Micromanagement Limits Influencer Marketing Effectiveness!

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Micromanagement Limits Influencer Marketing Effectiveness!

Micromanaging your employees lowers their working capacity to your ability to micromanage. A manager can only look over so many employees’ shoulders. But while most people grasp this, far fewer see how the same management style bogs down influencer marketing effectiveness. 

micromanage influencer marketing

How Micromanagement Kills Influencer Marketing Effectiveness

Depending on the size of your company, you’ll have anywhere from a couple of people to hundreds driving a marketing campaign. From social media managers to brand evangelists, data storytellers to martechs, thought smiths to conversion rate optimisers, the list of specialists goes and on and on. Some niches lately sound like they’re out of the Voynich manuscript.

Micromanagement Kills Influencer Marketing Effectiveness

Many companies and agencies realise influencers are an efficient way to target audiences directly. They cut out the middlemen because they already have genuine influence. However, too many ad agencies want to have their cake and eat it too. Instead of letting influencers promote brands as they see fit, account managers try to push influencers to execute campaigns as they themselves imagine. They micromanage details like logo usage, slogans, and tone.

In doing so, account managers nullify the single biggest advantage of influencer marketing over an overstaffed team of ad wizards and marketing masters…

Don’t Fear **Scalability**

As the CMO of PARKLU and co-founder of a top-100 beauty influencer, the most frequent barrier I see brands running into during influencer campaigns is being over-protective.

While they could let hundreds of influencers do the legwork of reaching consumers, they become constrained by a desire to carefully monitor their brand’s image. This desire is driven entirely by fear — the fear someone will talk about the brand in a way that was not framed by high-level, strategic-thinking MBA experts behind closed doors within the organisation. It’s strict adherence to high-level management’s brand vision that truly limits influencer marketing effectiveness

But people will talk about your brand however they want — you cannot control people. Recognise this freedom and embrace unpredictability: Let consumers frame your brand, and focus instead on adding positivity through your campaigns by collaborating with influencers who know what your target audience likes.   

How to Work WITH Influencers

Influencers have been building monetise-able communities around themselves since well before content marketing became the standard go-to strategy for digital marketing specialists.  And they’re still winning because they provide content that’s not about themselves. They know how to provide value.

But most organizations just can’t scale up their collaborations with influencers.  Their scalability problem stems from management trying to control influencers. If marketing managers would allow influencers more flexibility, they could triple or even quadruple how much work influencers do and the total number of influencers they work with. 

When brands work with influencers, they must enable them to frame the conversation — both about the brand and the audience. Companies must let go and allow customers to take greater control of the conversation which the brand is enabling. If brands continue to demand control, they will continue to be in a conversation with themselves. 

As is the case with employees anywhere, it’s better to empower influencers to work creatively than to tell them specifically what to create. This means providing influencers with the resources to start conversations you and your brand are a part of. In other words, be the enabler of conversations. Give people something positive to talk about your brand. Who cares if they don’t quote your motto correctly?

As long as the conversation is genuine and impacting your target customers in a positive way, you are winning. 

By |2020-11-13T11:51:23+08:00August 31st, 2017|Influencer Marketing, Marketing Strategy|0 Comments

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