Is It Time to Simply Let Influencers Influence?

During a standard social media scroll, most of us are uncharitable with our attention. It only takes a second - and sometimes less than that - to swipe past a piece of content and on to the next thing. It’s especially easy to scroll when you’re looking at content that’s not relevant to you, a trend that’s become annoying, something you’ve seen before, or an overplayed sound. But when we see a human who talks about something we’re interested in, and does so engagingly, we’re more likely to stop.

That’s why influencer marketing is so effective. When it’s done right, there’s an authentically human quality to influencers which is especially powerful on all-important social platforms. You just can’t replicate these human-to-human connections, which are proven to influence behaviour and opinion, through other means. That’s partly why, according to a study published last year, 63% of millennials said that they trusted influencers more than brands. 

These are the fundamentals of why influencer marketing works. No matter who you are as a brand, your audience can be reached through influencers who are passionate about the same things they are, and who can organically connect with them because of that passion. So the potential for success is obvious; but it’s far from guaranteed. It’s very possible - and in fact very easy - to get influencer marketing wrong and miss out on your brand’s full social media potential. Often, mistakes arise when marketers take too firm a line on an influencer’s content and end up undermining the very authenticity that drew them to that influencer in the first place.

At this point, there are a few important distinctions to make regarding the difference in expectations between ‘gifted’ and ‘paid’ influencer collaborations. 

In the first instance, gifted promotions (where a brand sends one of their products to an influencer for free but with no other payment), there is no expectation that an influencer will create specific, briefed-for content. That’s a good thing, because excessive control can be counterproductive for what many brands will want at this stage: to be building a meaningful relationship, and sparking creativity within the influencer for what is to come later down the track. 

The second scenario is paid collaborations, where there is a level of expectation as you are paying for an influencer’s services. However, this is where traditional marketers risk getting it wrong. The fact that content is being paid for sets up a transactional mindset, one wherein a brand might tell an influencer to do what they say rather than embracing a collaborative approach. This temptation might be understandable, but it needs to be avoided.

At this point, a delicate balancing act begins. Brands must be extremely clear on the purpose behind this paid-for collaboration with the influencer. Is it purely about raising awareness of their brand to the audience? Is it about attaching the brand to the influencer for credibility? Or is it to create a specific piece of content to be reused elsewhere? 

Even once those questions have been answered, marketers must accept that the most successful influencer marketing will require a greater scope of freedom and creativity in terms of content than they might otherwise be used to. 

Once these questions have been answered, marketers must accept that for successful results there must be a collaborative approach to creating influencer content. 

They live and breathe their accounts, and so they understand better than anyone else how to engage their audience. It’s literally their job - and that expertise is baked into the fee that they’re charging you. So use it! 

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you provide them with total free rein. Brand guidelines are important and they need to be set - but even within that process, we’d encourage co-creation with influencers. Otherwise, you’re risking the authenticity of your content.

Authenticity is the beginning, middle, and end of an influencer’s effectiveness. If your brand guidelines require them to say something that is jarringly outside of their vernacular or tone, then that authenticity will be shattered. The dreaded scroll will resume, and your content will be lost to the ether of the internet. It’s in a brand’s interests for an influencer collaboration to fit seamlessly into the kind of content their chosen influencer usually creates, and which drives engagement for them.

We will never brief influencers to do or say something that makes them uncomfortable. We don’t want paid collaborations to stand out like a sore thumb; we want them to feel like a natural addition to an influencer’s output. To be clear, there are common-sense limits to this rule. Influencers in paid collaborations must clearly communicate the name of the brand, product, and often tagline around which a campaign is based. That’s fair enough. But any specific brand language which goes further than that is often likely to feature in the caption, rather than the video itself. After all, what’s the point of collaborating with an influencer if you’re not going to let them influence?

An example of this dynamic playing out successfully is an influencer collaboration we completed with Malibu. Having set clear boundaries for a chosen set of influencers about the alcohol guidelines for social media, the brand otherwise gave them complete freedom to be creative in their content. Importantly, when working with an alcohol client you must be clear on the alcohol guidelines for social media - aside from that, we gave complete freedom for the influencer to be creative in their content. The result was a series of posts which smashed initial targets, securing millions of views across Instagram and outperforming estimated KPIs!

Of course, that kind of success can never be guaranteed with regularity. But what is certain is that the freedom for creativity is a required ingredient for any influencer campaign which hopes to achieve that level.

The beauty of influencer marketing is how it can bring your brand directly to your audience in an authentic way that doesn’t feel like advertising. It’s about meeting your customers where they are, in the way they live their lives through the content they choose to watch. That’s why this stuff works. But in order for a brand to make a success of it, there needs to be a degree of freedom offered to content creators. 

Simply put, it’s time to let influencers be influencers.