Influencer Marketing Gone Wrong

Richard Morgan
October 31, 2018

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Paul Harvey is with us with Influencer Marketing Gone Wrong sharing his marketing strategy using messenger chatbots and Instagram stories to promote his Amazon products

Whole new Amazon account for two new kids products
Didn’t want to do big giveaways so looked to launch with only 40% off
Aimed to generate mass traffic to the Messenger chat bot
The chatbot would then grade the traffic and send coupons
With 80% open rate on messenger chatbots you get good sales

The Strategy

Strategy took 2 months to build – should have been 2-3 days
Spent 3-4 weeks researching Influencers, their followers, etc
Got 30 really good influencers with 10k to 100k followers

Finding Influencers

Found that using software was not as good as manual searching
Looked for hashtags they wanted and tracked the influencers around those
Researched their followers and content
Mass emailed them or DMd them on Instagram
Got about 50% replies which were good
Didn’t want to pay for it
Maybe 2-3 out of 30 will be rock stars
Gave them a free product but no pay

Launching

Send every influencer one unit of each products before the stock landed at Amazon
Gave them time to get their content ready
Got the listing live and ready to launch on Tuesday
Instagram Influencer would create a story or add with the deal and a discount with a link
Link to an AMZ promoter page
The page then clicked through to the Messenger chatbot
They are then talking to the bot
A really cheap and effective way to get people into the bot

Grading Traffic using the Chatbot

People hit the bot and if they are not time wasters they go to the end and are the ones you want to reach out to
If they are time wasters, they have a couple of conversations with the bot and are then forgotten

Launch Day

Staring at the computer on Launch Day Tuesday
The Influencers are primed to do the launch with their unboxing videos and pictures content
A lot of them were stories – you need about 10k followers to run a story
The story links to the product
They primed their audience a few days earlier really well
Every influencer had their own unique links to track it
Watching the traffic numbers and clicks
After 2 months they only made 1 sale

Pre-traffic

The volume coming from the influencers with average follower counts of 15k
Expected a lot of traffic to come through
The clicks were in the tens not hundreds
Then nothing
Only got 4 people go into the bot
Not got enough data to even analyse what happened

The Message

What was the message from the unboxing?
The Influencers told their audience it was 40% off
Some said 80% to mix it up
Didn’t get enough data to suss it out

What went wrong?

The Influencers are in engagement pods where they group up with their friends and like and click on each others posts
Their numbers looked great with high follower counts and clicks
BUT…the clicks were not ‘high converting’ clicks
So the strategy failed at the first step because the Influencer traffic was not high-converting and didn’t really enter the funnel in any numbers

Takeaways

Can’t sleep at night as this strategy didn’t work – it just has to work as Paul is stubborn
The fault was that the wrong influencers were selected
The next round is for the Influencers to create content and videos and it’s really good from Instagram
This content is then on the website and social
Lost 15 product units and gained a ton fo content
So strategy is now to go for a single really good Influencer and test out their traffic first before entering into paid collaborations for them to become Paul’s Instagram marketer
Should have failed faster – took too long putting it all together
Could have saved 6 to 8 weeks of time
Test it with a few before scaling it out
Instagram takes time to grow the audience and it’s a one-shot promotion