Influencer marketing continues to be a powerful tool for brands seeking to engage with their target audiences in a more authentic and relatable way. However, despite its growing popularity, digital influencer marketing comes with its own set of challenges. In this blog, we’ll explore both the benefits and the challenges of influencer marketing in today’s digital landscape. If you’re looking for how to find influencers, scroll down for things we consider before parting with a content creator. In the meantime, let’s start by looking at the benefits of influencer marketing.
Studies show that influencers produce as much as 11x more ROI than any other digital marketing approach. The benefits of influencer marketing are endless, but let’s focus on the top four reasons why influencer marketing is worth the investment:
Influencer content can be developed to target the entire funnel or just a single point. Key to supporting multi-funnel tactics, vibrant, thumb-stopping content generates awareness, while assets that are optimized by channel and include unique call to actions (CTA) can drive both consideration and sales.
A trusted resource for followers and fans, influencers are an authentic means for promoting a brand. 61% of consumers trust influencers’ recommendations—nearly twice as many as the 38% who trust branded social media content.
Pairing organic content with whitelisting enables brands to reach hyper-targeted audiences effectively. By leveraging whitelisting, brands can extend the reach of their organic posts, turning them into a continuous stream of messaging to key audiences. This strategy amplifies content beyond the influencer’s direct followers, allowing it to target specific demographics based on factors like interests, behaviors, and location. The benefits of collaborating with influencers and then whitelisting their content result is a more efficient way to maintain visibility, engage potential customers, and maximize the impact of content over time, ensuring it resonates with the right people long after it’s originally posted.
Influencer partnerships can be a very cost-effective way to gather brand content while also promoting the brand on influencer channels. Utilizing smaller, highly engaging influencers can support content development while bypassing high cost production shoots and ultimately lowering yearly overhead costs. This allows brands to create a mix of evergreen, holiday, and campaign-specific assets throughout the year.
While the benefits of collaborating with influencers are numerous, it also comes with its share of challenges that brands must navigate. From selecting the right influencer to measuring the impact of campaigns, these hurdles can make it difficult for brands to achieve their desired outcomes. Understanding the challenges of influencer marketing is crucial for businesses looking to maximize the potential of influencer partnerships while avoiding common pitfalls. Some of the challenges of influencer marketing are as follows.
One of the primary challenges in influencer marketing is identifying the right influencer to represent your brand. It’s not enough to choose someone with a large following; their audience must align with your target demographic, and their values must resonate with your brand’s identity. Brands often struggle to find influencers who genuinely connect with their products, leading to inauthentic content that doesn’t engage followers. It requires in-depth research and a careful evaluation of an influencer’s audience engagement, past collaborations, and reputation to ensure they are a good fit. Selecting the wrong influencer can damage both the brand’s and the influencer’s credibility. Read below for more on how Socialfly approaches influencer identification.
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) for influencer marketing is a major challenge due to the difficulty of tracking direct outcomes. While metrics like clicks, impressions, and engagement can be quantified, understanding the long-term impact on brand perception, loyalty, and sales can be elusive. Influencer marketing often focuses on intangible benefits like brand awareness, which doesn’t always translate into immediate sales or measurable growth. Additionally, the difficulty of isolating influencer-driven results from other marketing efforts complicates the evaluation process. Without clear, standardized tools to measure the ROI, brands can struggle to justify their marketing spend and optimize their strategies.
In influencer marketing, authenticity is key to success, but it’s also a significant challenge. As audiences become more savvy, they can quickly detect when an influencer’s content feels disingenuous or forced. If an influencer promotes products they don’t truly believe in, it can lead to a loss of trust with their followers, negatively affecting the brand’s image. This makes transparency essential. When influencers fail to maintain authenticity, campaigns may backfire, leading to public backlash, unfollows, or even canceled partnerships. Brands must prioritize influencers who authentically align with their products and maintain trust with their audience for successful collaborations.
Social media algorithms are constantly evolving, making it difficult for influencers to maintain visibility and engagement with their followers. As platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube adjust their algorithms, influencer content may be shown to fewer people, limiting its reach and effectiveness. These changes can significantly affect the performance of influencer marketing campaigns, making it challenging for brands to predict results. Staying ahead of algorithm shifts and adapting strategies is vital for maintaining a successful influencer marketing strategy.
Influencer fraud is a known issue in the industry, where some influencers inflate their follower counts using fake accounts or bots to appear more popular than they are. This can skew the effectiveness of an influencer marketing campaign, as brands may unknowingly invest in influencers with low engagement and fake followers. Brands need to verify influencers’ authenticity by using tools to analyze engagement rates and ensure their audiences are real and engaged, avoiding wasted marketing budgets on fraudulent accounts.
As mentioned above, how to find influencers can be a challenging task in itself. There are three key things to remember when identifying influencers for your campaign. To find influencers, begin by identifying your campaign’s objectives and target demographic to determine the ideal type of influencer. Next, use influencer marketing platforms like Sprout Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger), which allow you to search based on metrics such as engagement rates, follower count, and niche. Social media platforms themselves are also valuable tools for discovering influencers—search relevant hashtags, trending topics, or look at brand mentions to uncover potential partners. Finally, research your competitors’ campaigns to see which influencers they collaborate with, and reach out to those influencers who align with your brand’s goals. Once the influencer is identifies, reach out to see if they are interested in partnering – and all the magic happens from there!
If you’re interested in learning more about how Socialfly can support your influencer marketing needs, get in touch with us today!
Written By: Angie Bolotin, VP, Influencer Marketing & Client Partner
