Due to the strong combination of impressive content and social power, influencer marketing has become one of the most preferred channels for the brands. The craze for this marketing technique has been growing rapidly and there are no signs of its slowing down in near future.
As a brand, you must be aware of the powers of influencer marketing and must have made contacts on the leading platforms, but you might not be aware of the issues faced the bloggers. Even the leading influencer marketing platforms and writers face a number of challenges making it difficult for the businesses to achieve desired results. These are challenges anyone from an influencer marketer to the writer at the blogging platform, anyone can face.
Though there are a large number of challenges in influencer marketing, I will cover only the major ones in this blog.
1. Measuring ROI
Every business needs to keep a record of their expenses and the return from the same to justify the expenditure on the channel. When it comes to influencer marketing, most of the times businesses end up registering on so many blogging websites, that that lose the track of their investment and then the return on the same.
This is not a new problem, as brand and agencies always find it difficult to measure ROI when it is concerned with the investment in content and social marketing.
Solution: As it is really hard to measure the direct financial return from the investment in influencer marketing, it will be better to look at other important non-financial benefits like web traffic, shares, increase in a number of followers etc. Though these numbers are not visible on the balance sheet, these figures still have a lot of value for your growth.
2. Finding the right influencer
Based on the business and the industry, it can sometimes be a really daunting task to find rich influencers. As today marketers are dealing with a completely new generation of the customers, they need to look for the influencers who can understand their requirements and can offer a solution through their blogs.
You visit any influencer marketing platform, and you will a big list of writers tagged in multiple categories. The same writer can be seen in fashion, education or any other category. This makes really difficult to decide the right choice for your business and niche.
Solution: To make the selection process easy, you should first understand your niche and customer base. It includes getting an idea of their habits, behavior and the people they follow. Based on the data collected, search the influencers in your niche. You can take help of different tools or platforms like LinkedIn, Blogmint etc. to find top influencers in your niche. After making a list of influencers, check their follower base, quality of content and pick the most suitable option.
3. Picking the right engagement strategy
Once you are ready with the list and the available resources of right influencers, the next task is to communicate with them. This is much easier said than done. Marketers find it really difficult to decide the right channel and source to engage with the influencers. There are so many influencers, but you cannot use the same strategy or channel to approach all of them.
Solution: The right idea to approach influencer is to first understand them what they like, what type of content they share and on which social media platforms they have their presence. This helps you get an idea of their interests and accordingly you will be able to decide right strategy.
Read their blogs and tell them about the same by sharing some insights and details of good content. You can also follow them on their social media profiles.
Conclusion
Though influencer marketing has so many challenges, by using right strategies, you can easily connect with the top influencers and can convince them to write for your products and services. To find right influencers, you can also take help of content marketplaces like Blogmint, where a number of bloggers register themselves to write for the brands.