At work we've really upped our influencer and customer-advocacy program. It's taken us to 13,000 Instagram followers from less than 1,000 in 12 months.
A lot of planning and hard teamwork went into this to make it happen. The team worked hard to find new language students (our customers) as well as 'recruiting' our online teachers to participate on social media.
But last week a problem. The quality of the pictures (selected by our picture editor) and the content our students produce led some of our followers to question the authenticity of these posts.
'She can't be a real student, it's too good a photograph.", "How can she write in English like that if she is from Moscow?".
The fact is, the big bad world is suspicious of influencer marketing.
And they have a point. Which means it's more important than ever to make sure your content is authentic. So what did we do next? For the next student post we didn't just post a great portrait photo, we added a few more photos in the carousel of her work, in this case some beautiful notebook illustrations.
In other words, not just the person, but the story behind the person. Lesson learned. We'll be doing more of the same in future.
Meantime have a read of this great article from The Drum, as well. It's got excellent examples of the rights (and wrongs) of influencer marketing.
Through most marketing mediums, you aim to buy reach and impressions. You aim to spread your marketing message to your target audience. Influencer marketing emerged a few years ago, and most people look at it the same way as they look at other mediums - it's a way of buying impressions. This is wrong. Influencer marketing is different to the other mediums for two major reasons: a) Influencer marketing is based on a relationship between the influencer and her/his following; b) Influencer marketing is about showing the audience what they want to see, rather than what you want to show them.
https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2019/05/02/why-influencer-marketing-about-moments-not-impressions
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