Influencer marketing has now earned the prime spot for digital marketing for millions of businesses worldwide. And while tons of them saw a definite success of including influencer marketing in their strategies, there are still marketers who haven’t tried it just because of some myths and misconceptions holding them back. And if certain thoughts are holding you back from trying influencer marketing, you’ve come to the right place as we’re about to prove some of the most popular misconceptions about influencer marketing wrong.
Here are seven myths that are still floating around that should’ve long been forgotten!
Influencer Marketing Is Ineffective Due To Fake Accounts
Paying an influencer to promote your product only to find out their followers are fake is a story nobody likes to be a part of. However, while some influencers did try to inflate their follower count by purchasing fake followers, this has now become a practice of the past.
That’s so not only because influencer marketing has grown significantly in popularity over the last year but also because there are free tools to detect if an influencer has fake followers. This, naturally, has dissuaded creators from buying their fans.
Of course, chances are there will always be some degree of fake profiles making up the follower count, but there are some definite measures brands can take to assess the real situation. You can read about that in one of our older articles on choosing the right influencer for your brand. Yet, of course, you could always skip the hands-on work and rely on a tool to figure out the count of fake followers for you!
Influencer Marketing Is Only Suitable For Brand Awareness
Well, that’s just not true – influencer marketing can help you achieve various goals, including consideration and conversion. In the early days, influencer marketing did consist mainly of brand shoutouts and giveaways, but now there are plenty of influencer marketing campaign types that go beyond brand awareness, allowing creators to be a part of every step of the buying journey.
Influencers are irreplaceable in educating your possible customers on your product – a how-to, a Q&A session, or just a good old recommendation can work wonders in leading your clients from interest to a decision. And talking about the actual sales, you can always create personal promo codes for your creators or ask them to include affiliate links in their posts. That would also allow you to track the campaign’s success in real-time and count actual purchases done via the promotion of your influencer.
Influencer Marketing Is Expensive
First off is the case of campaigns created by big brands collaborating with even bigger influencers. Looking at those, you can’t help but think that their success came with a lofty price tag. However, not every brand needs this, and influencers don’t always come with rates that might cost you your whole marketing budget.
Enter micro-influencers, who are the absolute rage these days! By collaborating with smaller-scale influencers, you can reach just the same (if not better!) rates of engagement and solid conversion rates. If you’re interested in working with one of them, read more about the benefits of working with micro-influencers in this article.
Second – the idea that influencer marketing can only be done by working with a marketing agency. Yeah, there’s always the option to trust everything to an agency, but that absolutely comes with its own price tag and isn’t always a trustworthy mean to reach the best results with influencer marketing.
Here’s the solution to that – working with an influencer marketing platform like Agenic, where you will be making all the decisions, and we’ll run the campaign for you, all the while cutting the costs up to 20 times. Sounds intriguing, right?
So, as you can see, there are plenty of ways to harness influencer marketing with all kinds of budgets (and even almost non-existent budgets).
REDUCE MANUAL WORK OF RUNNING INFLUENCER CAMPAIGNS
BY 80%
The Best Influencers Are Those With A Large Number Of Followers
This is probably the most common misconception about influencer marketing, where brands
Only choose to work with influencers who have accumulated tons of followers. However, there are plenty of much more important metrics to focus on when choosing an influencer to work with.
Working with a mega-influencer won’t do any good for your brand if their followers aren’t engaging with the posted content. So, to get the most from influencer marketing, creators have to have an engaged audience – one that interacts with the content by liking it, sharing, and commenting. In short, the best choice, in this case, is an influencer whose audience is already interested in the niche your brand is in and is actively engaging with the content posted by the creator of your choice.
Running An Influencer Campaign Is A Tedious Job
Absolutely, if you choose to do it completely on your own. Then, you’ll be dealing with sourcing, contacting, briefing, approving content, babysitting, coaxing out reports, and measuring the success of your campaign by yourself. Oh, and add manually, too!
However, there’s absolutely no need to carry the burden alone when you can simply rely on one of the MarTech platforms that will do all these things for you. Of course, we’d like to suggest you try our own platform, Agenic, but only because we know that we can definitely solve all these problems in just one go. All you’d have to do is fill in a short questionnaire about your brand, and we’ll do the rest automatically (yup, even sourcing!).
There’s No Way Of Measuring The Success Of Influencer Campaigns
If you want to spend your marketing budget wisely, you have to be able to measure your campaign’s success. With influencer marketing, though, there’s one catch, and it is choosing the right KPIs that are aligned with your campaign goals to measure how well your campaign performed.
For that, marketing technologies exist that allow you to track both qualitative and quantitative KPIs. Measuring actions like clicks, impressions, views, and comments is a great help in measuring brand engagement and awareness generated by your campaign. Now, to measure conversions, you can always rely on affiliate links or personalized promo codes that will give you the exact number of purchases made via them. While measuring the revenue generated from the campaign or the earned media value will help you calculate the ROI of your campaign and make data-based marketing decisions further on.
Hiring More People Is The Only Way To Scale Influencer Marketing
There’s no denying that working with several influencers and running tons of campaigns at the same time is the fastest way to scale up. However, with the added number of campaigns comes the additional workload of managing it. Now, hiring more managers to control it all might seem like the only solution if you want to go big with your influencer campaign, but there’s another way to get on top of your growing marketing needs.
Say you have a small team or managers working on your influencer campaigns. Chances are, they are running the campaigns manually, and adding more things onto their plate would lead to a definite overload. Instead of hiring new personnel, you could always try using an influencer marketing platform, just like ours, to turn all the manual processes of running an influencer campaign into automatic. This way, you’ll give a tool that will allow your team to work more efficiently while at the same time expanding your influencer marketing reach even further.
In short – you don’t have to hire more people to run your influencer marketing when you can just give your team a way to work more efficiently.
End Note
Hopefully, this article was able to prove some of the most popular misconceptions regarding influencer marketing wrong to you. In fact, what we were truly aiming for here was to convince you that influencer marketing is, in fact, a worthy addition to your strategy and will supplement any promotional means that you are now applying to your business.
After all, influencer marketing is definitely the ruler on social media platforms, and since half of the action on the internet is now happening there, you should absolutely try it. However, if you do have further questions you’d like answers to before you dive straight into the deep end of things – you can always contact us, and we’ll tell you more!
HUNDREDS OF INFLUENCERS ARE WAITING FOR YOU
