What to Avoid When Hiring an Influencer

If you’re used to dealing with traditional advertising agencies, working with an influencer can present as a brave new world. Gone are the plush offices full of execs trying to butter you up. Gone are the parameters you used to set. Gone are the large bills…. Well, hooray for that at least!

While you remain the client, the equation shifts when you work with an influencer – after all it’s their audience you’re tapping into. To get the best results, you’re going to have to redefine the working relationship. Here’s some things you need to avoid when hiring an influencer, in order to have a successful working relationship:

1. Control

No one is going to ask you to fall from a great height into the arms of your influencer, but trust is imperative here. And what you need to do is trust that the influencer knows their audience. We appreciate it’s hard to let go when you’ve traditionally had a say in most things, but honestly, influencer marketing is best when done the influencer’s way. Their talent is what attracts the fans, so leverage that for ultimate conversion.

2. Expecting a word-for-word script

It’s all very well to consider influencers as your puppets or actors, but you may want to add a few zeroes to their pay cheque if you’re expecting Michelle Yeoh to grace your promotion. The charm of influencer marketing is that it tends to feel authentic, rather than a polished performance. Revel in the spontaneity and organic feels. There’s plenty of production houses out there if you want a TV commercial.

3. Over-communicating

Mothers everywhere may have rejoiced at the recent revelation that nagging their teenage daughters makes them more successful, but we can promise you that stressing out your influencer with a barrage of communication is not going to get you a stellar video. Communicate enough so they know what you’re after and that it’s clear you’re on the same page, but trust them to do their job without you micro-managing them.

It’s also worth remembering that you are A/B testing; sometimes you’ll hit, sometimes you’ll miss. You’ve got opportunities to rework things.

4. Hard-selling

How would you feel if the first thing you saw in the morning was an advertisement? You see, no one wakes up bright and early wishing to see an ad. But they will wake up early and watch a video on YouTube.

Again, it all comes down to authenticity. While Moe Green has observed that people “are more interested than ever in the opinions of experts, thought-leaders, pundits, and self-proclaimed gurus,” when making purchases today, consumer cynicism remains alive and well. The message needs to come from the influencer in their trademark style, in as subtle a form as possible.

For example, one Malaysian based influencer Mingasaur, has a very consistent styling across all his videos and that in itself is building a form of consistency for his brand. Check out the first 15 seconds of this videos like this one: