The Benefits and Challenges of Influencer Marketing

Photo credits: @alexostyn

Nowadays, some of the most effective forms of marketing revolve, in some way or another, around highlighting real people. From having a customer-centric approach, to letting your employees humanize your brand’s content, there’s no doubt that people prefer to interact with people over brands. 

A powerful resource for brands that want to foster a human touch and tap into peer-to-peer marketing is leveraging the social presence of creators admired by your audience—after all, 70% of consumers say they trust the opinions of influencers as much or more than their real-world friends, and 60% of marketers think influencer content performs as good or better than their own branded content.

However, although working with influencers can bring many benefits to your business, the industry is becoming increasingly complex and challenging to navigate with so many categories, metrics, tools and platforms.

For this reason, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of influencer marketing, and key touchpoints of a successful campaign is essential when it comes to maximizing results. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the main benefits and challenges you can expect from this rewarding marketing strategy, to ensure you can make the most out of your influencer campaign.

The Benefits of Influencer Marketing

• It’s cost-effective. One of the main benefits of influencer marketing is that it allows you to expand your reach, maximize your awareness, and boost your conversions without having to spend too much—especially considering its ROI potential, as for every $1 spent with influencer marketing, companies have been able to generate $7.65.

• It helps you cut through the noise. Opening your business and brand up to new audiences and opportunities is tough work. Because influencers are thought leaders—already respected by their community, who trust their word and actually act upon their recommendations—working with creators represents a valuable avenue for any brand looking to cut through the noise. You will work with someone who already speaks to the exact audience who buys what you sell.

• It’s excellent for social spreading. More than helping you make that first impact, creators can easily and effectively spread your message among those who actually matter to you, representing a direct channel between your brand and your target audience. Working with strong brand-match influencers will add a layer of relevance and validity to your brand message. 

• It facilitates diverse messaging. More often than not, brands have to test different concepts and messaging to understand what speaks better to different target audiences. Because influencers already know how to interact with their community and what resonates with them, you don’t need to spend any resources to test and adjust your communication—you can trust their expertise and leave it up to them. That way, you can easily have a personalized message that speaks to different groups of consumers. 

• It can start a snowball effect. Another benefit of working with content creators is that they inspire not only their audiences, but other creators, too. So, there’s a higher probability of starting a snowball effect when it comes to your product or campaign concept, maximizing your awareness even further. To illustrate, our campaign with L’Oréal Paris, #WonderWaterWhip started with 12 influencers whipping their hair for a TikTok challenge, and eventually got picked up by other creators and users, currently amounting 4.9B views.

The Challenges of Influencer Marketing

• Your influencer selection has to be spot on. Choosing the influencers that will be the defacto faces of your brand is one of the most important steps of the process, and is crucial in determining your results. Selecting influencers who are a good fit for your brand and product is key for authenticity—a non-negotiable element for campaigns to resonate with today’s audiences. So, although time-consuming, you shouldn’t spare any effort in the influencer selection process.

• There is little room to make mistakes. Making influencers visualize the ideas that you have in mind is essential for a successful partnership. For this reason, the influencer briefing must be as detailed as possible to avoid the need of content reshooting. If there’s a mistake or missing information in the influencer briefing, a reshoot can cost brands money and time. 

• Analytics can be confusing. While creators provide the stats available in the social platforms they work with, an in-depth analysis of any campaign goes much beyond that. Vanity metrics will only get you so far, and an assessment of other elements—such as sentiment analysis, a comparison of influencer performance and against benchmarks, conversion rate, among others—is key for a holistic overview. 

• A rapport is needed. It is important that brands trust the influencers they choose to work with. Trust in their content creation capabilities; that they understand the business, brand and product; and that they know best how to engage with their audiences. That is why working with influencer marketing agencies can help you to pinpoint someone who can best do the job that you are looking for.

To ensure you can fully take advantage of working with content creators, it is important to be aware of the pros and cons that come with building an effective campaign, so you can positively benefit from them.

Now that you already know some of the challenges you might face, you can make better and informed decisions.

If you need help in the process, don’t hesitate to