Influencer marketing doesn’t need more metrics – it needs more trust and collaboration between brands and influencers

Influencer marketing has become one of the most important tools of brand strategy. Companies across industries are increasingly turning to social media personalities to promote their products and services.

However, despite its wide application and significant impact, influencer marketing is surrounded by uncertainty, ambiguity and controversy, both among practitioners and the general public.

Questions often arise: How do brands determine the effectiveness of an influencer campaign? How do influencers ensure that brand partnerships do not impact their relationships with their audiences? Who controls the original process during an influencer campaign?

in ours latest scientific article in Journal of MarketingWe discussed these uncertainties by focusing on two key areas relevant to both influencers and brands: How to determine the value of sponsored content and how to co-produce it.

In our research, we obtained information from a wide range of sources, including interviews with both influencers and their intermediaries, podcasts, media articles and reviews of third-party platforms. We conducted 21 primary interviews and transcribed 37 secondary podcast interviews. This sample included influencers specializing in fashion, food, cosmetics, travel, lifestyle, health and sexuality.

Research conclusions

One of the main challenges we’ve seen is that brands often struggle to quantify the value of sponsored content. Brands also struggle with how to do this measure ROI on influencer campaigns.

Similarly, many of the influencers we spoke to said they often face difficulties setting their salaries and charging for their work.

Another common problem payment terms. For brands, upfront payments can be risky if the influencer doesn’t follow the terms of the partnership.

On the other hand, conversion-based payment models can be disadvantageous for influencers. Sales performance depends on many factors beyond influencer endorsement, making such determinations an unfair measure of the influencer’s contribution.

Brands and influencers must also agree on partnership terms and decide who will be responsible for each element of the campaign. For example:

• Should influencers be responsible for generating awarenessfor example, presenting up-to-date product launches?
• Should influencers become more involved in campaigns, working closely with the brand to co-create content?
• Or maybe influencers should do it act as affiliates offering your customers a discount code?

These questions highlight the need for clear expectations and mutual understanding in creating effective partnerships with influencers.

Creativity and control

To overcome the uncertainty surrounding influencer marketing, both brands and influencers are engaging in what scholars call knowledge-based work — the process of creating and applying knowledge.

This energetic also includes third-party companies that act as facilitators, create metrics, match brands to influencers, and evaluate performance based on expert judgment or algorithms.

Our research shows that all this knowledge work is causing significant changes in the market and changing the relationship between brands and influencers.

For example, when brands place restrictions on influencers – such as asking them to overtly promote a product rather than naturally including it in their content – ​​this can limit influencers’ creativity.

This may affect more than just… authenticity of the influencer’s messagebut they also alienate them from their audience. Influencers often cultivate parasocial relationships with their followers through engaging and relatable content; when authenticity is threatened, these relationships may erode.

The influencers we interviewed felt that excessive control over their work constrained their ability to leverage their expertise and ultimately made their work less meaningful.

Because influencer compensation is based on metrics, there was a consensus in the industry that it incentivized influencers to perform buy fake followers or manipulate engagement rates to appear more effective.

In response some brands have turned to third-party services to monitor influencers. This practice risks undermining the trust necessary for effective partnerships and the benefits that come from developing long-term relationships, such as greater synergy between brands and influencers.

Recommendations for influencers and brands

Efforts to reduce confusion around sponsored content have transformed the influencer industry. These efforts introduced up-to-date ways to measure value, such as proprietary metrics, new entities, such as influencer agencies, new job categories such as influencer marketing directorsand up-to-date platforms – 62 of which were reviewed in our study – to address these challenges.

However, our findings show that these changes are not always beneficial to industry participants. Instead they can they deepen the imbalance between brands and creatorsresulting in an environment characterized by distrust, surveillance, over-reliance on, and even manipulation of, incomplete metrics.

To alleviate these challenges, we offer the following recommendations for influencers:

1. Influencers should consider outsourcing business tasks or learning management skills to have better control over their brand partnerships.
2. Influencers should consider engaging in collective action to advance and protect their interests, address power imbalances, and create more equitable industry practices.

We offer the following recommendations for brands:

1. Brands should realize that influencers fulfill multiple roles and connect multiple partnerships and audiences. Pressuring influencers to change their voice can damage their authenticity and weaken their connections with followers and other colleagues.
2. Arrangement too much emphasis on short-term indicators or exercising excessive control over sponsored content may harm the quality of content produced and the quality and long-term stability of relationships with influencers.

These recommendations can support establish more equitable and sustainable practices in the influencer industry and extend them to other emerging industries, such as metaworld, NFTs and generative artificial intelligence.

These sectors face similar challenges because their products and services are not yet fully understood by their creators and consumers. Like influencer marketing, they require continuous creation of knowledge and its application in order to work effectively.