When you are a part of a social circle, you meet different kinds of people. Similarly, when you run any kind of campaign, such as an influencer marketing campaign, on social media, you should be ready to receive both bouquets and brickbats. No matter how meticulously you design an influencer marketing campaign or how well you execute it, you will come across some people who will find faults with it.
An influencer marketing campaign could attract some negative feedback because of various reasons. Popular influencers have their share of fans and haters. When you collaborate with such influencers, you realize some of their detractors attack them for no reason all the time. This will also spill over your brand and some of these haters might try to attack you as well. On the brighter side, you will get a lot of love and appreciation from their fans as well.
Influencer marketing campaigns prove to be beneficial to both brands and influencers. While brands create awareness about their products, services, goals, and objectives through these campaigns, influencers get the opportunity to make a good amount of money through these collaborations. These days, a lot of people think about how to become a micro influencer or mega influencer and look at it as a viable career option.
Some brands get so overwhelmed by negative feedback that they decide never to engage in influencer marketing campaigns again. Instead of doing that, you should find the root cause of the problem and fix it. Influencer marketing campaigns help brands tremendously and therefore, investing in them should be a part of your marketing agenda. As far as receiving negative feedback is concerned, you just need to know how to deal with it.
Here are some ways in which you can deal with negative feedback while engaging in an influencer marketing campaign:
Put Together an Online Reputation Management Team
From your competitors to trolls, a lot of people will try to tarnish your reputation when you launch and run an influencer marketing campaign. If there is too much negativity surrounding a brand, it can tarnish its credibility in the long run. A popular YouTuber speaking badly about your campaign in a video and getting a large number of views will not be good news for your brand.
To counter the negativity being spread about your campaign and brand online, you need to invest in online reputation management. It refers to the process of overseeing and influencing how people look at your business on the Internet. If you have a good online reputation management team, you will not just be able to deal with negative feedback but also build a good image of your brand effectively.
Make Sure You Respond Quickly
A lot of brands believe silence is the best option when it comes to handling negativity encountered while propelling an influencer marketing campaign forward. On some occasions, maintaining a dignified silence works. However, on several other occasions, you have to crush negativity by responding promptly.
If somebody is trying to spread a false rumor about your influencer marketing campaign and making an attempt to sabotage it, you should get into action and counter it immediately. In today’s age of social media, you can address your audience or consumer base directly, clear the miscommunication, and set the record straight. The sooner you respond to the negativity, the faster it will die down.
Learn To Identify the Trolls
Listening to constructive criticism, processing it, and working on it is very important for brands. However, it is very important to differentiate constructive feedback and unwarranted criticism that is thrown around to bring you down. Once you learn to segregate the two, you will never be affected by any negative comments or feedback.
The internet is full of trolls whose only job is to attack everybody and make their lives miserable. While some of these trolls look at it as a pastime, many a time companies hire such individuals to attack their competitors. You should put together a mechanism or a team to identify these trolls and curb the negativity spread by them.
Analyze the Campaign
You might have worked very hard on creating an influencer marketing campaign. With all the efforts put in, you would have massive expectations from it. However, you also need to be realistic and figure out whether it creating the desired impact or reaching out to your target consumer base. If the results are not showing, there could be something wrong with the campaign.
If a particular influencer marketing campaign is attracting a lot of negativity, you should analyze why and what you can do to change the narrative. If there are some elements in the campaign that people do not like, you can remove them. If the campaign, at large, is not appealing to them, you should withdraw it and work towards creating another campaign.
Be Careful About the Influencers You Collaborate With
These days, every other individual is wondering how to become a micro-influencer or trying to figure out ways to have a strong social media presence. People have realized being in this space is extremely lucrative. Many are going to extreme lengths to become some kind of influencer. In such times, brands need to be careful during the process of choosing influencers to collaborate with.
A particular influencer, with a huge number of followers, might not have the best reputation. If you collaborate with such an influencer, it will lead to your brand value being affected adversely. The reason you are getting a lot of negative feedback on an influencer marketing campaign could be because of the influencers you have chosen to associate yourself with.
Figure Out the Reason
Before you start responding to negative comments or feedback appearing online, you need to figure out what is the cause behind it. Sometimes, people assume that there is something wrong with the influencer marketing campaign and therefore, people are responding to it in a negative manner. However, the reason behind the negativity could be something else too.
Maybe, people are not happy with the kind of products and services your brand is providing of late and they are showing their displeasure online in the form of comments and other feedback. They could also be protesting against something the influencer has done recently. Once you figure out the real reason behind the negative feedback, dealing with it will become a lot easier.
