Influencer Marketing Collaboration Mistakes

Through my experience managing influencer marketing campaigns for Nearpod and Flocabulary, I quickly realized that teachers don’t have the best resources to navigate through the influencer marketing collaboration process. Influencer Marketing has only been around for a few years, so it’s natural to not see any standardization of best practices across businesses and influencers. Here are the most common influencer marketing collaboration mistakes and what you can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

1. You have too many sponsored posts

It is so exciting to be able to book a bunch of sponsored collaborations. I’m so happy for you! Have you ever noticed that when you post a sponsored post, your engagement dips just slightly? When you post sponsored content back to back (without trickling organic content in between), your pages starts to feel like an add. Even an Oreo has a sweet filling in between the cookies. When companies see too many sponsored posts back to back, they don’t see an influencer generating relationships with their audience, they see an ‘ad’ feed. Make sure that you’re tricking in organic posts in between your paid posts as a buffer. 

3. You promote brands that aren’t relevant to your audience

There were many times teacher influencers (who were actually teacher lifestyle influencers) reached out to Nearpod and Flocabulary to try and be a part of our campaigns. I declined them immediately. When your account doesn’t normally share products and ideas in that realm, doing so for the first time will be super low. You don’t know if your audience will like that type of content, so why should a brand work with you to take that risk? This goes back to the ‘long standing partnership comment’. If you’re willing to share a series of posts or IG stories to prime your audience, that is something that the brand can work with. But a one and done scenario will not drive clicks, and the campaign will likely fall on its face.

4. You don’t actually know what the product does

This one is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. If you are getting asked to promote a product on your account, you need to act like the business that you want to be. Take at least 15 minutes to visit their website and learn about the product. I can’t tell you how many times I signed contracts with teacher influencers who then decided to work with Nearpod, and you could just tell that they had no clue what Nearpod did. When you show that you know about what you’re promoting, I can assure you that the brand will respect you more and want to work with you more. 

5. You don’t read the creative brief

Typically, when a brand decides to work with you, they will send over a creative brief that are essentially the guidelines of how you should promote the product. It is your job as the person being hired for the campaign, to read the creative brief in its entirety and ask questions when something does not make sense. 

If you don’t read the creative brief, then you will run into the issue of creative a piece of media that does not align with the goal of the campaign. You see, every campaign has a goal, which has a type of messaging they want to put out into the world. They are hiring you to amplify that message. If you don’t read the brief, you don’t know what the message is. 

You know what will resonate with your audience best, which is why it’s so important to reach out to your point of contact a the brand and tell them when you have suggestions to make. Remember, it’s a long-term partnership. 

Don’t let these influencer marketing collaboration mistakes happen to you

Which influencer marketing collaboration mistake are you guilty of? It’s a part of the learning process to make mistakes. As someone who sits on the business side, I have also made my share of mistakes. Let’s be aware so that we can do better. When we make changes to do better, we give the teacher influencers a better reputation to support future collaborations for all of us.