Many marketers sponsor influencer content expecting an overnight boom in their sales or app downloads.
While a boost is usually apparent after influencer content is published, often the results initially seem disappointing for first timers especially against all the hype surrounding marketing’s hottest new channel.
Some marketers even question why so many brands are raving about influencers if their first campaign fails to deliver the results they planned.
The answer is because these brands have figured out how to play the influencer game, and it’s all about strategy – not an overnight sensation.
The key is to wait, yes it’s frustrating, but it’s the only way to accurately measure your results and therefore appropriately steer your strategy in the optimal direction.
Once a piece of content is published on the internet, unless the creator or the publisher deletes it, it’s there forever.
The views that content gets will increase over time.
Arbitrarily drawing the line for establishing if your key performance indicators have been met at 24 hours is not helpful.
For example, if the content is uploaded on Thursday but the influencer gets most of his traffic at the weekend then counting the views on Friday will not be a fair representation of the content’s true performance.
It is much better to wait a week or even a month before tallying the results, and even then the views will keep going up – possibly even exponentially if the influencer is growing.
If the results are not what you predicted, ask yourself why.
Did the influencer have the wrong audience demographic? Was the price you negotiated too high in the end? Was the content too much like an ad?
This article has more reasons your influencer marketing isn’t working.
Learn from your first flurry into influencer marketing, although in many cases the first attempt makes good it is not uncommon for it to take a few campaigns before the results deliver your expectations.
Often influencer marketing requires a certain amount of trial and error in order to optimize the process and therefore the results – the second part to the waiting game.
Use your analysis to work out which creators are working best for you, what are they doing differently in their content to the ones that did not work so well?
Take your assumptions forward in your next influencer brief, either rehiring your best return on investment influencers or testing new influencers.
Repeat your now optimized process, your results should be improved.
Brands who keep with influencer marketing, continually optimizing with each campaign, are the ones who win.
In the short term marketers have to wait to get accurate results from sponsored content, in the longer term trial and error is usually the way to a successful influencer marketing strategy – don’t expect to strike gold overnight.
