The 5 Biggest Obstacles in Running An Influencer Marketing Campaign — And How To Solve Them
Running a campaign based on social media influencers is not like running a traditional marketing campaign. In many cases, you’re dealing with hobbyists (rather than professionals) and communicating with individuals (rather than agencies).
This pivotal difference requires an innovative approach. It’s easy for a marketer to become overwhelmed by the difficulties of organizing diverse, effective, and efficient influencer campaigns.
In this article, we’ll work through the 5 most common obstacles to a successful campaign — highlighting what the problems are, and how to solve them.
Here at MuseFind we’ve put a lot of thought into how to make influencer marketing easier and more effective. I’ll also talk about how we solved each of these problems through the MuseFind platform (though if you’re not interested in our platform, feel free to skip those sections!)
1: Finding the Right Influencers
The influencers in your campaign are your ambassadors — you’re associating your brand’s image with their social media, which in turn represents the influencer’s personal brand. This relationship can be a major boost for your brand, but if only if it’s a good fit for both parties.
Ideally, in the course of the campaign you’ll foster a more permanent relationship, with the influencer becoming a long-term advocate for your brand.
But finding the right influencers is difficult — it’s time-consuming to collect potential candidates and organize their information, as well as ensure a thorough review process. Worse, that difficulty compounds as you run bigger and bigger campaigns.
The Solution
I asked Mara, a campaign strategist at MuseFind, how she approaches finding the perfect influencer:
“The first step is to have a firm idea of what you’re looking for — what your requirements are in terms of aesthetic, follower count, profession, and so on. But your expectations must be realistic.
“Brands can get carried away with far too specific of criteria, which limits your influencer pool past the point of reason.
“If you have a reasonable idea of what size of influencer you can pull, based on your budget, product, and brand, you then want to find the influencer that best aligns with your brand image.
The first step is to have a firm idea of what you’re looking for — what your requirements are in terms of aesthetic, follower count, profession, and so on.
“Beyond that, look for influencers with experience. If you’re not using a platform or agency, you should keep an eye out for signs of past collaborations, especially a contact email displayed on the profile, are an indication you’re going to be communicating with a seasoned influencer. These influencers are far more likely to be professional and responsive.”
MuseFind’s Approach
Having run numerous campaigns in the past (400+ to date), we are able to source the best influencers on the respective social networks, based on the brand’s custom search criteria.
We’re constantly developing our tools to curate the right ones from within that pool — including tagging influencers according to relevant verticals/categories, flagging problem influencers, and developing close relationships with effective collaborators.
With these tools, and our experienced campaign managers, we select influencers for you to choose from within our campaign dashboard — it’s all within your control.
2: Negotiating Payment
As the influencer marketing landscape grows, one of the most persistent problems is payment — the payment that influencers are compensated with for collaborations, in addition to product.
Influencers are quickly coming to understand their worth as content creators within this industry and are starting to require compensation for their work.
But a lack of standardized pricing means many brands are just guessing when it comes to negotiating with influencers.
Worse, there’s no way to know if you overpaid or underpaid.
The Solution
Many influencers will work on a campaign solely in exchange for product, if they especially like the brand or the product resonates with them and their audience.
But influencers are waking up to their value, and demanding greater and greater fees.
Here’s what Mara has to say about settling on the right price:
“If you have a great product or a high-profile brand that appeals to influencers, you can often get away with a product-only exchange. But if you must negotiate a price (as many brands do), start on the lower end, and work your way up. If you’re conducting your influencer marketing yourself, use a standard metric for determining price (e.g. cost per thousand followers) for all your influencers, as way of figuring out which influencers are charging more than they’re worth.
“But keep in mind that there are many factors that affect price. Time of year (influencers are busy at Christmas), amount of posts required, and the quality of the influencer’s photos (a professional photographer will charge more than your low-effort iPhonographer) will all skew the cost up or down — and these are only a few of such factors.
“Also remember good influencers are increasingly in demand, so too much low-balling will hurt your response rate from potential collaborators.”
MuseFind’s Approach
Again, our campaign managers allow us to give you an advantage — drawing from their experience and our past data, we can determine what a fair price is for both you and the influencer, based on factors like brand equity, follower count, and influencer quality.
We believe price standardization is one of the biggest benefits MuseFind can bring to the influencer marketplace, and we’re actively pursuing a more streamlined negotiation process, with automatic price suggestion — as a brand, you’ll only ever see the fair offers on our dashboard, since any unreasonable ones are filtered out. Stay tuned!
3: Sending Products
Most influencer marketing campaigns will hinge on a specific product or product line. Sending these products to your influencers in a timely manner is one of the best things you can do to ensure campaign efficiency.
For many brands, however, the approach to product shipment is rather ad hoc — email chains, spreadsheets, etc. A lack of an organizational system leads to delays — which add up, and can derail a campaign.
The Solution
Here’s what Mara has to say about shipping solution:
“Let’s start with the obvious: ship your products as soon as possible. Not only that, but provide influencers with tracking numbers and regular updates.
“Organization is key. Your influencers are not always going to be perfectly on schedule, but you can do a lot from your end to expedite the process.”
MuseFind’s Approach
Our platform integrates package tracking, address management, and the status of each influencer’s shipment, all in one place. The goal is to allow you to manage everything to do with your products in-platform, with a streamlined user interface.
Even better, we’re working on a flexible product management feature, so you can track inventory and product selections all in one place.
4: Speed and Efficiency
When MuseFind first started out, the industry’s average end-to-end influencer marketing campaign took 3 months.
Today, that number is halved, down to 45 days. We’re pretty proud of that. But we have the benefit of experience and sophisticated tools. A lone marketing team (or worse, lone marketer) is going to have a hard time managing deadlines with 10, 20, 50 influencers, and ensuring that the campaign completes on time.
After all, influencers are just regular people, with busy lives and — often — full-time jobs.
The Solution
Here’s what Mara has to say about keeping your campaign efficient:
“Efficiency depends on both parties — your brand and the influencers. It’s a partnership, and you both have to understand that.
“Respond quickly to your influencers, and ask the same from them. Don’t be afraid to remind them if they’re taking too long, but don’t be too overzealous — understand that these are real people, with families and full-time jobs. Patience will be key.
“This is also why it’s important to plan out campaigns ahead of time, so you’re not scrambling to gather influencers before a particular deadline. The more time you allow influencers to create content, the better the content will be.
“The longest stage of the campaign by far is the posting phase, when influencers have your product and are working on their photos. Our average posting phase takes 22 days. Expect this, prepare for it, embrace it. But again, prompt, friendly, and helpful communication will go a long way.”
MuseFind’s Approach
Our increase in campaign efficiency came from a variety of factors. Here’s the top three:
- In-platform chat, to allow fast and easy communication between brands and influencers.
- Automatic email reminders to influencers, encouraging them to post and providing vital information, such as hashtags and post requirements.
- A web platform and mobile app for influencers to upload photos with as seamlessly as possible.
5: Analytics
Okay, your campaign is over. If everything went well, congratulations!
The next question: was it successful? How do you measure your ROI? How do you know which influencers were most effective, and which ones are worth pursuing for a longer-term relationship?
The Solution
Here’s what Mara has to say about analyzing your campaign:
“It depends what your goals are. Most brands are interested in gaining exposures, and choose to measure impressions — the number of times a consumer sees a post. That’s one of our metrics. But we also track engagement (likes and comments on posts, divided by follower count) and other, more involved numbers.
“If the social platform allows it, ask the influencer to send you the stats for the post. This isn’t possible on Instagram, for example, but most bloggers will be able to do so.
“You can also track the impact on your web presence. A post will likely mean an increase in traffic to both your social media account on that platform, and your website. Use before and after snapshots of those statistics to get a better idea of what’s working.”
MuseFind’s Approach
We always give your brand an influencer’s vital stats (followers, engagement) at each stage of the campaign. But we also provide in-depth analytics for your entire campaign, including ranking influencers in terms of their reach and response to your sponsored posts, or tracking engagement by time-of-day of the post.
By providing parameters for success, we try to ensure your campaign isn’t just effective, but provides clear, measurable results.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is, for many brands, a whole new world.
Managing the novelty, and the complexities that come with it, can bring unforeseen challenges. We hope this article has illuminated some possible obstacles, as well as a way around them.
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