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Influencer marketing is the magic word of mouth strategy we all strive for, but on steroids - the steroids being the power of the entire internet.
- Jenny Beres is the cofounder and president of Pink Shark PR and Pink Shark Studios. Jenny helps her clients get rich, famous, or both by leveraging the power of influencer marketing to create engaging and exciting campaigns.
- Beres says that influencer marketing is often misunderstood and misused, but when used correctly it can have a big impact.
- There are three main things people get wrong when it comes to influencer marketing: They never actually ask for the sale, they think one post will be enough, and they don't give influencers enough direction.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more.
Influencer marketing.
It's the magical misfit of marketing, the supposed sales heavy-hitter that 49% of modern consumers depend on to make buying decisions, the branding unicorn that generates 8X the ROI, and yet it's the only marketing strategy where its success has been accepted as an outright mystery. We just throw products up on an influencer's platform and if it works, it works. If it doesn't, we complain and write off influencer marketing like a scorned lover.
As a long-time influencer marketing and sales pioneer, this approach to influencer marketing never ceases to amaze me. Influencer marketing is the magic word of mouth strategy we all strive for, but on steroids - the steroids being the power of the entire internet.
Candidly, there's been a lot of disappointment around influencer marketing. A lot of high hopes and half-baked efforts, with the results to match. And frankly, this comes from mismanaged expectations and abuse of the strategy as a whole.
Courtesy of Jenny Beres
Jenny Beres.
So why are your campaigns - complete with glossy pictures of influencers enjoying coffee under their perfectly coiffed Christmas trees - barely getting your sponsored posts any real, sales-producing engagement?
As someone who has fixed more broken influencer campaigns than a plumber fixes toilets - I once took a profitable beauty company that had zero Instagram presence and no influencer sales to 1,500 influencer-generated sales in just two days after launching a campaign, leading the COO to be so overwhelmed that they begged me to please turn the campaign off - I can identify a few big areas in which marketing teams get influencer sales all wrong.
It really ramps up during the holiday season, when everyone wants a piece of the ROI pie, by throwing influencer-shaped spaghetti against the wall. Followers will enjoy your pretty pictures, the influencers will enjoy the free products, and maybe their audience will click and buy at random, but why would you leave your revenue to random chance?
You don't pay an influencer over $5,000 to be random. The good news? It's a much easier fix than you think.
Here are the three major reasons why your influencer campaigns are tanking this holiday season, and how to save them just in time to fa-la-la-la-la out of 2019 and ring in Q1 flush with influencer-generated cash.