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The top challenges of influencer marketing and their solutions

By Tim Murphy

Influencer campaigns build trust, but only if marketers find the right match.

Many consumers can see through traditional advertising, and this has pushed marketers to collaborate with social media influencers. These collaborations can increase brand awareness and make campaigns appear more authentic. However, influencer marketing comes with challenges, such as finding the right influencers, maintaining regulatory compliance, spotting impostors and fake followers, letting go of control and measuring ROI.

To create an effective campaign, marketers should understand the top influencer marketing challenges and how to overcome them.

1. Finding the right influencers

Brands can partner with a wide range of influencers, from niche creators with a few thousand followers to A-list celebrities. However, the abundance of options can overwhelm marketers as they try to find the right fit.

To narrow the search, marketers can look for influencers who meet the following criteria:

• Audience overlap. To maximize campaign relevance and engagement, the influencer's audience should share similarities, such as demographics and interests, with the brand's audience.
• Value match. Campaigns feel more authentic if influencers share values with the brands they promote. For example, a cruelty-free skincare brand might partner with a vegan beauty influencer who advocates for animal rights.
• Creates high-quality content. Influencers who consistently create visually appealing, unique and high-quality content reflect positively on the brands they represent.
• Aligns with the campaign's goal. The ideal influencer often depends on the objective. For brand awareness campaigns, mega-influencers -- those with over a million followers -- can offer broad exposure. If the campaign focuses on sales, marketers might collaborate with micro-influencers -- those with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers -- who have close-knit communities and high engagement rates that are more willing to purchase a product.

Beyond these criteria, marketers should also research the influencer's past for any controversial behavior that could damage the brand's reputation, such as excessive partying or illegal activities. Influencer marketing platforms, such as TikTok Creator Marketplace and Sprout Social, can help marketers identify potential partners, assess content history and any controversial posts.

2. Maintaining regulatory compliance

Some influencers, especially those with smaller followings, might not know about advertising regulations, such as the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) guidelines on endorsements and testimonials. This law requires influencers to disclose any material connections to a brand, such as payments or free products.

To avoid legal penalties, marketers can educate influencers about FTC rules and offer clear instructions on how to disclose partnerships properly. For instance, they might instruct influencers to use hashtags, such as #Sponsorship or #Ad, on all promoted social posts.

3. Spotting impostors and fake followers

People can buy fake followers and likes on social media to artificially inflate their audience size and engagement rates. Marketers must know how to spot this manipulation so they can avoid impostors.

To identify an impostor, marketers can look for the following signs:

• Unusual follower-to-engagement ratio. A YouTube creator with over a million subscribers whose videos consistently receive less than 3,000 views is a sign that the influencer bought fake followers. Micro-influencers can use this tactic to pose as mega-influencers.
• Few posts. An Instagram account with few posts but a high follower count is a red flag. Authentic growth typically coincides with consistent posting and audience engagement.
• Generic and irrelevant comments. Engagement that consists primarily of generic comments -- such as "Nice post!" -- can indicate the use of bots, which are programs that automate actions on social media, or engagement pods, which are groups of users who agree to comment on each other's posts to boost engagement artificially.
• Sudden spikes in followers or engagement. As people buy followers and likes, their follower count and engagement can increase rapidly with no viral content to account for it.
• Suspicious follower profiles. Influencers who have many followers with no profile picture, meaningless usernames and little activity can indicate an inflated follower count.

Marketers can manually check for fake followers, but this can take considerable time, especially if the brand partners with many creators. Influencer marketing tools, such as Modash and HypeAuditor, can automate the process.

4. Letting go of control

Marketers might have detailed campaign visions in mind, but overly scripted advertisements won't resonate with an influencer's audience. Instead, marketers should leave room in their campaigns for influencers to be themselves.

For instance, instead of a word-for-word script, marketers can share a few talking points with the influencer and trust them to deliver them in a way that resonates with their audience. This approach balances authenticity with brand goals.

5. Measuring ROI

Although social media platforms track engagement metrics, such as impressions and likes, these KPIs don't always translate to ROI. For instance, if an influencer's post on Instagram gets thousands of likes but doesn't increase sales, the collaboration might not be worth the investment.

Common goals of influencer marketing and their associated KPIs include the following:

• Brand awareness. Impressions, reach and follower growth.
• Sales. Conversions, affiliate link performance, promo code redemptions and customer acquisition cost.
• Engagement. Likes, comments, shares and engagement rate.
• Website traffic. Clickthrough rate, traffic from influencer links, unique visitors and the search volume of an organization's website name on major search engines.
• Lead generation. Email sign-ups, contract form submissions, gated content downloads and event registrations.

Influencer marketing platforms like CreatorIQ and Traackr can help marketers track KPIs. For more advanced tracking, brands can integrate these platforms with multitouch attribution (MTA) platforms. These tools assign credit for conversions to multiple touchpoints. For instance, if a user likes an influencer's post about a vacuum, then searches for the vacuum on Google and orders it a week later, MTA tools can track the influencer's role in that sale.

Key takeaways

Influencer marketing can help brands connect with consumers more authentically. Yet, marketers must vet influencers to reach the right audiences and avoid reputational damage. Additionally, they must balance brand control with creative freedom to set their campaigns apart from more traditional advertising.

Brands new to influencer marketing can start with one collaboration at a time to avoid becoming overwhelmed. As marketers become more experienced and learn to work with multiple influencers simultaneously, they might consider influencer marketing platforms and MTA tools to streamline discovery, compliance and ROI tracking.

Tim Murphy is site editor for Informa TechTarget's Customer Experience and Content Management sites.