Influencer marketing went through a revived heyday as platforms like Instagram and YouTube spawned a slew of new online celebrities. Now, “influencers” are everywhere, and some brands spend a significant amount of budget to promote their products and services through internet influencers. From our perspective and experience, most of these spends are ineffective because there is no actual connection between these brands and influencers in the majority of cases.
If you want influencer marketing to work for you, do the following:
- Establish collaborations between your brand and influencers. If the influencer is just promoting your product, that’s simply an advertisement, and there are more efficient ways to do an ad spend.
- Focus on content creators with platforms that go beyond simple entertainment and extend into education (think publications and journalists over models).
- Pursue narrower, more hyper-focused influencer marketing efforts. Sometimes, smaller more engaged audiences are more profitable than a superficial follower count that is in the hundreds of thousands.
- If you do work with an influencer, carefully assess engagement and ask for specific numbers on click-throughs and typical results. The fuzzier the metrics, the more cautious you should be.
Shoot me a note if you’d to talk through this in greater depth.