People are buying waist trainers - but it's a fraction of what they sold at their peak in 2016/2017. The reason? People have wised up to the fact that these products, being hawked by influencers, are just paid adverts. Their marketing is not genuine, and users don't trust the Instagram influencer or product because of this. 
​

​The Advertising Standards Authority published guidance in 2018 concerning the "identification of advertisements", to help those who are offered payment or free samples to promote products to their followers, to understand the obligations on them. As reported by Stuff.co.nz, the note says, where it is not obvious or well understood by the audience that content is an advertisement, all parties to it are responsible for ensuring the audience is aware.

This means influencers have little room to hide a post's nature - any advert will need to be highlighted as an advert. This is a massive roadblock for an influencer to connect with its audience - for them, your product or service is just an advert. It's noise, and will its engagement will be less enthusiastic. 
​

If you follow someone on Instagram because they post a lot of healthy eating tips, how would you react to seeing them post about car insurance? What about teeth whitening? These posts are disconnected from their audience, and can harm the business at the subject of the advert. Not only is the advert ineffective, but it also looks insensitive and out of place. It also weakens their trust in the eyes of their followers. Because of this, smart marketers will choose an influencer who is a good match for their product, otherwise it will appear disingenuous.

Influencer marketing is somewhat cloak and dagger. Unlike a magazine rate card or online newspaper CPM, there is no set price and whether or not you're getting value for money is unclear. Are you paying based on follower numbers? Engagement rate? A premium because the influencer has 200,000+ followers? It's just not clear.  
​

Influencer marketing can work, but for your brand, product and/or service, it's unlikely to be money well spent. If it is to work, it needs to be organic, original and meet an undiscovered demand. Beyond our measure of likes, you can also measure clicks and shares. However, what matters are not these metrics, but the ones marketers have been using long before social media first arrived. 

What matters is:

1. Acquisition
2. Activation
3. Retention
4. Revenue
5. Referral

As an example, if you can convince loyal followers of a food Instagrammer that your company's car insurance, tax return service or tote bags will target and win on all of these five criteria, then you have it made. But the reality is there is a lot more to effective influencer marketing than agreeing on a price and posing for a photo. 
​

Followers respect originality and creativity. If you go with an influencer who has a history of posting lots of adverts, this may not be a good thing. Their followers may be fatigued with the ads, and whatever the influencer's creative difference was to start with, it likely eroded with ad after ad. We believe less is more - if you have an influencer who hasn't advertised, and can create a long-term exclusive relationship, the uptake of your promotion is likely to be higher. A spray-gun approach of spending $10,000 on 8-12 posts from 5-10 influencers, for example, will probably be far less effective.
​

Influencers come and go, and while Instagram is here to stay, big doesn't mean best. If you are interested in going ahead with an influencer campaign, we believe it's a good idea to look beyond the agencies. We believe going with an influencer who most people don't know about but bring an engaged following (i.e. 10%+ like rate on posts) is going to beat a big, commercial influencer account. If you're unsure, look at their follower count and their last ten posts, and calculate their following. If they have 10,000 followers and each post gets 1,000 likes on average (10%), that's significantly more engaging than someone with 50,000 followers and an average 500 likes per post (1%). 
​

If you spend $10,000 and get 10-15 posts from a range of influencers all with different interests and follower backgrounds, you will probably not develop a connection to their followers. And for this reason it's fairly likely the uptake and/or sales generation will be minimal. Their efforts may feel like a short puff of smoke that quickly disappears into the sky. If you spend another $10,000, the results may not be too different.

Working smarter makes all the difference
Instead, we believe that working directly and closely and with one influencer offers more value. Firstly, your marketing efforts are targeted and isolated to an influencer who fits in with your interests. They will be able to explain to their followers why they are collaborating and point out some of the unique selling points of your product or service. Best of all, you can use exclusive promotional codes which can measure new sales, as well as invest in a longer relationship. By going direct, you can also save money (no agencies to pay etc.) and have one-on-one communication with an influencer. It's the difference between wasting money on posts that are ads, and investing in an influencer who has an active following that is relevant to your business.
​ 

People buy followers. It's a fact. This cynical Irish send-up points out the fact that there are online services influencers buy which see robots (or similar) 'like' or comment on Instagram posts. You may see an account with 50,000 followers, but it may not have grown for months, or it may even be losing followers. Also, there is no way to know if the followers and/or comments are genuine. An agency may curate a list of influencers for you to chose from, but their followers are unlikely to have any interest in your product or service if it falls outside the focus of the account. In a world where influencers can soar and crash overnight, picking the right influencer to do justice to your spend is notoriously difficult.
​

There is no magic formula with influencer marketing. Even some of the biggest Instagram influencers in the world fail at it. As an example, Zayn Malik, the singer with over 30 million Instagram followers, really only has one or two products to sell - albums and concert tickets. Despite a massive social media following, his 2018 album entered in the UK charts at #64, and the next week was out of the top 100. 

An objective business owner or marketing manager could ask - is influencer marketing really going to work, and how long do we need to try it for before we give up? The answer really depends on who your influencer is, what you are selling, and what your expectations are. If every marketing dollar counts and allocating budget to campaigns could make or break your business, it may not be the best idea. The odds of success in influencer marketing are stacked up against you - measurable success is rare, and consumers have become saturated with ads pretending to be posts.