5 Things NOT to do When Working with Influencers
By Kate Bray
There’s a lot to keep track of when you run an influencer campaign. Finding the best influencer. Negotiating your contract. Juggling itineraries and flight bookings. Timely payment. Deadlines. Reporting on the ROI… we could go on and on. To help you work your best, we’ve rounded up our top 5 ‘not-to-dos’ when working with an influencer to ensure that your campaigns are the best they can be. Ready to learn more?
1. Don’t be too Controlling
When you decide to work with an influencer to tell your brand’s story and to create content, you should be doing so because you want your brand to be showcased in a unique and creative way. We work with influencers to achieve marketing goals that cannot be accomplished via traditional, in-house marketing efforts. That’s why we think of the influencers we work with here at VERB as ‘Content Partners’ as opposed to ‘just’ influencers, as they’re known more widely.
Your selection process should be intentional, and you should have solid reasons as to why you chose a particular influencer for each partnership. So, when it comes time to actually work with them and guide the content creation efforts, don’t be a dictator! Of course, you want to set your influencers up for success (more on that in a bit), and you have every right to build a review process into every contract, but rein it in if you find yourself scripting your influencers’ copy or trying to control their creative vision to the point that it doesn’t fit their brand. This should be a collaborative effort between you and your Influencer (ahem, Content Partner :))
A few things to keep in mind:
- Influencers know their audience and what they will respond to best
- Influencers will have creative vision and an ability to highlight your brand in a beautiful and artistic way — trust that, and collaborate!
- If you’re nitpicking every aspect of the content creation process, you’ve hired a spokesperson, not a content partner.
2. Don’t be too Hands-off, Either.
On the flipside, don’t throw your influencers into the deep end without a guide, either. In addition to clearly defining the expectations for specific deliverables in the contract we sign with an influencer, we also provide a comprehensive content partnership brief ahead of the engagement.
What’s in the brief? Here’s your cheat sheet:
- A summary of the campaign and its goals.
- Required campaign deliverables as stipulated in the contract.
- All campaign tags, hashtags, and geotags that should be used, including notes about compliant FTC & Ad Standards disclosures.
- A schedule that outlines when the influencer should be sending deliverables for review, the turnaround time for internal approval, and when to publish. Note: this should be mutually agreed upon, and you should be willing to be somewhat flexible with the influencers’ established content calendar.
- A mood board that displays content from the influencer that you’ve particularly liked, AND examples of client-owned assets that may help to inspire the content you’re commissioning.
- An overview of the brand. This can include company history, brand pillars, unique facts, talking points about the service or product and answers to any FAQs you can anticipate, and links to further reading on your website.
- Contact info of the person who will be managing the partnership from start to finish.
3. Don’t Forget About Disclosures
Hopefully you’ve chosen to work with an influencer who is on-the-ball when it comes to disclosing partnerships or sponsored content in a compliant way (read alllllll about those, here.) and this won’t even be a concern. That said, some influencers do need to be reminded, and others try to shirk the responsibility for some reason or another. That’s why, as a brand or agency, YOU need to be the one to ensure that influencers are always disclosing their relationship with you, clearly and properly.
Why? Well, you can read the article linked above for more info (and you should!), but when the FTC and/or Ad Standards Canada cracks down on faulty disclosures (or lack of disclosure completely), they’re more likely to go after the brand or agency as opposed to individual influencers. That can mean big fines, lawsuits, and just plain bad PR for your brand. Avoid the worry by ensuring you require proper disclosures in the contract you sign with the influencer, include it in the brief, check for it in the review process, and if it still gets missed when the content is published, you have your contract to lean on when you require that the influencer make an edit to disclose. It will also show that you’ve done your due diligence if the FTC comes knockin’.
4. Don’t Cast a Wide Net
Like we mentioned above, your influencer marketing efforts should be very intentional. You should know why you want to work with an influencer in the first place, and you should know exactly the type of creator you’re looking for. This means that you shouldn’t cast a wide net by reaching out to dozens of influencers without any thought. Have a clear sense of who you want to work with and why.
You should approach influencers who you know are a good fit for your brand, create content you want and need, and will be seen as authentic content partners; both for your brand and theirs! Good influencers only want to work with partners who make sense for them and the same should be said for brands. Go into negotiations already having done the research, and show the influencer why you’re reaching out to them specifically. It’s better to have one solid, authentic brand advocate than 50 random influencers who will sell anything for a buck.
5. Don’t Forget to Track & Report
This is a big one! Proving ROI with influencer campaigns can be tricky because the benefits usually don’t become apparent until long after the engagement has ended. That’s why it’s important to report on all of the results and big wins that you can. There are lots of ways to do this, and what it really comes down to is that you’re going to want to track everything.
Where there’s tracking, there’s tagging. Ensure that all of the links you provide your influencer are tagged with a UTM, through bit.ly or with your preferred tracking pixel so you can monitor the direct traffic they create, and this potential customer’s journey.
You’ll also want to ensure that you’re receiving first-party performance metrics from your influencer. This would be everything beyond post engagement, e.g. impressions, reach, saves, link clicks, blog views, audience demographics, and so on. Will they report these metrics directly to you? How? Will they authorize access to their metrics through your Influencer CRM? Are they granting you read/analyze access to their Google Analytics? You’ll need to include this ask in the initial contract and make your desired access and expectations very clear from the outset.
Finally, you’ll need to have a clear understanding of your brand’s typical web and social traffic before the engagement so you can report accurately on traffic and follower spikes. Review past performance metrics and reports, and be sure to let your data insights team know that you’re working with an influencer so they can monitor developments with you.
Kate is a Content & Social Media Influencer Manager with VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
