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What Is One of the Biggest Challenges for Influencer Marketing?
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When you’re starting any new marketing efforts, it’s important to consider the potential challenges as well as the potential benefits. What are the benefits of influencer marketing? To name a few, influencer marketing increases brand awareness, has a high return on investment (ROI) compared to other types of marketing, and can help brands effectively reach their target audiences.
But what are the disadvantages of influencer marketing? And, what is the hardest thing about influencer marketing? This article will explore some of the challenges of influencer marketing and the steps you can take to overcome them.
What Makes Influencer Marketing So Difficult?
Like any other form of marketing, influencer marketing comes with some challenges. If it was easy, every brand would be taking full advantage of influencer marketing. So what is one of the biggest challenges for influencer marketing? These are some challenges you may encounter:
Finding the Right Influencers
For many marketers, the most difficult part of influencer marketing is finding and connecting with the right influencers. The right influencers for your brand can make wonderful, long-term partners, but it’s not always easy to locate those influencers in the sea of other social media users. 78% of marketers say they find it difficult or very difficult to find the appropriate influencers for their campaigns.
One way to alleviate the time and stress associated with finding your influencer partners is by using an influencer marketing platform. These platforms typically have built-in influencer discovery tools that help connect brands with the most suitable influencers. Marketers can input the qualities they’re looking for in their influencer partners, and the platform will return curated results.
Evaluating Campaign Performance
With any marketing campaign, you need to be able to measure performance and determine your results. That’s true of influencer marketing campaigns, too, but it’s not always easy to do. If you want to know “is influencer marketing more effective than other marketing efforts?” you need an effective way to measure and compare results.
To evaluate an influencer marketing campaign’s performance, you first have to know what you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Looking to improve your own social media presence? Drive conversions? Whatever your main goal for the campaign, track metrics related to that goal. Influencer marketing platforms can automatically track and report important metrics, simplifying this process.
Fake Influencers and Followers
One of the ethical issues in influencer marketing is people purchasing fake followers to artificially inflate their audience metrics. They can also purchase likes, views, and comments from click farms. This practice — known as influencer fraud — is a major concern for brands hoping to run influencer marketing campaigns. Around 68% of marketers have experienced influencer fraud in one form or another, and it can be incredibly damaging.
Influencers committing influencer fraud are much less likely to deliver the results you’re looking for since they have less influence over real social media users. Some red flags to look out for include strange follow-to-engagement ratios and comments that seem inauthentic or “spammy.” You can also use digital audit tools to look for fake followers. It’s better to find fake influencers ahead of time than to accidentally hire them for your campaigns.
Is Influencer Marketing Still Effective?
If you’re going to invest in influencer marketing, you want to know that it’s still an effective form of marketing. According to other marketers, it certainly is. 80% of marketers claim that influencer marketing is still effective, and many are backing up that belief by increasing their investment in influencer marketing efforts.
More than half of marketers even say that influencer marketing is the most effective trend in marketing. Very few can claim that influencer marketing is not an effective strategy with all the statistics that back it up. Of course, some types of influencer marketing are more effective than others. You need the right influencer marketing strategy paired with the right influencer partners to get the most out of your campaign. There are lots of opportunities in influencer marketing, brands just have to know how to take advantage of them.
How Lionize Can Help with Your Influencer Marketing
Dealing with all the challenges of influencer marketing can be overwhelming. Rather than trying to tackle these challenges alone, why not turn to an influencer marketing platform to make things easier?
Influencer marketing platforms like Lionize take all the hard work out of running influencer marketing campaigns. Lionize will help you find and recruit the best influencers for your campaign, manage the campaign, and report the results in a convenient dashboard. The platform will even automate payment and reactivation of high-performing influencers if you so choose.
Instead of spending hours each week managing your brand’s influencer marketing efforts, you can use Lionize to cut that down to minutes. Lionize is the perfect combination of artificial intelligence and real-world expertise. See how the platform works by scheduling a free demo today.
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