing, which is an average and acceptable ROI. However, once you add in intrinsic and longer-term value, this expands dramatically far beyond simple dollar calculations. Influencer marketing is an extremely cost effective and high value channel for businesses, acting as a perpetual conversion funnel for months if not years—and in order to validate and explore its maximum potential, brands will need to start tracking it in new and better ways.

3-Overlooking the human element in influencer marketing.

One of the critical mistakes marketers make with influencer marketing starts right at the outset: They implement it similarly to marketing channels already familiar to them, such as social media marketing. But hiring a group of influencers is very, very different from setting up a Facebook or Google ad campaign. Influencer marketing is fundamentally a human management business—not an ad management one. Marketers can enlist the help of influencer marketing management technology platforms or emerging AI to ease the load, but at the end of the day, to be successful, they need their human influencers to be creative, timely and communicative. Having a foundational understanding from the start—that influencer marketing must be approached differently than other channels and will require a human touch—goes a long way in reaching successful outcomes.

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4-Committing to influencers before testing them in the “field.”

Many marketers make the mistake of committing long term to influencers right off the bat, then finding themselves stuck in a bind when results aren’t what they’d expected. Surprisingly, this often isn’t correlated with a lack of due diligence on their part. Marketers may have done competitive research, carefully dug into prospective influencers’ content and audiences, even conducted critical social media background checks to mitigate future risk or brand fallout. They will also likely have surfaced insights from their own data, to determine the type of content their customers and desired audiences seek. Yet, even after putting an excellent foundational preparation in place, they’ll find they cannot fully predict outcomes for influencer marketing. This is because even the smallest differences in each influencer’s content, delivery and individual followings can make a big difference to results. Marketers can choose four identical influencers for a campaign, who focus on the same topic, make the same type of content, have the same audience size and demographics-wise, and yet when it comes to final outcomes, they will most likely not perform the same. Human behavior limits full predictability.

So, the best way to circumvent this is to structure contractual relationships in a way that can protect against it. They need to approach influencer marketing with instead a highly iterative short to long term strategy, starting short, such as with a one-month engagement with an option to extend to 3+ months, and a potential for a year extension (which we have seen to work very well.) This allows them to test influencers and see how they uniquely work within the context of their brand—and optimize accordingly. The creator economy today is moving and expanding at lightning speed, with new and exciting influencers of all kinds coming onto the scene daily.  By instilling flexibility into their influencer marketing strategy, marketers not only avoid getting stuck in situations that don’t scale, they can constantly bring in emerging talent to strike synergy, with astounding results. At the heart, this is nothing new, it’s akin to A/B testing or growth marketing—it’s dynamic marketing 101.