The customer is always right … right? In my job as CEO of an influencer and content marketing agency, I want to wow our clients at every turn. I want every client to walk away feeling like we went the extra mile to please them, and that we provided them with our very best skills and service.
The last thing we want is to say no. However, if we didn’t occasionally do so, we would be doing our brand partners a major disservice.
When a brand hires a full-service influencer agency, they expect more than a platform for picking influencers. DIY networks are limited to searching and connecting with influencers, but agencies that provide total campaign management offer strategy in addition to execution.
Ideally, an agency comes with expertise, and that expertise means that brands should listen up when the answer is no. In my experience, here are five times a good agency should put its foot down, even when pleasing the client is paramount (which it always is!).
1. When The Client Doesn’t Have A Clear Goal
The most important step in any influencer marketing campaign is determining brand key performance indicators (KPIs). Every client has a different set of KPIs, and that determines everything else in the process—from the types of influencers who will be the best fit for the campaign to the actual messaging and creative content direction.
Brand goals can be rooted in outreach, conversions, list growth, brand affinity, website traffic, lead generation—the list goes on and on. Engagement types such as views, social shares, likes, comments and more are the metrics that reveal campaign impact, but without clearly stated goals, there’s no way to tie this data back to what you were hoping to achieve.
Any agency can take a client’s money and put together a scattershot campaign without KPIs. A reputable agency, however, should put up a major red flag if a brand has no idea what their ideal influencer marketing outcome is.
2. When A Client Is Distracted By The Wrong People
There are two ways for a brand to really miss the mark when it comes to influencer outreach: choosing the wrong influencer, and targeting the wrong audiences.
More and more brands are learning to prioritize fit over follower count, which is good news, but getting swayed by “vanity metrics” is still a common mistake. Influencers with very large follower counts can seem like a marketing dream, but just because they have millions of subscribers doesn’t always mean they’ll be ideal brand spokespeople.
So-called micro-influencers (those with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers) often have better engagement than celebrity-level accounts, and they tend to specialize in niches that can be the perfect fit for a brand.
Influencers should be chosen based on how well they align with a brand’s values, messages and aesthetics, not how many followers they have. If a client wants to work with a hugely popular vegan beauty influencer to market their new bacon burger, we can’t stop them from doing so, but we’d be a terrible agency if we didn’t explain why that’s not a great idea.
3. When A Client Is Sending The Wrong Message
Even if a client has a strong influencer partnership in mind that provides good access to their ideal market, the opportunity can be wasted or made much less successful with the wrong message. This, of course, is not limited to influencer marketing; traditional advertising messages can easily go awry (the recent Peloton ad comes to mind).
Brands often have specific marketing messages in mind when planning an influencer campaign, and a good agency should offer their expertise when it comes to executing those messages. Additionally, if an influencer doesn’t feel comfortable with the message a brand is asking them to communicate, the brand should listen—and allow for the possibility that the message isn’t quite right.
4. When A Client Is Micromanaging The Influencer’s Content
Influencer marketing works best when it feels like a natural review or recommendation from a trusted source. Brands that are overly restrictive with campaign requirements are essentially asking influencers to simply echo brand slogans and sales pitches, which can be a real turnoff for audiences.
Clients should allow influencers to not only share their brand, but contribute to it with their own unique style and tone. Blatantly commercial, staged images and commentary don’t resonate with consumers the way authentic content does, and an expert agency can and should guide clients away from being too inflexible.
5. When A Client Doesn’t Want Influencers To Disclose
Truly, if a brand is working with a reputable full-service agency with a QA department, this won’t even come up, because the team will ensure proper FTC disclosures for every influencer campaign. But in the case of DIY influencer platforms or less hands-on agency services, disclosures can slip through the cracks. Plus, some clients may ask influencers to skip the sponsorship mention, in the misguided hopes that avoiding disclosure will result in a better campaign.
Disclosing a brand/influencer partnership in a campaign post isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s required by the Federal Trade Commission. Brands can be held accountable and fined for failing to provide disclosure, and every good agency should prioritize educating clients on the importance of disclosure.
Most of us in the agency business want the very best for our clients, and we really don’t like having to put on the brakes. However, when we’ve been hired for our expertise and capabilities, that’s what we bring to the table—and sometimes that involves suggesting that more work be done, a different direction taken or a plan abandoned altogether. A “yes man” agency does no favors to the companies that work with them. A reputable influencer agency will guide clients away from bad tactics while providing reasons, before finding the best alternative course of action for success.