7 Tips to Create an Ethical Influencer Marketing Strategy (that protects your brand reputation)

As brands continue to invest more in influencer marketing, they need to think carefully about whether their approach fulfils the ethical and equality-driven expectations that are rightly being placed on industry. Failing to create an ethical strategy can harm your brand reputation, cause you to lose revenue and prevent you from building a strong community of advocates. The ethics and core values of a brand are now more important than ever when it comes to maintaining brand loyalty and prioritising an ethical influencer marketing strategy is non-negotiable. 

At Wearisma, we encourage our clients to place ethics at the forefront of their agenda by sparking conversations around the best ways for them to curate an ethical influencer marketing campaign suitable for their brand DNA. Relevance and trust are now dependent on a brand showcasing originality, equality, and ethical practises both on a corporate level and through their online communications; here are our top tips for ensuring your influencer marketing strategy is successful in more ways than just profit:

7 tips to create an ethical influencer marketing strategy

1. Analyse your chosen influencers’ historical content 

It's important you take the time to get to know your influencer’s content before jumping to partner with them. Reviewing past content allows you to make an informed decision on whether your chosen influencer is the right match for your brand for the following reasons:

• Analysing historical content enables you to see if your chosen influencer has previously partnered with any of your competitors, as well as getting the inside scoop on how well their content performed
• You can determine If they have previously posted any content that doesn’t align with your brand values or core beliefs, as well as simply checking if their aesthetic aligns with your brand’s DNA
• Analyse how certain topics and trends performed within a specific influencer’s community, allowing you to gauge how effective they will be for your current campaign

Wearisma is one of the only platforms that enables you to see over 5+ years of historical content, allowing your brand to ensure you are doing your due diligence and protecting your brand reputation when it comes to working with influencers. 

2. Check that your chosen influencers are declaring #sponsored content

New advertising standards mean that influencers and brands now have to declare sponsored content from brands, so make sure the influencers you are excited to work with adhering to these guidelines. 

In fact, audiences demand this level of transparency from influencers and research suggests that declaring sponsored posts doesn’t impact the posts’ performance. In 2020 alone, brands spent $98 billion on social media advertising across the globe, a figure that has grown exponentially at a rate of 20% per year over the past four years. This places it as the highest growth digital marketing category, revealing the relevance and success of sponsored partnerships with influencers remains on the rise. 

Wearisma’s platform enables you to clearly see an influencer’s sponsored content and compare the performance of sponsored vs. organic content, so you can see the full possibilities of your partnership. 

3. Pay influencers fairly by checking their performance metrics 

When it comes to figuring out how much value to place on your post, it’s important to make sure you are approaching influencers fairly and with a well-thought-out fee. With platforms such as @influencerpaygap gaining traction, the influencer community has been openly sharing experiences of being low-balled by brands based on discriminatory factors. It is essential for brands to be ethical and place welfare, respect, and equality at the forefront of their approach when working with influencers. 

Brands must utilise insights such as the amount of traffic, engagements, and other performance metrics such as sales to pay influencers fairly and maintain good working relationships. Our Clicks and Sales tool allows brands to track sales in order to ensure you are generating an impactful and cost-effective influencer marketing campaign, as well as help you maintain good working relationships with your influencers. 

To continue reading click here to discover the last tips from Wearisma and hear from one of our clients on why it’s important to your ethical strategy to find the right advocates for your brand and how we’ve helped them discover them. 

Schedule a demo today if you would like to see how Wearisma’s solutions can help you achieve an ethical influencer marketing strategy.