10 Influencer Marketing Risks You Should Know Before You Start

While influencer marketing and influencer-driven growth is awesome, it also comes with certain risks that you must be aware of.

In this post, we’ll cover the potential challenges and problems that you will face when you start on your influencer marketing journey. Don’t let these deter you though. Knowing where the pitfalls lie before you embark on a journey is equally as important as knowing best practices.

All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.

- Charlie Munger

1. Asking For Usage Rights For Influencer Content

Influencers might demand an extra fee for giving you the rights to use their content. You might want to use their videos as testimonials on your website, or as ad creatives for your paid media campaigns.

Paying for usage rights is understandable, but make sure you mention that before the content goes live. Sometimes, the prices creators quote for usage rights can be unreasonable. Make sure it’s no more than 20%-25% of the actual cost of placement (assuming you’re paying for placement).

Mentioning this before you decide to work with them also gives you leverage as you can say “we’ll pay $150 more if we really like the content and want to use it on our paid channels”. This incentive motivates them to create compelling content, making it a win win.

If you want to use their content for paid media or anything else in the near future, make sure you get usage-rights out of the way before you start working with them.

Paying A High Flat Fee For Influencer Posts

This sounds obvious but it’s the most commonly occurring risk when it comes to influencer marketing.

You know what makes or breaks your influencer campaigns? It’s the flat fee that you pay influencers for placements. Paying an influencer $500 and making $200 from the promotion is not something you want. This is why we recommend starting off with only affiliate-only collaborations and not big name influencers who will charge you $500+ upfront for posts.

Here’s how much you should pay your influencers. SARAL also has a free chrome extension where you can find the required influencer metrics and a fair fee to pay to any influencer with just one click.

Don’t make impulsive decisions here, they quickly spiral into an unprofitable influencer campaign and you will falsely conclude “it doesn’t work!”

Falling Into The Trap Of Fake Influencer Follower Counts

If you are choosing influencers solely based on their follower count then you’re taking a subpar, myopic approach to influencer-driven marketing. Here's how you vet creators for your brand.

Since most brands pay by the follower count of the influencers, some bad actors tend to purchase followers to increase their rates. As you run your influencer program, you will inevitably come across some of these types.

Yes, their audience size does determine the reach your influencer marketing campaigns get but if they have fake followers, this metric becomes useless. You must use a fake follower checker tool to mitigate this, or simply use SARAL’s chrome extension that shows you their Authentic Follower Percentage.

This helps you evaluate if the influencer is legit, or if they’re using bots and engagement pods to amp up their metrics. Usually, an authentic follower percentage of 80% or more is safe, but you really want to aim for 90% or higher, especially for smaller creators.

Not Looking At The Content Quality of the Influencer

Authentic influencer UGC helps your brand build a strong relationship with their audience.

Their audience trusts them and they also trust your brand by association. Just going through their feeds for a few minutes will give you an idea of the content quality.

While you can always look at their engagement rate in SARAL, you’ll get a better feel for their engagement by looking at the comments.

Comment sections are a goldmine for finding how engaged the influencer audience is. If you feel the content isn’t up to the mark and the engagement quality isn’t good either, then it’s better to drop the influencer and move ahead with the next one.

No Partnership Agreement With the Influencer

In your journey, you will encounter some influencers who aren’t true to their word. The most common problem is constantly extending the timeline of when they’ll post about you.

Sometimes, the influencers don't respond to your emails too! It’s better to make a clear agreement and get it signed. The influencer contract should include crucial details like a timeline of the promotion, deliverables, rate, and usage rights.

It doesn’t have to be a written agreement for every single influencer you work with, it can be a simple email exchange. But for most influencer whom you do a flat-fee deal with (eventually), you should do a proper agreement. Never pay the entire amount upfront, pay 30%-50% upfront and the rest after the post is live. If there's no proper alignment, then it's better to end the partnership with the influencer.

Too Much Sponsored Content

If the influencer’s feed has more sponsored posts than organic ones then it means they’re likely just milking their audience for money and will soon see drops in engagement rates, if they haven’t already.

You want to find the best influencers and partner with those who are creators first, promoters later. Given how lucrative it is, some influencers promote a lot of products simply because they're getting paid for it. You want to avoid working with them. Only work with influencers who produce good content and can weave your product in seamlessly.

No one likes ads, and if their followers are constantly bombarded with new products then it’s likely that the influencer's audience has already lost trust in them. Be wary of too many sponsored posts.

Lack of Brand Alignment With The Influencer

If you choose an influencer then make sure they align with your brand values and beliefs.

There are influencers who create controversial and weird content just to get views and likes. Partnering with these influencers can seriously hurt your brand image. Stay away from them. Unless controversy is your brand, of course 😉

Sometimes, lack of alignment can also reflect in less obvious “honest mistake” ways. This happens when you pay non-aligned influencers to post about you.

Consider this infamous example of Scott Disick who posted the instructions sent by the brand as the caption of the post. As a result, he faced backlash from the community and lost trust and the brand hurt its own reputation by association.

To make sure this doesn’t happen, focus on only working with influencers that are in alignment with your mission and actually want to promote your products. This leads us directly to the next point.

Organic vs Inauthentic Influencer Promotions

FTC guidelines state that if a influencers is getting paid for recommending a product then they must tag it as sponsored content. This is fine, they can say you sponsored them. BUT what matters most is that the placement shouldn’t look like a typical ad. It should not feel like they’re paid to do it.

The more naturally your product fits in with their audience, the better. The best way to do this is to only work with influencers that you vet and are super aligned with your brand mission.

Stay away from influencers who would sign up for your ambassador program and start promoting without even using the product. Trust me, I’ve seen some duckface influencers literally post screenshots of brand’s websites and asked their audience to purchase. Needless to say, this does not work.

The Risk of Using One Social Media Platform

How you weigh your distribution of content matters. When starting off, test every platform. But eventually you need to measure which one works the best for your goals and start investing more in that channel.

Brands make one of two mistakes with this:

1. Only test one platform (TikTok is hot!)
2. Keep collaborating with influencers on multiple platforms

You must eventually find the top 3 platforms that work best for you and do those. Even within those, there will be a best performing platform (depending on your goals) — overindex on that!

In our experience, TikTok works best for impressions and brand awareness, YouTube does the best for long-term value and conversions, and Instagram is the best of both worlds. You must test Pinterest, Bloggers, and maybe even LinkedIn creators. It depends on your product!

No Insight Into Influencer Marketing Campaign Performance

Your job doesn’t end once the influencer posts. You need to track and measure the performance of your influencer campaigns each week, see what’s working and what isn’t.

Then revise your strategy based on this analysis. It’s easy to do it inside Google Analytics if you use SARAL’s tracking-link generator feature. You can simply create a report and look at it for 5 minutes every week to see what works. It’s that simple.

Your brand risks losing money and energy if you do not track influencer marketing ROI every week.

Find the top-performing influencers who have generated good traction for your product and replicate your success month by month. Here’s an excellent guide on tracking influencer campaign results.

To Wrap It Up...

Running an influencer marketing campaign sounds overwhelming but if you stick with it and make the right decisions then this can prove to be one of your most profitable marketing channels.

Make sure you avoid all these risks when you’re in the trenches, feel free to bookmark this blog and review it periodically to ensure you’re not falling for one of these.

If you want to build a successful influencer program—without the tedious, soul-draining task of scrolling socials to find influencers and managing them all on spreadsheets—claim your free access to SARAL.