There are dozens of reasons why your influencer marketing campaign isn’t performing as well as it should be. An influencer strategy audit takes a look under the hood to pinpoint exactly what the problem is. Throughout all the Instagram audits we’ve completed, we’ve identified six critical errors that account for 90% of influencer strategy failures. We’ll review each error that could sink your ship and provide you with the life raft to safety.
In order to achieve that coveted 6x ROI, your campaign needs to be a well-oiled machine – clicking, turning, and spinning in a coherent motion. First up, your campaign engagement is in the shitter – what do you do now?
Poor Sponsored Content Engagement
Did you know that on average, sponsored content engages about 30-50% below organic engagement? Yikes. The most common reason for such a drop in engagement rate is that the influencer simply doesn’t match the brand (more on this later). Once we begin analyzing the actual content being published for sponsored posts, we can see further reason for low engagement rates.
Sponsored content must be something that your target audience is hungry for. It’s not enough to simply have your product held up like a souvenir by an influencer. Sponsored content, like any other form of content, must provide value. Value can be found in recipes, workouts, morning routines, and tools that make our lives easier. It can also be in the form or genuine reviews or recommendations to a great restaurant for example. But there must always be an exchange of value; that is our deal as advertisers. Before we ever trade money for products and services, we trade value for time and attention.
An influencer strategy audit evaluates the content that you’re producing and compares it to what your target customers are open to at that time and place. A strategy audit highlights the sponsored posts that aren’t going to cut it moving forward.
Failing to Take Advantage of Massive Content Creation Opportunity
A small army of influencers is capable of moving mountains for your brand, especially if they’re given direction and content that is purposeful. Nano-influencer campaigns offer the ability to create a massive content library for your brand. The problem is that most brands aren’t strategizing content production. A influencer strategy audit can set you straight here.
Using a campaign brief, your influencers will learn how they can organize, schedule and create purposeful content for your brand. Give enough direction so that the content maintains a general theme, but not so much that you end up with hundreds of identical pieces of content – we never want to put words in anybody’s mouth.
A campaign brief ensures that you continually churn out high quality and genuinely authentic content month after month.
Partnering With The Wrong Influencers For Your Brand
Back again – sourcing influencers has been cited as the most challenging part of influencer marketing campaigns. The fatal flaw so many campaigns have is that they’re partnering with influencers who do not resonate with their brand. This step is so crucial that even if you do everything right for the rest of your campaign, it will be on a shaky foundation as the influencers who deliver your message are the catalyst to a successful campaign.
An influencer strategy audit will point you in the right direction, towards influencers that are in tune with your audience. The influencer’s audience should not only match your target demographic, but the influencer themselves should be a natural fit for your brand.
For example, it’s not enough to say that an artist who has 90% American audience, the majority of which are 20-28 years old, is a good fit for your supplement brand. The demographics might align beautifully, but the intent of their followers isn’t in-tune with your products. The person following the artist is likely following for artistic inspiration, not dietary tips or insights into their supplement stack.
Once you begin utilizing influencers who truly understand their audiences, and their audiences trust them and engages with them faithfully, you’ll open doors to high-value customers like never before.
Unrealized Potential of Influencer Traffic
If you’re sending all of your traffic straight to the checkout with a discount code, there’s a good chance you aren’t making a lasting impression on most of that traffic. Nobody scrolls through Instagram with their credit card in hand, so why would we want to advertise to consumers as if they do?
Remember that influencers are often the first touch point for your brand, a hard sell on the first impression isn’t just bad form, it’s ineffective. Use the first touch point as an opportunity to pique interest and intrigue, the goal is to earn the right to talk to them again on your own website. The influencer post should often act as an invitation to continue consuming more content aligned with the consumer’s interest. This is where pixel data comes into play; retargeting traffic from influencers is an excellent way to reach qualified, warm traffic. Once you’ve earned a couple of interaction points with your consumer, you can then begin sending traffic to the checkout.
Pod Fraud & Other Fake Engagement
Some social media marketers can certainly spot fake engagement and followers, but not many can spot pod fraud.
An influencer strategy audit shines a bright light on fake engagement and pod fraud. The first step towards getting rid of the fake engagement dragging your campaign down is by learning how to identify it. An audit on your influencer strategy gives you clarity on what kind of engagement looks too good to be true, and what is really going to ignite action among your target audience.
An influencer strategy audit can give you peace of mind that what you’ve been doing all along has the proper strategy behind it, or it can be the wakeup call you need to turn it around. At the end of the day, influencer marketing is tricky and getting an expert opinion on your campaign might be just the thing it needs to start firing like you imagined. There are endless possibilities with influencer campaigns, but you can’t go in blind. You need a proper strategy and flawless execution to see desired results.
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