5 Pitfalls of Influencer Marketing: What to Think about Before Setting It Up?

Clipboard with "influencer marketing" text, icons, and a stylized audience pattern, beside a keyboard, eyeglasses, highlighter, pen, binder clips, and a cup of coffee
Clipboard with "influencer marketing" text, icons, and a stylized audience pattern, beside a keyboard, eyeglasses, highlighter, pen, binder clips, and a cup of coffee

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Nowadays, advertising is everywhere. Here and there you can see famous stars taking part in photo shootings for well-known brands of luxury clothes or perfumes. Their Instagram accounts also remind marketing place more than the diary of their lives. 

Have you ever thought about running an influencer marketing campaign? Still have doubts  about its quality and safeness? Well, this article is a must read if you want to avoid crucial mistakes cooperating with an influencer. Here we are going to divulge how to detect fake accounts!

Yet, when it comes to the world’s most famous stars, people objectify them so much that this advertising seems natural. At the same time, when we talk about ‘small and medium-sized’ bloggers, their marketing efforts seem to bear no practical value at all. However, this is totally wrong.

People with considerable numbers of followers are called influencers because they can influence the purchasing behavior of their loyal audience. In other words, brands use them to reach out to the people who trust those people whom they admire and follow. In this case, loyalty and trust are more important for the business than the real numbers.

The phenomenon of influencer marketing has gained its attention along with the rise of blogging and social media. Instagram hosts the biggest number of influencers, and this fact makes this platform number one choice for influencer marketing.

However, this type of marketing does not function as simply as it seems. There are some obvious pitfalls of influencer marketing which will be discussed further in the article.

Influencer Marketing

Low Quality Content

It really matters how your product or service is advertised. Content plays a key role in successful influencer marketing. It is not about composing beautiful works that essay writing service can do for you but rather about knowing how to appeal to some particular audience.

Many people can subconsciously distinguish between lies and truth, aggressive marketing and friendly advice. Therefore, your influencer should be really great with followers.

Such a person needs to use the right words for advertising. It usually helps if he or she has really tried the product or service and speaks from their personal experience.

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Here we deal with an account which has several admins, posting photos of different people. It has not been ordering paid followers but at the same time doesn’t engage like a human being. Added to which is that fact that its followers don’t necessarily have a huge amount to say. Its audience is not engaged at all, because on the post with 4k likes they have only 10-20 comments. Now, it’s obvious, ordering advertisement on such an account will only harm your product or just bring no value.  

Fake Followers

At the dawn of all social media platforms, no one could even think that paid advertising will be bringing so much money to different stakeholders. Therefore, back then, the percentage of fake accounts was very small. It took quite a bit of time before people started to create fake accounts and add fake followers there. 

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Nowadays, Instagram is a whole new platform for selling goods in its broadest sense. Being created to share photos and memories with friends, it developed into one of the biggest promotion, sell, and making profits. Of course, everywhere where the money keeps rolling, there is fraud too.

When you decide to set an influencer marketing campaign, try to analyze the audience of your chosen popular figure.

You are interested in your product or service being advertised to real people. Therefore, if your person of choice has fake followers, it means a waste of money for you.

Useful tip: Are you ready to send your money for an influencer? Take your time and check an account for the fake followers on IG Audit. It is a handy tool used by zillions of users to check accounts before ordering promotion there. Everything you need to do is to the username into the search box and get an estimated ratio of real to fake followers. 

Problem of Choice

There are many people online who can advertise your product or service to their followers. Thus, the biggest problem that businesses usually face is who to choose.

They should select the best one from the entire pool of influencers weighing several factors such as account’s quality, price, audience, previous success, etc.

Most of the successful influencers demand quite high payments for their work. Therefore, do not expect to start cooperation for a low price.

It really matters how you get your product in front of a large audience, and any mistake or failure can cost you reputation.

Failure to Ensure Brand-Fit

When choosing the best influencer, you cannot be guided by their earned media value only. Of course, their success matters. But the compliance with your brand’s mission and vision is even more important.

You should select people who can really see why your product or service is good for their audience and be ready to speak about their personal experience.

An influencer should also match your target group. They should advertise your product to the people who can potentially buy those goods.

For example, a fashion influencer can hardly promote tracking boots the way a travel influencer can. Consider this when selecting the right person for the job.

False Limitations

It is wrong to assume that influencer marketing on Instagram is enough. In fact, you should contract with several different influencers, each working in their natural environment.

When you are looking for an influencer, analyze his audience ahead. Try to find those who have diversified followers from different age groups. It would be good to find such influencers whose followers have not more than 500 subscribers. It means these are most likely real people. Their audiences are and should be different. This way you can guarantee that more people will find out about your product or service.

If you stick with only one social media platform, it is unlikely that your influencer marketing attempt will really pay off. Therefore, be prepared to invest in order to improve your brand awareness and grow sales volumes.

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Wrapping Up

Everything new is well-forgotten old and influencer marketing on Instagram is no exception. Celebrity endorsements have been on top of popularity since the 80s. Nevertheless, influencer marketing is a relatively new way that employs well-known mechanisms. You have to pay third persons who have the power to get your product or service in front of many people. However, these are usually ordinary people who are running blogs about parenting, healthy living, fashion and so on. They are not models, movie stars or singers but people who are a bit more popular than others. 

Therefore, before setting it up, carefully analyze your selected influencer, their earned media value, niche and other factors that impact the success of your advertising.

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About Annabel Johnson

Part time gamer, reviewer and blogger. Full time geek and tech expert!

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