Lazy Influencer Marketing isn’t just unprofitable, it can actually turn an audience against you.

Avoid these mistakes made by an influencer worth $70 million for your next Influencer Marketing campaign.

I’ve been preaching the *right* way to do influencer marketing for years so that this doesn’t happen. When you take the easy route, the brand and the influencer both lose credibility. You’re about to see why.

Meet Tony Romo. Or maybe, you’ve already met him. NFL Superstar, 700K on Instagram, and a $70M net worth. He’s one of the best examples of how NOT to do Influencer Marketing.

This is an ad he did for Sketchers on Father’s Day. Tell me on a scale of 1 to 10 how much Tony Romo cares about Sketchers. It’s obvious that his audience doesn’t.

If it was one bad ad, it would be forgivable. But if you look at his profile, all but TWO IG posts since February 2020 have been an ad. And half of his comments look like this.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with using your audience to help brands get a message across. But it becomes a problem when all you do is promote. If we were in charge of running the Tony Romo x Sketchers campaign, here’s what we’d do differently:

Tony Romo wouldn’t be posing like a model in a chair showing off his shoes. He’d be doing dad stuff. On Father’s Day. Casually barbequing, and he just happens to mention that he’s wearing Sketchers.

Influencer Marketing is a game of showing, not telling. We don’t care that a billion-dollar company wrote your caption for you. We want to know that you actually enjoy and use the product. The money is in the subtlety.

There are two main angles that you can use in a campaign: 1. The brand provided the influencer value, and the brand uses the influencer’s audience to show that YOU can also get value. 2. The influencer really loves the product, and the audience wants to be just like them.

Having an influencer be the star of a big-budget commercial is not Influencer Marketing. It’s just vanity. Create a high-quality experience for your influencer with your brand, and encourage them to promote you because of what you DO instead of what you PAY.

If you want to learn more about how our agency helps brands scale profitably with Influencer Marketing, feel free to shoot me a DM! We’ve scaled 100+ DTC brands of all sizes, and we’ll continue to do it for years to come.

If this article taught you about how your influencer campaigns should look, feel free to share or retweet https://twitter.com/Cody_Wittick/status/1540469213088739328 it so we can spread the word. Thanks and enjoy your weekend!