Influencer Marketing Challenges In 2023 And How To Tackle Them
“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.”- Mark Zuckerberg
(Co-founder and CEO, Meta Platforms)
The influencer marketing landscape is evolving each day at a rapid speed. And now, there is an array of opportunities and challenges that continue to create in this sector. As the year 2021 has proved quite challenging with the coronavirus pandemic in this second year, it is worth mentioning that this same situation has created a number of new opportunities within influencer marketing and the social media industry. Being a leading YouTube and Instagram influencer marketing agency, we at Confluencr, have keenly studied the state of influencer marketing. This article discusses in detail the challenges and trends brands can expect to encounter in the year 2023. After all, change is the only constant and is going to be associated with a handful of challenges. However, it’s time that brands embrace these challenges and overcome them for handsome profit returns from the influencer marketing campaigns!
Contents:
Existing Challenges In The Influencer Marketing Industry
Top 5 Influencer Marketing Challenges In 2023 And How Can Brands Tackle Them
Existing Challenges In The Influencer Marketing Industry
Here are some of the existing challenges in the influencer marketing sector that most brands have been facing so far.
1. Fake Influencer Profiles
This is one of the major concerns for most brands trying to make a mark on social media platforms. The selection of influencers plays an essential role in the field of influencer marketing, as your performance in the market is largely based on it. Not only does the presence of fake influencers on social media platforms bring trouble for the brands, but it even takes the users through a tough ride. In a number of cases, influencers acquire fake followers, which has a negative impact on the influencer marketing campaign. Moreover, this creates doubt among the users about the brand, which eventually has a negative impact on its operation. Hence, it is important for the brands to evaluate all the influencers minutely before confirming any selection to avoid such mishaps. Read here, about the important metrics to consider while choosing the right influencers.
2. Inefficient Campaign Execution
You need to stay assured that not all the influencers are efficient to the point you want when it comes to the context of content creation as well as the implementation of the influencer campaigns. This imposes a lot of risk for all those brands on social media, investing a large part of their fund in influencer marketing. Taking the present time as a concern, there are a lot of reports of influencers unable to cater to the content requirement of brands enough to reach their target audience. Besides, proper representation of the content to the audience also remains a problem. Not only does this affect the image of your brand, but it impacts various essential engagement metrics. Influencers in a number of cases have failed to abide by all the guidelines set by the brand resulting in a lower campaign response rate. It is important for the brands to carry out the campaigns with influencers keeping brand safety in concern. The best option is to lay out a proper content brief, outline the importance of the campaign, educate the influencers about your brand and co-create with them. Only then can influencer marketing pay off for both the brand as well as the associated influencer.
The main motive behind all influencer marketing campaigns is to develop and convey the idea about the services and products of the brands to the target audience. Selecting the target audience here plays a very important role. However, most marketers go wrong when it comes to selecting the target audience. Merely directing a campaign to a large group of audiences doesn’t help. It is important to prepare and choose the list of the target audience carefully by taking into concern various factors such as their age, demographics, interests, and other factors that affect the decision-making process. Checking the type of audience you would like to target for your services and products, the location you would prefer to reach, and such details should be taken into concern when developing an influencer marketing campaign for your brand. This will help your brand to gain the most out of this investment.
3. Skeptical List Of The Target Audience
4. More Followers Do Not Count For More Influence
It is not very easy to influence your audience to buy your products even when it appears so. There is a common misconception that more followers only lead to greater sales or greater influence. However, more followers does not imply greater influence. There have been many cases where influencers, even with lakhs of followers, have failed to generate a few hundred comments and likes. The gap between the audiences and influencers is a contributing factor to growing awareness and this gap is often more in the cases of celebrity influencers with a massive fan following. Hence, getting on track with this group audience on social media is more difficult as compared to the influencers who have a lesser number of followers but share a very personalized connection with their audience.
5. A Lack Of Clarity On The Performance Parameters And ROI
6. Finding The Right Influencers
Even though there are different influencer databases largely available today in the market, reports of managers facing difficulty in getting hold of relevant influencers have come up. Most influencer marketing campaigns end up only with failure due to the wrong selection of influencers, irrelevant content, and improper choice of the target audience. You can resolve this with the selection of relevant influencers who can do justice to your brand campaigns and boost your brand value.
7. Decreased Engagement On Sponsored Posts
Social media influencers climbing the ladder of success and growth are not always doing justice to all of their campaigns. Many times they even face failure in generating the desired amount of engagement for their influencer posts due to improper content and inability to convey the message clearly. Another common reason behind this is the skeptical attitude towards a new product or service that users often have back. Fortunately, with the right set of influencer marketing tools and convenient research work, it is easily possible to overcome all these challenges and make the campaign a hit.
Top 5 Influencer Marketing Challenges In 2023 And How Can Brands Tackle Them
A new year comes with new hopes and challenges together. And this is applicable to influencer marketing as well, which is enjoying growth in its functionality with every passing day. Influencer marketing is an effective brand strategy with a present global market worth of nearly $13.8 billion. While about 46% of the marketing professionals aim to expand their investment in influencer marketing for 2023, it is likely to become a challenge for the brands to plan the actions that can help them to focus on their efforts. To help you better, here are some of the predicted challenges in the influencer marketing industry in 2023.
1. Flexibility Of Campaigns
It cannot be overlooked how important flexibility has become for any business to keep up with their customers’ habit of switching back and forth initiated by the coronavirus pandemic. Brands need to be flexible with their campaigns and their overall influencer marketing budget. There is no provision for the brands to get hold of this kind of firm control of their messages as they used to do in the past, that too in a situation where the consumers are directly getting in touch with the brands. Since consumers today are attracted to authenticity more, the success of influencer marketing is completely based on flexible content campaigns and not on branded scripts. This calls for influencers to retain their authenticity, and brands their flexibility.
Solution: Influencers can only drive positive and powerful brand associations when they are granted flexibility and creative freedom by the brands that help them to be genuine. Also, marketers must keep aside a portion of the influencer market budget they have set in order to use that to capitalize on social media virality.
The explosive growth of short video platforms is not expected to go down anytime soon. This platform focused on short videos started with just dance and lip-sync trends and has grabbed the attention of millions of users all over the world. It has thus evolved to be one of the best platforms for influencer marketing. However, it is a challenge for brands to take it to these short video platforms since it is a challenge to create content that is short, concise, and crisp. Short video platforms such as Instagram reels and YouTube Shorts have challenged brands as well as creators to effectively hook in their audience and send across their messages in a very short amount of time.
Solution: Creating short format content that effectively attracts the attention of your target audience is sure a challenge. However, using techniques such as multidimensional research, content marketing and repurposing content can help you leverage influencer marketing on these short video platforms. Studying different patterns of audience engagement on various platforms, breaking down large pieces of content into small, crisp chunks, and co-creating content with influencers who are experts in their niche can help you create authentic content.
2. Short Videos Are The New Normal
3. Go For A Long Term Partnership With Your Influencer
While there is still scope for a one-time partnership with your selected influencer marketer, as of 2023, it is predicted that more brands will go for long-term partnerships. Brands that follow the latter are the ones who can build authentic connections with their target audience through this long-term partnership image. Also, an influencer working with your brand for a longer span of time will be able to share various aspects of the brand with the audience. Also, they help to boost brand loyalty.
Solution: Identify a reliable social media influencer with whom you can partner. It is even better if you search and find one among your list of devoted customers, as this helps to enhance the brand image. It is important to opt for the right influencer for a long-time partnership and yield maximum results from the collaboration.
4. Hyper-Targeted Influencer Outreach
While the influencer marketing of the yesteryears focused on a specific target like moms with children, that of today targets more classified targeting opportunities. For example, moms with children who go to elementary school, live in the ABC area, etc. While it is possible to be specific when it comes to marketing, this also calls for more resources and proper management.
Solution: Brands should plan to keep away a part of their fund for influencer marketing and use it for paid media. Marketers can make use of paid ad tools on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to ensure high engagement content for the audience on these platforms.
5. Partnership With College Sports Influencers
The NCAA, in the year 2021, has issued a statement permitting college athletes to make money using their name, likeliness, and image. This is known as NIL. Today there are many college athletes offering lucrative partnership opportunities for your brands. Rather than paying a huge amount hiring pro players, brands these days prefer to invest in up-coming and young athletes to grab customer attention on social media. However, offering them valuable partnership offers, and gauging their authenticity still remains a challenge for brands.
Solution: College athletes can put in a lot of effort and appeal to help your brand grow and reach out to the target audience in the best possible way. Hence, try and get in terms with college athletes to take your social media influencer campaign to the next level of success. Also, get them into a long-term partnership because, with demand, it will become hard to select and bear the expense.
