Pros and Cons of Influencer Marketing

A Complete Guide for Brands – Influencer Marketing

It’s not an experiment anymore, it’s a reality. It’s no longer a “nice to have” in marketing budgets, but a standard marketing spend line item, alongside paid search and social ads. It makes sense because today, users are more likely to follow a familiar face on their feed than a billboard, and platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have made it easier than ever to create a genuine and engaged community around a niche.

However, this does not make the strategy a risk-free one. There’s a brand that’s made a creator partnership that made sales soar, and another that’s seen a single ill-timed partnership sink months of reputation building. It’s best to be honest about both sides of the coin: the positive aspects of influencer marketing for a brand and the pitfalls.

What is Influencer Marketing, Anyway?

Influencer marketing is essentially about collaborating with someone who has an audience of people who are interested in a particular topic, whether it’s beauty, fitness, parenting, tech, personal finance, and so on, and getting them to talk about your product in their own words. Unlike traditional advertising, it is not just about renting ads, it is about lending credibility that no media placement can buy outright.

Typically, influencers are categorized according to their reach:

• Mega influencers – more than a million followers, celebrity level reach.
• Macro influencers are those who have between 100,000 and 1 million followers. Macro influencers have 100,000-1 million followers.
• Micro influencers – 1,000 to 100,000 followers, usually more niche and engaged
• Nano influencers – less than 1,000 followers, hyper-local or hyper-niche credibility

The larger is not necessarily the better. While there are pros and cons to consider below, it’s important to remember that smaller creators can often provide more engaged communities at a lower price point, which is something to consider when you’re weighing the options.

The pros of Influencer Marketing

In-built trust and credibility

People who follow are trusted by consumers, and that trust is extended, even though consumers are skeptical of brand messaging. The product recommendation from a creator is not an advertisement, but a tip from a friend who has good taste. That’s particularly important for newer brands, or direct-to-consumer brands that haven’t established their own reputation — an influencer essentially vouches for you from the get-go, putting the distance between “never heard of this brand” and “I trust this brand enough to buy” at a minimum.

Greater visibility on platforms

One strategic partnership can get your brand in front of audiences that you would have to spend months building organically, or a lot more money on paid media. Creators know how to make use of reels, stories, live streams, and cross-collaborations with other creators to extend that reach even more, and platforms tend to distribute that native-feeling content better than a standard ad unit does.

The scale is vast: the big platforms have billions of monthly users and a successful creator understands which niche of that audience to invest your product in.

Content that continues to serve you

One of the lesser-known advantages of influencer collaborations is the amount of content that can be utilized. Product photos, testimonials, unboxing videos, and honest reviews made by influencers can be used on your website, paid ads, emails and more after the initial post has disappeared from everyone’s feed. A great way to ease the strain on an in-house creative team, and to keep your visual library fresh, current, and authentic without it being too polished and corporate.

Improved conversion rates and faster sales cycles

Since the recommendation comes in with the trust, followers are more likely to convert from discovery to purchase than if they discover a brand through a search or display ad. Research conducted in the industry has been consistent in highlighting the high ROI of influencer campaigns over traditional advertising methods, and even some neurological testing has revealed that influencer-driven content is more memorable to viewers than traditional brand ads. That’s important, because emotional resonance and memorability is what brings a shopper back to make a repeat purchase later.

A quiet SEO boost

This is the area that brands tend to miss. If your product is mentioned by influencers on their own blogs or websites or if your content is reshared on their social networks, it can provide real backlinks and social signals that search engines will notice. It’s not about gaming rankings anymore, because the days of brands trying to are long gone, it’s about genuine mentions from individuals with their own online authority that tells search engines that your brand is worth surfacing to more people. When combined with a solid content and keyword strategy, an influencer campaign can become a long-term SEO asset rather than a one-off traffic boost that lasts for a week.

The cons of Influencer Marketing

Costs that vary in an uncertain manner

The rates of influencers are extremely different and the difference between the tiers is larger than most first-time buyers realize. Mega and macro influencers can ask for anything from about a thousand dollars to several thousand dollars per post, whereas micro and nano influencers will charge in the tens to low hundreds of dollars. That span is really difficult to budget because you can overspend on a known name, or you can underspend and have a team of creators that don’t produce any results for your objectives.

Your reputation, in someone else’s hands

Once you enter into a partnership with a creator, your brand is linked to their own brand, either positively or negatively. When that person subsequently finds themselves in a controversy, when they make a divisive public statement or when they turn out to be less genuine than they seemed, the consequences are often felt by all the brands with which they have worked. It’s a real risk and not a theoretical one and it’s for this reason that it’s important to do due diligence on a creator’s history and values when choosing who to work with as much as it’s important to look at their followers.

Brand-fit mismatches

Not all creators who get to your target audience will be a good fit for your brand tone or values. It may appear unnatural, or even baffling, to your audience and over time, it can weaken your brand identity instead of building it. One of the easier-to-avoid mistakes in this list — a thorough examination of a creator’s previous posts, comments, and audience reactions is a huge step towards avoiding this one before any contract is signed.

Follower figures that fall within

Fake followers and fake engagement are still prevalent enough that it’s hard to tell much from the number of followers. If the creator has a large following but few authentic interactions, you might end up paying real cash for little real reach and engagement. In order to avoid wasting any money on a partnership, brands are now starting to look beyond the headline figure and evaluate engagement rate, audience authenticity, and comment quality.

Challenge yourself to be ready to meet the demand

It’s a good problem to have, but it’s a problem nonetheless: if your post is successful, you can get a rush of orders that you don’t have the stock, fulfillment or customer service to deal with. Brands that aren’t prepared for that surge risk to face a cascade of shipping failures, stockouts, and letdown new customers, all the while undermining the trust that the campaign was designed to gain in the first place.

Is Influencer Marketing Worth It?

The upsides and downsides of influencer marketing converge to the same end that most savvy marketers eventually reach: influencer marketing is worth it, but it’s a strategy that’s more effective if it’s done strategically than reactively. The brands that are doing well are typically not the ones trying to attract the most followers of the most popular creator for the week, but rather the ones who are using the same tools and frameworks that they would use for any other marketing channel — with clear goals, a well-defined target audience, a realistic budget, and a willingness to walk away if it doesn’t work.

Before signing a contract, here are a few ground rules to keep in mind:

• Establish a measurable goal first. Each of these—reach, engagement, traffic and sales—requires different creators, and different content formats, so you need to know what you’re optimizing for before you start reaching out to anyone.
• Vet beyond the followers. Before signing on, look at engagement rate, audience quality and a creator’s past collaborations with brands.
• Communicate expectations in writing. Deliverables, timelines, usage rights and disclosure requirements should all be clearly defined in the contract and not assumed or agreed to orally.
• If you’re not sure, begin with a small amount. It’s likely that a brief pilot featuring a handful of micro-influencers will reveal more about the actual fit than a single mega influencer’s swing.
• Don’t just prepare your creative, prepare your operations. Ensure that inventory, fulfillment and customer support are ready to meet demand surge, not after the post is live.

The Bottom Line

Like any marketing channel, influencer marketing has its pros and cons, and it’s not a quick get-rich scheme or a risk-taking endeavor. When managed properly, it can establish trust more quickly than nearly any other strategy a brand has today, reach audiences that they wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise, and even drive their entire SEO strategy with real mentions and backlinks that continue to benefit them long after the campaign is over. When handled poorly, it can turn into a costly reputation disaster. The difference is always preparation: knowing what you want to achieve, thoroughly checking out your partners, and being ready to deploy your operations to maximize the success of a campaign that is actually successful.