6 ways to lose money while working with bloggers

Just some triste real-life stories from marketing specialists' job experience and some tips on how to avoid the same blunders.

In 2019, influence marketing is not a trend – it is a must-have SMM strategy that should be used by any promotional specialist.

The efficiency of the promotional assistance of influencers is supported by data. 60% of consumers are trusting writers and roughly 73% are looking forward to updates.

At first glance, it can be simple to work with influencers: consent to commercials — produce an ad — and take advantage of your earnings. But the budget is actually wasted more often than you expected. Here are a few ways that are only the money blown:

1. Trust the statistics of the account

A 10k account is certainly more spectacular than the 2k account, but should we pay as much attention to supporters and account statistics? The answer is yes and no. The answer. The data provided by various services can help to build the first impression, but you should not depend entirely on it.

Two thousand true followers who participate frequently with a page are more effective than 10k or 100k bots. Many feel that the higher the level of commitment, the more profit it will make, so that the budget will not be wasted. But it is crucial to remember that ER, love rate, speaking rate and views (stories/videos) and other involvement metrics are easy to buy. It's a lot cheaper than actually reaching high rates.

What can I do? What can I do? It is important to carry out a difficult analysis (not only an analysis of the data, but also the quality analysis, which means that commentaries are read and whether or not they are real), and to plan your work in order to protect your budget from being spent by the false public.

The worst experience we saw was the Bounty schemes, which were widespread for international crowdfunding initiatives. The idea of Bounty is to do a few little chores and to collect a certain amount of stakes for them after you join (stakes are parts of the Bounty funds). The duties are very simple — you only have to repost or merely like some posts. It is apparent that the company reaches a large public if the Bounty participants are conscientious.

In that way, people understood that you can make as many accounts as you like, purchase some "friends" on the exchanges—and here we go! Now every participant can be added to the programme under numerous accounts, perform easy measures that will provide no effect to the enterprise, and obtain extra stakes for it! Actually, the budgets of Bounty programmes are simply dispersed among participants and offer firms absolutely little advantage!

2. Select influencers by people's recommendations

We tend to trust these recommendations, but it can be a trap for influencer marketing. It is apparent that the same influencer promotes different products in different ways. However, even if the resemblance of the items is taken into account, the outcomes can be substantially different. For example, the location of the audience and the attitude of the blogger to the product may alter the result or just "burn out" the audience.

For example, a "big blogger" was recommended to the corporation involved in a technology project. They insisted, then, on resorting to that blogger who is truly specialised in digital business transformation to attract financing to their idea. Imagine the corporate management's disappointment when they found that there were many visitors but no investment. It was particularly upsetting when you consider that the post cost around $10,000.

Research is important to determine the impact of each influencer to the overall result of the campaign.

3. Use the same method for various players

Day and night you have created a brilliant piece that you think could be included in the "2019 Best Selling Text" collection, but your influence database contains automotive bloggers, young mothers and business coaches...

The practical aspect of marketing influencers reveals that the same material can not be distributed with multiple influencers. Even though bloggers have their own techniques, intonations and accents, in a similar sector. When the material is unified, the advertiser takes away indigenous advertising, which is the most valuable element of influence marketing! It turns out that you must create the opportunity to introduce something unique to each scenario.

What to do? What to do? Select a different approach: provide a studied business offer to a chosen blogger and propose a solution to the problem. Describe the product, assign a task, specify what you can do and let the blogger post. The influencer will reach his audience in the most natural way. That's the right thing to do.

Here is an example of cooperation on the subject of investment with a financial advisor. Following several fruitless interactions with various influencers that had been given explicit instructions on how to sell the product, an active financial advisor arrived on the horizon and decided to invite him to participate in the promotional campaign.

It is intriguing that what is to be promoted and how was not mentioned. The product itself was the only item detailed: its essential concepts, technology and advantages. And that's it. And that's it. During his speech, the adviser began talking about the product, offered his view enthusiastically and consistently said that the initiative may be invested in. This technique has enabled this financial opinion leader to draw an investment of $10,000 for the firm and earns himself well, as he received a percentage of all the investments he lured. That's what occurs when you reach the correct audience and approach when you work with the influencer.

4. Ask bloggers for poor marketing sales

Influencers are a terrific sales channel, but you will soon kill golden goose if you only want to sell all the time. We're all familiar with "banner blindness," so if you repeatedly ask influencers simply for sales, you must face something like "blogger deafness" one fine day.

What to do? What to do? The answer is apparent, not to sell directly, but to involve the public in brand communication. In this instance, creative and viral mechanics can be helpful.

Many advertising efforts today involve the sales funnels that warm up your audience, and other clever tactics of selling, crossing sales, and selling, rather than just "Buy it!" and "Our sweets are the sweetest in the world!" It is not about 'placement culture,' but about the inefficiency of advertising efforts calling for 'to buy now.'

Marketing of influence will unavoidably lead to funnels – this fact should be grasped and considered and used. Now when preparing campaigns, a proper "keep-in-touch" strategy needs to be developed, which starts by selling nothing but introduces the product and educates the audience.

5. Do not identify your objectives in numbers

As anywhere, chances rely on the money, but each influencer campaign should have its objectives established in numbers. These objectives may vary from simple post-click analysis measurements to extensive brand lift study.

What to do? What to do? Set goals in numbers all the time. Fix them if you need bloggers' and ambassadors' sales. And if you seek to increase awareness, engagement or other brand goals – design mechanics to increase brand awareness, engage your audience and maintain them. Measure the most accessible results and compare them to your objectives. Optimize them then.

6. Do not use equipment

Digital marketing includes practically all tools! For example, you can use canva.com for quick design, autoposting — SMMPlanner.com and Amplifr.com, analysing advertisements — mixpanel.com, automating customer accounts and marketing — countingworkspro.com. You have several tools to face an ocean of obstacles.

We noticed that some companies begin to use promotional codes. Yes, better than nothing! Yes, better than nothing! Promo codes, however, have some important disadvantages. For example, website viewers can forget or blend the promotional codes, do not enter them, if there is insufficient motivation, enter a code incorrectly and do not get the promised bonus, and influence people, meanwhile, can't often see when and how many people have used their promotional codes, which won't allow them to improve, add optimism and willingness to work.

What to do? What to do? Fluencers and ambassadors can use a great variety of instruments (like TrendKite.com), allowing you to flexibly set up tasks for bloggers with very different campaign goals, measure influencer results on one or more target actions and even pay every participating blogger automatically depending on the volume and quality of customers it has brought.

S

um-up

Recall that influencer marketing is a complex of several duties, which involve analysis, control and evaluation of results. Be warned that you can easily waste your budget by believing in the promises of bloggers and influencers or by blindly following recommendations and popular influencer choice tactics for publicity campaigns.

Mass glance, mass love and mass follow-up are the fundamental elements in our life. While Instagram struggles with the masses and even threats to hide loves, those who wanted to buy followers did this long before. Therefore always extensively research the accounts of possible ambassadors before starting working with them and thereafter do not forget to evaluate their effectiveness.

And pay for your business profit alone, of course, rather than for postings with inconsistent coverage and boring efficiency.