Here's how you can transform a failure in influencer marketing into a valuable learning experience.

Take the time to analyze what went wrong. Was it a mismatch between the influencer and your brand? Did the campaign messaging or content not resonate with the audience? Understanding the root cause is essential for preventing similar failures in the future. Seek Feedback: Reach out to the influencer and ask for their perspective on why the campaign didn't perform as expected. They might offer valuable insights into audience preferences, content format, or timing that you hadn't considered. Review Data and Metrics: Look at the data from the campaign, including engagement metrics, conversion rates, and audience demographics. This can provide concrete evidence of what worked and what didn't, guiding future decision-making.

When evaluating the impact of a failed influencer campaign, it's essential to dive deep into both qualitative and quantitative data. Look at engagement metrics such as comments and direct messages, which can provide more nuanced insights than likes or shares alone. Additionally, use tools like sentiment analysis to understand the emotional tone behind the feedback. This detailed approach helps in crafting a narrative around the data, allowing us to see not just what happened, but how people felt about it.

Transforming a failure in influencer marketing into a valuable learning experience can be challenging, but it’s essential for growth and improvement. Here are some strategies to turn setbacks into valuable lessons: Reflect and Analyze; After a failed influencer marketing campaign, analyze the data, metrics, and feedback to understand why. Consider questions like: Did the influencer resonate with the target audience? Was the content aligned with your brand’s messaging? Were the goals and KPIs realistic? Dig deeper to identify the root causes of the failure. Was it a poor influencer choice, ineffective content, or misaligned expectations? If at first you don't succeed try again and again.

Understanding what went wrong with the campaign is the first step in learning from the campaign. 1. Was it a misalignment of brands? 2. Was it the campaign narrative? 3. Was it the execution of the campaign narrative? 4. Was it the cadence of the campaign? Speaking directly to your audience and the influencer(s) involved will help you get the most direct feedback. It also shows brand transparency and a commitment to doing better in future. Look at campaign metrics - was there a steady decline in engagement or was there no engagement at all? This should help you ascertain where and when the campaign fell short to better inform future campaigns

When assessing the impact, I'd recommend getting a colleague who didn't work on the campaign to take a look through the campaign roadmap. If you've worked on a project for a long time, you can become blindsided by some of the key learnings - Allow someone to take a look who will have more of a holistic approach to analysing what went wrong, they might spot something that you've missed!

Understanding the root cause is crucial. Once there was a product, we sought influencers, and the targeted group of creators are graphic designers. This is for a wall hanger that can be customized. None of the reached influencers came to sign up with us for the campaign while understanding the root cause; they are also creators who are marketing similar products. We saw a conflict of interest there, and we changed our perspective. We reached out to homemakers who are stay-at-home moms who keep on decorating their homes. This was spot-on. The key learning from this is that understanding the root cause can open our eyes to figuring out the solution.

Engaging with feedback should be proactive and structured. Consider using surveys with specific questions tailored to uncover useful insights, rather than open-ended queries. This can be supplemented with a virtual focus group session to discuss the campaign in real-time. These approaches encourage more detailed feedback and demonstrate your commitment to improvement, enhancing brand trust and customer loyalty.

Failure is just a step of any learning process. Instead of focusing on mistakes, let’s view them as opportunities for growth and improvement. For me I have a 1 page after each influencer marketing campaign, this page is to celebrate the lessons learned and the progress made. I don’t call them failure after all, I call them “Need Improvement” . The improvement lies in that area between the influencer, audience, and the company’s feedbacks. Then we find the commonalities and work on them right away. The “first campaign” should have a “follow up campaign” with better targeting, better messaging, and as a result; better impact for sure.

It is a good practice to keep engaging with the audience at the end of the day; they are the decision-makers. Shooting them a message and sending them a questionnaire does not cost anything but lets you gain more insight into the failures. It is very important to get the reason rather than assuming. It may be that we are completely wrong in assuming things.

Much like when we reach out to creators to collaborate on activation ideas, its also important to get feedback directly from them on overall performance, too. You can build additional trust by letting influencers be completely open and transparent about a campaign, their content plans, your general direction, and what they would want to see next time. Regardless of whether it is positive or negative feedback, it's still a good opportunity to build relationships.

Adjusting your strategy should focus on iterative improvements rather than complete overhauls, which can disrupt what might already be working. Implement A/B testing for new elements to compare their effectiveness directly against previous tactics. This gradual integration helps mitigate risks and provides real-time feedback on what changes are truly enhancing the influencer campaign.

After learning the buyer persona and their pain points, we also need to evolve in picking the right influencer for these niches. And in any instance where we let go of some persona or add a new persona, we should also tweak the influencers we are working with.

Changing the campaign strategy or the content does not cause any harm, especially when the results are not great. It always takes a wise decision to tweak the plan rather than waiting till the last minute.

Taking action based on your key learnings can be challenging, but building out the right materials for your team to grow from these learnings is crucial. Failure is all a part of growth, and everybody recognises that. Campaign pivots, strategy changes, red flags - it will happen. It's just how you react to change when it does!

Moving forward, it's important to maintain a culture of resilience and learning within your team. Celebrate the learning process as much as the successes. Encourage team members to share their thoughts on what didn't work and why, fostering an environment of open communication and continuous improvement.

Do speak to the upcoming influencers and consider partnering with them too, who are also nano-influencers. Sometimes certain content from these influencers cracks and works well because of the effort they put into the content creation. Its all about them and the brand working hand in hand where the macro influencers are already established and tend to make any new experiments because of their already established audiences.

Build a small, close network of influencers to bounce some of your ideas off of. It will help you understand what influencers want to see, and it will help creators learn what happens behind the curtain for brand strategy.