Influencer marketing platforms

Once you have followed rigorously the steps mentioned in the other articles, you might be curious of knowing on which platforms you can exploit your work and be rewarded for that, whether it involves cash or products/ services.

First of all, let’s outline that there are 2 types of collaborations: barter and paid. But which one is more suitable?

Since the beginning of trading, barter has been used by people in order to exchange good or services with one another. The advantage with barter projects is that the number of followers does not have a big influence on the decision making, so if you are fresh on the market, then it might be a great stepping stone. At the beginning, it is obviously exciting to get PRODUCTS FOR FREE, but you have to consider the worth and functionality of the product, consequently the fame of the brand, which can bring you more exposure. Usually, on barter collaborations you have free hands to do whatever you want with the product, but in case you want a long-term collaboration with the brand, the best will be to make a post and or stories to introduce it to your audience. However, there are contrary opinions regarding barter collaborations, which cuts the chances of a real content creator to get paid for its efforts. Below, I will list one of the most popular influencer marketing platforms where you can collaborate with brands. A shorter version of this text can be found here, otherwise if you want to discover in depth every platform, then keep on reading!

  • Brandbassador is a brand-building community app, which helps in identifying affiliates, influencers, and brands you want to collaborate with, in order to drive sales and complete missions that will propel your influencer journey. There you can find lifestyle brands such as DESENIO, Ideal of Sweden, One Piece, etc.
  • ReachBird has the largest site in Munich, followed by Ruggel in Liechtenstein, so they can keep track on the Swiss partners and customers and Budapest, where high technology allowes to control campaigns from brands such as The Body Shop, Lindt, Movenpick,etc.
  • Hivency was founded in 2017 and is a platform aimed to micro-influencers with interests such as Fashion, Travel and Lifestyle. When a company wants to launch a campaign, they describe the product or service along with the ideal promoter profile, so that the algorithm finds the best match.
  • BrandHeroes was founded in Denmark, Aarhus and they match local micro-influencers with lifestyle brands ( H&M, The Body Shop, Boozt, Vero Moda, Dyson ) for authentic collaborations, with the purpose of becoming Brandheroes by sharing the love for the brands they genuinely adore on social media.
  • Octoly accepts the accounts ( Youtube, Instagram) with over 1K from mostly Germany, US, France, Spain and Italy, but from time to time there are campaigns running in other countries too. You get products for free from beauty brands such as Sephora, Estee Lauder, but as well lifestyle brands, before their official launch in favor of your honest review.

But what does every platform have in common? Besides a collaborative transparent community managed through Influencer Relationship Management. there’s Artificial Intelligence to collect first party data across social media channels. Nevertheless, the audience and ‘fame’ are analyzed, so the plaform can meet their client’s requirements, in terms of targeting.

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Failed influencer marketing campaigns

The title says it all. Both brands and influencers have an obligation of behaving responsibly to their potential customers, but no one is perfect and mistakes are sometimes unavoidable. The internet has made distances shorter and information quicker to be accessed, therefore when these mistakes happen, the price paid often involves lawsuits, decreases in sales, ruining careers, brands etc.

The Italian luxury fashion house, Dolce & Gabbana used a famous Chinese model, Zuo Ye to be the face of the campaign #DGlovesChina and shoot in 3 videos how she is trying to behave like an Italian by eating cannoli and pizza with chopsticks. Nevertheless, after the bad reactions appeared straightforward, the post was removed after 24 hours. The entire campaign was accused of trivialising Chinese culture and promoting unflattering stereotypes and lead to the cancelation of the fashion show in Shanghai by the Chinese government and some Chinese online retailers removed their products. Was this measure necessary or the Chinese overreacted?

There are many products being advertised , especially beauty ones that promise miracles. You probably remember the outrageous scandal between James Charles and Tati Westbrook . The promotion of Sugar Bear Hair broke Tati’s heart who is producing Halo Beauty and is in direct competition with the previous brand. However, the dispute got a lot of attention, subscribers went up and down, but the 100% truth is known by the protagonists.

We all know that advertising beauty products is as much as exciting, as also problematic. A product can react differently depending on the type of skin and in general skincare. Kylie Cosmetics owned by Kylie Jenner is a brand that got itself into hot water multiple times due to the defective products, not respecting the delivery dates and not including the exact order in a package. Despite all these problems, the brand used a very smart content strategy by creating real urgency based on scarcity ( when she launches a product, there is a small number of products on stock, so the next time this product is back again people will feel the urge of buying it) You can inform yourself about this brand here.

Does Fyre Festival tell you something? There is even a Netflix documentary that brings to the surface the issues caused by the organizers and promoters of the festivals to the attendants. It was expected to be a revolutionary festival on a private island, much better than Coachella aimed to filthy rich people, especially young ones ready to pay up to 12,000$ for a complete package. The 25 year old organizer had the brilliant idea of inviting influencers and models to shoot a promo video, faking the festival atmosphere, without knowing that they were getting themselves in a big lie.

Fyre festival, failed influencer marketing campaigns

The Swedish influencer Johanna Eolsson faked her fancy trip to Paris by posting many photos in hyped French locations, while wearing branded clothes. As soon as her photos were carefully analyzed (you didn’t even need to be an expert for that) , the negative exposure didn’t stop her as she persued with forging her holidays to Switzerland and Dubai. Some of the photos can still be found on her profile, which makes you even doubt about which ones are for real.

A different example, but in this case a positive one is Natalia Taylor who pretented to be on a luxury trip in Bali, when in fact she went to IKEA. However, some price tags were left intentionally to be seen, in order to check her audience’s attention. After she posted the photos, she did a behind the scenes Youtube video, where she explained every concept.

If we are talking about influencers on local level, Antonella Patitucci staged being stalked for almost a month and obviously many people were worried about her, because everything seemed real and that it was getting worse. She was explaining the uncomfortable situation in tears and showed how she had received threatening messages both on DM and mail box. Fortunately, this was done for a group of students from the Zurich University of the Arts who did a research regarding cybersecurity and launched a petition as there is no criminal offense for that in Switzerland. The situation however escalated and haters didn’t cease to appear.

As an advice, don’t let influencers blindfold you with whatever they promote. When a brand choses to work with a shady influencer and the other way around can damage what you have been trying to build for years, therefore keep looking for multiple sources of information. So these are a couple of examples that went wrong, but as the Influencer Marketing world is huge, did you come across other interesting cases? I would be delighted to hear that and generally, your opinion.

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