A recent Allison+Partners’ study on influencer marketing has highlighted a few key issues being faced in the industry by marketers. Most notably, “the underlying current of [the] study – a communications and relationship gap between marketers and influencers – comes to light in measurement perhaps more strongly than any other topic [they] explored.”
Out of the issues forming this divide, a few stood out the most:
1. Authenticity
2. In order to combat influencer fraud, marketers have become more savvy and have begun asking to look at some of the key metrics on a page – reach, views, etc. However, they do not seem to focus as much on real comments and interactions on the posts.
3. Testing
4. Marketers don’t test multiple types of content and posts with influencers, and generally just have the influencers stick to whatever approved content has been generated at the beginning of the campaign.
5. Influencer Targeting
6. Marketers tend to fail at the very start, by not being able to identify the best influencers for their brand. Many influencers won’t provide audience insights unless the brands ask them to – this leads to a serious mismatch.
7. Measurement
8. Finally, influencers need to be able to show the value they generate for brands using numbers. Benchmarks need to be set and tested.
At Smartfluence, we believe the solutions for these issues are rather simple, and often overlooked, many of which we actually implement in our own platform.
1. Using a tool such as ours will allow brands to target the optimal influencer for their campaign, as our proprietary algorithm maps the ideal audience a brand aspires to reach onto the influencers in our database. Using this avoids the simplest problem of influencer discovery.
2. We are working on building our own influencer scoring mechanism. We already provide statistics on engagement, authenticity, and affinity, and are going to combine these, along with a few other factors, to allow brands to forecast the impact influencers will have on their campaign.
3. Feedback is crucial. Both qualitative and quantitative. Brands and influencers need to adjust their campaigns based on what types of content worked and what didn’t work. From a numbers perspective, impact should be measured not only in return on financial investment, but also a return on branding. If an influencer generates engagement and reach for a brand, that’s just as valuable as generating short term sales.
Addressing these issues with the solutions laid out above, marketers should be able to generate more successful campaigns with influencers, increasing their ROI in every sense of the term.
