The Challenges of Instagram Influencer Marketing

by Alex Ditty November 9, 2015
November 9, 2015

And why it’s still worth the investment


Instagram_Influencer_Marketing_ChallengesWhen you try to implement an influencer marketing program on your own it can be fairly difficult. There are a lot of different aspects that contribute to the overall success of these programs. And staying on top of all of them isn’t an easy task for a social media manager who’s tasked with so many other responsibilities. These challenges can scare people away from implementing an influencer marketing program, but savvy social media marketers who are able to fully understand all of the factors that could hold back a campaign will be able to overcome them to find success in theirprograms. Many of these marketers turn to influencer networks like Snapfluence in order to efficiently run effective influencer campaigns that work.


Challenges of discovering influencers

The first challenge that you may face when trying to launch an influencer program is the difficulty of finding and recruiting the influencers for your campaign. Often, marketers will try to accomplish this by manually searching through Instagram for people who have a high following. But that’s an incomplete process that doesn’t always yield the best influencers who will actually drive engagement. You need to evaluate your influencers on criteria more than just their following but also on factors such as their engagement rates. You also want to be sure that the influencers match your brand’s persona. Once your find the influencers comes the tedious task of finding their contact information to recruit them into your program. This process of finding and recruiting influencers is one that even some of the most experienced social media marketers find difficult.


Why it’s still worth it:


Though this can be a difficult first step, the work you put in here will pay off throughout each stage of your promotion. Finding influencers who drive engagement with your target audience will give you the opportunity to generate awareness for your brand among people who previously wouldn’t have been exposed to it.


Challenges of activating influencers

Once you’ve identified the influencers and completed the recruitment, activating them for the campaign creates its own set of challenges. There are necessary steps to take such as creating the posting schedule and guiding the influencers’ content creation. The posting schedule serves the purpose of spreading the reach and content creation throughout the campaign’s duration. This ensures that the influencers’ content is properly allocated. Another challenge is creating guidelines for the influencers’ sharing to align it with your brand’s message. The coordination of these steps, having the influencers share the right content at the right time, can feel overwhelming; especially when you’re simultaneously managing your client relationships.


Why it’s still worth it:


Though it can feel overwhelming, the work here is really felt when you have the right influencers participating in your program. When you’re able to activate influencers who can authentically speak to their audience about your brand, you’ll feel the benefits. With the influencer campaign planning guide, you can gain a better understanding of the best practices that go into creating effective posting schedules and guidelines. This will simplify the influencer activation process for your brand.


Challenges of measuring ROI

During the campaign and at its conclusion, the measurement of its ROI will be paramount for your team. This is something that is critical to the success of your programs but isn’t easily done on your own without a measurement tool. We’ve heard horror stories from social media managers who’ve attempted to measure this on their own with dozens Instagram tabs and Google Docs to track their influencers’ posts. The fact that they’d be willing to go through such efforts shows the importance of this step. But it shouldn’t need to be so challenging or time-consuming.


Why it’s still worth it:


This necessary step is beneficial as it will help you and your team understand the campaign’s success and the factors that contributed to it.


Challenges of scaling

With all of these challenges compounded, the biggest aspect that even experienced influencer marketers have trouble with is that it is often hard to increase the scale of the programs. Discovering and activating a few influencers for a campaign is hard enough. When you’re trying to increase that number to a few dozen or more, the management of those content creators can be quite challenging. Because there is so much that needs to go into an Instagram influencer marketing campaign at each stage in order to make it successful, staying on top of these aspects can be difficult for anyone to do themselves.


Why it’s still worth it:


Influencer marketing programs on Instagram are very beneficial for your social media marketing and when you can increase the scale of these promotions and amplify them even more; you’ll see great results. This increase in the amplification is best accomplished when you work with a trusted partner like Snapfluence to accomplish all of these necessary tasks in a sustainable and efficient way.


These challenges shouldn’t scare you away from running an influencer marketing promotion on Instagram because when they’re done right, they’re extremely powerful.


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