Crisis Management in Influencer Partnerships: Creating Brand Resilience
No one ever wants an influencer marketing partnership to have bumps in the road, but sometimes it’s inevitable. The world of social media can be incredibly unpredictable with social morals constantly evolving and the rise of cancel culture, ensuring you’re on the right side of everything requires time and attention. Instead of hoping for the best, it’s better to just be prepared. Let’s dive into crisis management in influencer partnerships and learning crisis communication.
Preventing the Crisis: Strategies to Implement Before the Campaign
The best way to avoid a crisis is to implement preventative measures. Here are a few ways you can implement crisis management before it happens. Start with clear communication from the get-go.
Clear Contracts: Make sure that the language in your influencer contract is clear with comprehensible guidelines for posting. Establishing clear dos and don'ts in your agreement with the influencer is an easy way to start but also including brand messaging and behavior is important. Sometimes the contract can be crystal clear but there is still a misunderstanding.
Content Approvals: To be even more preventative, requiring approval before posting content is another way to make sure your brand representation is accurate. Including an approval process in your influencer agreement is important. Some influencers are put off by an approval process, but everyone has to remember this is a professional relationship and everyone is trying to make sure the correct messaging goes out. Iroin also notes that including an approval process helps with quality control because you can send feedback to the creator if the content isn’t aligned with the brand.
Product Seeding: Another way to prevent a crisis is sending the product to the influencer before they begin filming and ask for feedback. This way, if the influencer has a genuine concern about the product, it is expressed to you first rather than in the video. Ensuring the influencer genuinely enjoys the product is especially important for health and wellness brands because oftentimes, the product is used on the body where there is the risk of negative body reactions.
Sending the product to the influencer prior to the campaign is also referred to as product seeding. According to Traackr, “92% of marketers at least somewhat agree that influencer product seeding has successfully driven awareness for their business.” Not only does this strategy help with crisis prevention, but it drives brand awareness as well.
Learning these skills are part of reputation management and while it is important to have smooth relationships with your influencers, it’s just as important to keep your messaging consistent.
Respond Swiftly Without Raising Concern
Even with a clear contract for preventing a crisis, it still happens. The best thing you can do is respond swiftly and professionally. To be on top of the crisis, there should be someone on the team closely monitoring every campaign so that any mistakes can be caught and corrected quickly. If a post goes out and it somehow blows up before you can correct it, then be ready to make a statement or a stance on the subject. In an article from Adweek, they state that if you’re crafting a statement when a reporter asks for one, you’re already too late. Practicing and preparing for crisis communication before the crisis is crucial.
Adweek cites the example of the Lizzo allegations made by her dancers. They waited 24 hours to release a statement but the negative opinions and damage had already been done. This is an example to learn from because while you can’t always anticipate the crisis, you can plan for different scenarios and have a plan of action at the ready.
There have been many cases when brands cut ties with influencers or create a permanent post on the brand feed acknowledging the crisis. Of course this action depends on the severity of the crisis, but this should be in your plans in case something happens. One thing to keep in mind is deciding if you want to include your influencer in your crisis communication. Science Direct has found that consumers might seem influencers as an extension of the brand rather than someone with audience interests in mind. ScienceDirect cites Kapitan & Silvera with, “When SMIs support a brand in crisis, consumers could be suspicious of the brand’s crisis response and perceive it as a manipulative attempt to persuade consumers into believing that the crisis is not as severe as it seems.” This may not always be the case, but understanding your brand resilience and how the influencer could make it harder to work through the crisis is important.
After deciding whether or not the influencer is directly involved with your crisis communication, you’ll want to keep transparency and accountability at the forefront of your response. It may be tempting to downplay the situation, but the risk of this crisis coming back to haunt your brand is too high. With audiences craving authenticity, it is even more important now than ever to be honest when something goes wrong. Responding with transparency will keep your reputation as an authentic brand and will display your resilience as a company.
Researching Influencer Reputation to Keep Your Brand Reputation
Obviously you’ve done research on who you’re collaborating with, but another aspect of influencer research is ongoing monitoring of their social media status. Scandals and controversies can happen in an instant and the responses to them pop up all over various social channels. Having someone on your team that closely monitors your campaigns could not be emphasized enough. In addition to keeping tabs on your influencers during the campaign, pre-campaign research is just as important. Inflow talks about avoiding negative associations even if the influencer has a huge following. Knowing past scandals of your influencers is crucial because those connotations will be associated with your brand when the campaign comes out.
Understanding who you are collaborating with is even more important for health and wellness brands because there is already some apprehension for these types of products. There is a fine line in the health and wellness space online with people erring on the side of conspiracy versus a genuine product that has real benefits. Researching what your influencer has promoted in the past will help prevent a crisis for your brand because if they’ve promoted products that weren’t legitimate before, their audiences might not trust the next product they promote. Feeling confident with each influencer representing your brand is one of the best ways to prevent a crisis.
Use This as a Learning Experience
Maybe the crisis happened and you weren’t as prepared as you would have liked to have been. That’s okay, now you know what not to do for the next one. Go back and understand what went wrong to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future. These experiences are all part of growing crisis communication and building brand resilience. There aren’t many brands who haven’t had to respond to a crisis, so now you’re just part of the club. While influencer marketing is amazingly beneficial for brands, it comes with the risk of potential crises which is something to be aware of before entering into this strategy of marketing.
