Top 5 Influencer Complaints About Marketers

Learn how to solve these common collaboration issues

Influencer marketing works when you, the marketer, and the influencer are on the same page creating amazing content for the targeted community. But unfortunately, sometimes there are some roadblocks that interfere with that symbiosis.

On Snapfluence, we work to educate the influencers on how they can put their best foot forward to drive the best results for brand collaborations.

On this blog, we want to share resources to help you build partnerships with influencers.

Here are the most common influencer complaints we hear about dealing with marketers and ways you can prevent them.

1. They have unrealistic expectations for timelines

This complaint usually appears during large-scale campaigns that require a great deal of content creation, but this can pop up on any influencer campaign.

When you’re building the campaign schedule, you want to allow flexibility to give the influencer time to create and post on a cadence that is natural to their feeds. Obviously, you need content to go live during specific times to support your brand campaigns. We encourage building posting “windows” to give influencers some flexibility to post at the time that feels best to them, but also allows you to have a general idea of when the content will go live.

2. They don’t communicate ALL of the directions

This is the kicker, the queen bee, the holy grail of all complaints. This is the origin of every complaint.

We work to provide all of your expectations, content types, required tags, do’s and don’t, approval dates, etc. in a neat webpage for the influencers so they can quickly reference it. But occasionally there is still an issue with the content shared by influencers. Sometimes it’s because they didn’t read through all of the content guidelines, other times… It’s because the marketer forgot to include details that were sensitive to the brand.

For the content guidelines to be effective and for the influencer to share exactly what they’re supposed to, it’s imperative that the marketer goes through an exhaustive approach to the content do’s and don’ts for the campaign.

3. They require content approvals

This relates to the complaint above but can be much more devastating to the campaign. When the marketer doesn’t work on building the proper content education for the influencer, they’ll too often lean on content approvals— requiring the influencer to submit their posts for sign-off from the marketing team before sharing. This is counter to what makes influencer marketing great and a habit that we strongly discourage. Content approvals reduce the authenticity of posts and create unnecessary delays for the campaign. Rather than forcing this burden on the influencer, take the time to provide influencers with ample education up front, clear guidelines on what to do and not do, and then have trust that they know how best to reach their audience.

4. They try to force overly salesy or spammy messaging

Influencer marketing works because influencers are able to build authentic brand awareness with followers that trust them. This is totally lost when you force a spammy message on the influencer in an effort to aggressively drive sales. “Link in bio”, “Use promo code…:”, we’ve all seen these posts and had the same reactions. This is born from a misunderstanding of where influencer marketing exists on the path to purchase. Good influencers don’t like being lumped in with the spammy posters we’ve all seen. And most importantly, your customers don’t appreciate the insincere messaging from influencers they look to for genuine endorsements. Rather than trying to force these posts on your community, focus on building awareness with authentic messaging.

5. They try to avoid disclosures

You may think that the influencers want to avoid disclosing that a post is sponsored, but for many branded posts make up a significant part of their income. They have their livelihood on the line. They need to protect their ass just as much as your brand does. At this point, most brands and influencers understand the severity of the situation and include the proper disclosures. But there are still lingering brands that either out of ignorance or arrogance, want to avoid disclosures on their influencers’ posts. This is another tactic that damages relationships with influencers and also damages customer perceptions of your brand.

Download our free ebook on influencer marketing FTC disclosures to coach yourself and your influencers on the proper way to avoid confrontations with the FTC.

Source: B2C