Influencer marketing is expected to be a $6.5 billion dollar industry in 2019. This is up from $1.7 billion in 2016.
Influence marketing is helping brands of all sizes big and small engage their dream customers, ignite communities, increase brand awareness and nurture powerful relationships. If you haven’t heard about influence marketing you must have been hiding under a rock.
As with anything in marketing, there are some marketers doing it right and are others who ruin it for the rest of us. Some are burning more bridges than they are building. Many are doing it without truly understanding the extent to which they are damaging relationships.
There are also agencies who claim to help brands big and small build relationships with an influencer marketing program. However, they wound up falling to spammy tactics and end up hurting the brand reputation without the brand marketer even knowing.
Every brand touch is an impression of your brand. If an agency or a member of your team is spamming the contact boxes of top industry or even micro-influencers with copy / paste spam messages begging for free tweets, I can guarantee they are hurting your brand more than helping you.
Influencer marketing is not about getting free tweets, Instagram story shoutouts and coverage.
Influencer marketing is not the same as earned media. Earned media = media you actually do something to earn. Many brands trick themselves into believing that they can skip valuing the influencers time investment in community as they lump it into “earned media.”
Agencies and Brand Need to Stop the Unethical Spam Tactics
Brand leaders need to get real, acknowledge spamming contact forms for free tweets, shoutouts and product reviews is not marketing!
Agencies that are falling to these lazy tactics in representation of the brand they represent need to quit damaging the brand reputation and trust of the clients who are trusting them. These brands are paying agencies to help them build relationships, not damage them through a series of spam and begging tactics. This is not earned media, paid media or influencer marketing, it’s spammed reputation damage.
You will get out of influencer marketing what you put into it
You will get out of influencer marketing what you put into it. If you invest time as a human in building relationships the payoff can be big. However, many brands fall to the spammy tactics and then blame it on the fact that influencer marketing isn’t working. The truth is the person running the program never took the time to learn the strategies and tactics that really work. They often skip researching influencers and send a generic blanket email or contact form desperately begging for free amplification.
Instead, brand and social marketing leaders wanting to test the waters with influencer marketing must always also think… “what is in it for the influencer?” How can I bring them mass value in working with our brand. The most successful influencer programs are when there is a partnership, when the brand and the influencer have common ground, beliefs, interests and a base to build a relationship. This is much of why micro-influencer marketing can be so successful for even brands with small budgets.
I developed episode 121 of the Social Zoom Factor podcast with a goal to help marketers brand new to influence marketing as well as seasoned veterans get the most out of their influence marketing programs.
The goal of this episode is to save you wasted time and help ensure you are establishing trust and a brand of integrity as you build, launch and execute your influencer marketing program.
I share with you tips in this podcast from my experience in working with brands of all sizes from startups to Fortune 100 brands helping them develop and execute influence marketing programs as well as from being an influencer myself. We get contacted by at minimum 10-20 brands per week wanting us to be an influencer for their brand.
In this 30 Minute Episode You Will Learn:
- Why and how brands are confusing spam with influence marketing
- How to choose the right influencers and avoid choosing the wrong influencers
- Importance of doing your research on influencers before reaching out to them
- The importance of the influencer being able to drive real action to help you achieve your business goals
- Why trust matters with influencers
- Building your team to succeed with influence marketing
- How to create value for the influencer as a top priority
- Importance of connecting the influencer with other people at your in person events
- Importance of respecting the influencer as a human being, not as a number to help you simply amplify your message
- How to decide if you should compensate influencers for their time