WHY INFLUENCERS ARE USELESS & DAMAGING TO YOUR BRAND

Trying to grow your brand?

The Influencer trend seems to be continuing: hitting up a relevant person and paying them to blast your audience with sponsored posts promoting your merch, product, or service–but how is that working out?

No really?

I want KPI’s and OKR’s from you and not likes, impressions and views. People who know how to market and grow companies effectively don’t care about the vanity metrics! Followers and likes can also be purchased. 

There is literally a graveyard of case studies of influencer marketing gone wrong just ask Pepsi.

The above should tell you everything. They say, “there’s no thing as bad press.” I say, numbers don’t lie and these numbers suggest there is in fact bad press and sometimes, you cannot come back from that. 

Take a look at Pepsi before and after the Kendall Jenner influencer campaign.

After November, Purchase Consideration trailed back down to 23%, the lowest it’s been since April 2015.

Still thinking Influencers can’t be that bad? Ask Jello – I bet J-E-L-L-O is also uber happy with Bill Cosby being the first thing people think about when they think about their brand.

Influencers Can Damage Brands (and they have)

What started out as an interesting way to reach new niche audiences has now become an over-used and over-hyped marketing tactic that is doing very little to benefit businesses.

Perhaps one of the things that initially inspired brands to begin using “influencers” to their advantage were studies saying things like:

• “2.56 billion global mobile social media users, equaling 34% penetration; globally with 1 million new active mobile social users added every day” (We Are Social)
• In 2015, Facebook alone influenced 52% of purchase decisions amongst consumers (an increase of 16% from the prior year). (The Drum)

Unfortunately, the growing use of influencers has only done harm. That’s because, let’s face it: consumers are smart and getting smarter by the day.

Consumers see through your influencer’s unauthentic post in a heartbeat. They have their finger on the pulse of social media, and they know a sponsorship deal means they can’t trust anything so-called influencers say about your business.

This is very much unlike how people perceive the high-quality social advocacy posts that still exist. Although they’re rare, when a brand is able to dig up and promote posts from real users who weren’t asked to brag about your business (but simply wanted to), that has a huge positive impact on your marketing. (We will talk about micro influencers later).

With that said, influencers are an entirely different realm of advertising. If anything, when people see that your brand is using these influencers to promote your products, it can begin to make them feel like your brand is anything but authentic. After all, if you’re paying for social media attention, if you are paying for people to like your product…. what else is your brand faking?

In today’s consumer-driven economy where relationships and causes mean everything what does it say about your brand when you need to have an “influencer” post a pic of it along with the other number of things they post that week for other companies?

What if your influencer is also posting/promoting items you state your company does not stand for? Again, you will be losing credibility with people who really liked your brand.

It’s NOT New

The idea of throwing a celebrity behind your brand has been used for decades. However, if you do your research you will see that even celebrities can’t save a brand. Not only that, what happens to your brand when that celebrity of influence goes rogue, throws out a racial slur or begins fighting back and using vulgar language on social media.

Anyone here remember Tiger Woods and Buick?

“Sales of Buick vehicles were right around the 400,000 mark in 1999, when Mr. Woods signed the first of two five-year contracts with the automaker. But by 2007, yearly sales of the aging Buick brand fell dramatically to 185,791 units. Buick sales through October of 2008 tumbled 23.6% compared with the same 10-month time period last year, much more sharply than the 14.6% drop in car sales that the entire industry is experiencing.”

Take a look at how Buick is doing now.

Expensive “Results” With No Impact

In addition to damaging your brand, the “proof” influencers provide to backup the assumed positive impact they’ll be making for your business is usually inflated. Unless there is a real metric behind their post(s) that informs you about:

• User acquisition
• User behaviour/behavioural marketing
• Churn rate
• Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
• Or create further in-depth persona building

How will your brand grow without that influencer - if it grew at all?

One of the most valuable systems a business can adopt is a system known as pirate metrics. Named so because of the acronym created by the stages of this approach (AARRR), pirate metrics can make a huge impact on your business’ bottomline. If influencers include these in their offering, than you are onto something.

Pirate metrics include:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Revenue
• Referral

The problem is, influencer campaigns typically do not coincide with pirate metrics. At the most, a campaign might be able to get your sponsored posts a few likes (great for the influencer) or perhaps send someone through to your own social media page, but IS IT actually going to drive revenue on any scale?

If it does drum up sales what was the time delay? What was your return on investment (ROI)? How much did it cost you to acquire one user with your influencer? Is that a repeatable growth strategy?

What Are My Alternatives

So, what is your brand to do now that you have seen past the crowd of money-hungry influencers? How about try one of these three proven and timeless alternatives:

• Thought Leadership: People care about causes, and they want your brand to care too. Demonstrate responsibility and brand values through thought leadership. Demonstrate that you and your company are breaking trail and defying the norms.
• Collaboration: Collaborate with authentic and relevant industry leaders in a partnership that will prove mutually beneficial. Partnering with a cause you care about and bringing more attention to a cause is a great way to help a non-profit. If that can also support revenue streams while building your community that is a great way to create a trifecta of winning solutions.
• Genuine Partnerships: The authenticity will shine through and users will appreciate seeing your brand come together with another for a campaign or project.

These are three things that will help boost your brand’s presence in both the short-term and long-term as you look to build a solid reputation with your audience.

Or… Work with your brand evangelists or brand ambassadors. Those users who stick with you through thick and thin. You cannot buy their love. They tell you when they hate you. They tell you when they love you… but it’s unconditional and their feedback is paramount to improving your brand.

These brand ambassadors are your micro influencers and, in case you didn’t know, they are almost 7 times more effective than working with influencers with large followings. And it’s cheaper, too because it’s free!! 

What’s A Micro Influencer

SAP has done micro influencing so well! This is how they approach influencer marketing.

“Our Influencer marketing program at SAP is really about finding expert voices that are really influential to our buyers. We are not looking for celebrities, but for people that our buying audience really pays attention to, aspires to or is inspired by. We look for those types of influencers externally to see how we can work with them, to create programs and/or content that impacts the buyer journey.”

They measure impact and the involvement of users with micro influencers with tools such as Traacker and Sprinklr.

Don’t Be Cheap Or Easy. Use These Tested & True Growth Strategies:

1) Market Penetration. This is the least risky of business growth strategies but also has the lowest opportunity for growth. One way to increase your market share is by lowering your prices. For example, in markets where there is little differentiation among products, a lower price may help a company increase its share of the market. However, it is hard to compete solely on price so you will want to make sure you are the superior platform before you get into a game of rolling back prices.

2) Market Development. Another business growth strategy to think about is targeting new markets with an existing product. This is easier said than done - especially if you have mapped out your TAM, SAM and SOM and your user personas.

3) Product Development. A small company can expand its product line or add new features to increase its sales and profits. When small companies employ a product expansion strategy, they continue selling within the existing market. A product expansion growth strategy often works well when technology starts to change or when you have found a new need in the market.

4) Diversification. This type of growth strategy can be very risky! You will need to plan this stage very carefully. Marketing research is essential because a company will need to determine if consumers in the new market will potentially like the new products. Let’s never forgot the story of BuildDirect. We know how that ended. 

5) Account Management It’s a simple equation really. Key account management = organic growth. It comes down to getting more revenue from your current customers through strategic relationships.

With long-term relationships and collaboration with clients, key account managers grow each of their accounts into a larger revenue source for the company. Organic growth is a more reliable strategy to increase revenue than many other sales-based strategies.

Still On The Fence

If you are still considering using an “influencer” consider your 1, 3 and 5 year goals and objectives for your company. Will this “influencer” be part of your longevity or is it a short term play that may or may not pay out in dividends?

Go back to the top and think about Bill Cosby. Your influencer may be on top of their game, but what is hiding in their closet? Will your brand survive a scandal like that?

The last thing we want you to consider about “influencers” is that you need to be using past consumer data to continue to grow you business as long as you want your business operating.

Do influencers provide you the information and data you need about your customer base to continue growing? Or, would you be better off growing slowly and learning along the way (with actual customers) so you have data you can use for the years to come?