Why Companies Fail At Influencer Marketing

Well, influencers know how to communicate on social media, making them an attractive commodity for brands and organizations aiming to capture massive digital audiences. A recent survey from Influencer Marketing Hub indicated that 60 percent of companies planed to raise influencer marketing budgets in 2024. In search of a solution to their social media marketing woes, some of these companies may be under the impression that partnering with the right influencer will generate the loyal following they’re looking for.

However, while many influencers are very good at promoting other brands, they don’t do it all by themselves. An effective influencer campaign is a highly collaborative process, typically involving the input of multiple employees. For this reason, companies cannot expect influencers to single-handedly strengthen their customer bases with the same expertise they’ve used to build their personal brands. Organizations operating under this notion will almost certainly waste the money they spend on an influencer partnership.

Successful influencers are talented at generating likes, views, shares and comments on their posts. So, it’s logical to assume that an influencer will be able to replicate the same outcomes for another business. After all, someone who excels at social media engagement should theoretically be able to draw attention to virtually anything on their platform. Right?

Building a personal brand on social media requires a skillset completely different from those necessary to promote someone else’s products or services. When influencers create their posts, they focus entirely on themselves. They aren’t telling someone else’s story or attempting to educate viewers about an external topic. Companies are mistaken if they believe that successful influencers possess an inherent ability to promote other products or services just as effectively as they promote themselves.

Let’s say a company hands an influencer a new product and tells them to research it and “work their magic.” The influencer might be able to recite the product’s features, but the promotion will probably sound inauthentic if the influencer has no real connection to this company. It might seem as if the influencer is just reading from a script, and one of the things that attracts consumers to influencers is the perception of authenticity.

When people encounter inauthentic social media posts, they skip them and search for something else that commands their attention. This means the company that employed this influencer will have wasted money and failed to generate additional visibility for its product.

Companies that hope to benefit from influencers may be under the impression that successful influencers work alone. Yes, influencers may be the only people featured in their social media posts, but that doesn’t mean they create content for these posts independently.

To speak about a brand with passion and authenticity, an influencer needs to understand the brand’s personality and connect on a personal level. Can an influencer genuinely understand a brand’s personality by merely examining its latest offerings or scrolling through its social media pages? No, they will need more help, preferably from the same people who constructed this brand’s personality in the first place: the company's marketing and public relations professionals.

Unlike influencers, marketing and PR pros specialize in creating stories around products or services and can bestow essential storytelling techniques to influencers during content development.

Rest assured, if you’ve ever seen a compelling piece of influencer marketing content, it’s from an influencer who may have received coaching from a company’s marketing and/or PR team. It’s up to these experts to immerse the influencer in the company’s brand identity by helping them understand the long-term psychological and emotional benefits of a product and the underlying problems that the company is trying to solve.

Becoming immersed in a company’s brand identity allows an influencer to develop a genuine connection with a company. When influencers don’t have to feign enthusiasm for the subjects of their posts, they can easily promote other companies’ products or services in their particular, authentic style.

Influencers must stand out to succeed, often by creating humorous or thought-provoking content. These are the characteristics an influencer’s audience expects in their posts, even when paid to promote another’s brand. When a piece of influencer marketing content feels natural and on-brand, the influencer’s audience is likelier to follow the influencer’s advice or engage.

Companies with too much stock in influencer marketing are in for a rude awakening. Effective influencer content requires strategizing with a brand's marketing and PR professionals. Without that support, the influencer won’t be able to connect with the company, and the resulting content will not fulfill its intended purpose. So, if a company plans to raise its influencer marketing budget, as many say they’ll do, they’d better be prepared to devote time and effort to helping influencers do their jobs.