Influencer Horror Stories
Welcome to today's episode of online store success where I'm sharing with you a horror story. From working with influencers. I have many of these horror stories, but today I'm going to talk to you about one particular one, which I hope by sharing with you will help you avoid the nightmare situation that I found myself in with this one. So stay tuned. Let's get started.
Welcome to the online store success podcast with me Jodie Minto. If you have or are planning on launching your very own online store, you are in the right place my friend. I'm your host Jodie Minto and award winning ecommerce mentor online fashion business owner and speaker based on the central coast of New South Wales.
I started my own online fashion store from scratch as a side hustle when I was working full time in the corporate world, juggling young children and living in the Middle East. Today. That side hustle is a seven figure a year online fashion brand with stockists, and customers all over the world. Join me each week for Real Talk lessons and strategies that I used. In order to build up Island code to the million dollar a year business it is today. The lessons and strategies I share with you each week we'll help you build and scale your very own successful ecommerce fashion business too. Because I know how my life has changed for the better after launching my own business. And I want the same for you.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of online store success where I'm sharing a horror story from working with an influencer. I've worked with tonnes of influences over the past seven years or so, both in Australia international influences and boy do I have some horror stories. Yes, we've had some great success too. But it is one of those marketing strategies or campaigns that people often don't always have a great experience. So I'm going to share one of my horror stories with you today.
Now I can't name names because I don't want to get sued. However, I will certainly share with you the story and also my lessons from that story. And hopefully it's something that you can take away. And remember and know to try not to get stuck in a nightmare situation like this. So let's get started.
This particular influencer collaboration, thankfully, now I realised I actually booked it via a platform. It was one of those influencer platforms. I can't even remember what it's called. It'll come to me and I'll post it in the show notes or under this video, but a tribe that set tribe so luckily, it was done via tribe because they had to I ended up having to get them to come in and help. But what had happened is we we posted a job on this influencer platform, we had these different influencers apply with other posts that they had done in the past for other brands. And we shortlisted it, we picked one. And we sent this product to this particular influencer, who was about to go and travel to the Greek islands is prior to COVID.
So we were really excited about this collaboration. And we had said in our job posting that we wanted to work with an influencer that creates great content, but also share to their audience, but will provide us with the content that we can then repost to our own social media accounts and repurpose. So that was the brief. And again, like I said it was posted on tribe, thankfully, because it all came undone. So what happened is we sent the product to this influencer. And then she travelled to Greece. And she captured the most incredible photos of our product. We were so thrilled she had hired a photographer there locally, and submitted it to tribe. And we were we approved and said yes, we love this. Thank you so much job done. And then we started re sharing it in our social. We shared it on Instagram. First of all, in our just regular grid.
And what happened within a few days is that we had the Greece, the photographer based in Greece start hounding us asking for more money. You see, he said that he owned that photo that because he took it and that was not the agreement he had with the influencer. So we had to send him more money if we wanted to use that photo so you can imagine my horror. Waking up to those kinds of DMS in our Instagram he was DMing us he was emailing us he felt like he was entitled to more money. And why was completely as a you know,a one woman show at the time. I think I had one part time staff member we were sort of bamboozled. What is he talking about? We paid the influencer. We told her what we wanted. We told her we're going to be reusing the product. And what is this guy even carrying on about? But he was persistent. He was not going to let it go. So we ended up having to block him. And then obviously take it up with the influencer. And then the influencer got really defensive. Because she was then saying, Well, why do you care about re sharing it? I'm not just a clothes horse. If you want to just to close horse, you should have hired a model. I've shared it to my account and to my followers. And so you should be happy. And I was just, you know, beside myself thinking, What are you talking about? The whole brief was that we wanted to reshare this, you know, this content. And this particular influence, I can't actually remember their name, I can remember the image really clearly. But I can't remember the name wasn't a mega influencer, she was pretty small. And her posting it to her her. Her account, and to her followers brought in absolutely zero sales and probably a small smattering of new followers. But it does certainly didn't even cover the cost of the the actual collaboration.
And it wasn't, it wasn't what the collaboration was all about. We had specifically said we wanted the content in order to reshare it. So we sort of were going backwards and forwards with her. And she you know, eventually was you know, just like, well, well, I'm not, you know, you'll just have to, you just can't share it. So we then like I said, luckily had booked it through this tribe platform. And I went to them and said, hey, well, we've hired this influencer off your pro platform, here is the brief, which you can see crystal clear states that we want to reuse this content. What agreement she had with her photographer is nothing to do with me, she should have made it really clear with him that this particular image was going to be reshard. And that should have been included in his fee, and so on and so forth. And luckily they came tribe came to the party and said yes, of course. So then they went back to the influencer and started mediating for us and told them that, you know, they either have to, you know, refund the money, because they'd already been paid by this point, or re shoot the content. So this influencers offered to reshoot the content and deliver us more photos.
So we were, you know, like, Okay, fine. But in the end, she didn't use a photographer, the second time around, they were simply iPhone photos that her friend had taken, and they were certainly not as impactful as that first image that we loved so much. So it was a great lesson, ultimately, where everything needs to be crystal clear, from the very get go, you need to be really specific, and tell them that if you plan on re sharing that content, and whether that's on your website, whether that's in your organic social media channels, or whether that's in paid ads, tell them up front, because there's nothing worse than getting those DMS from some strange Greek photographer demanding money because he feels like he's been cut out of you know, the, the profits or something like that. So it's a really great lesson for us and hopefully you to you, when you go into a collaboration with an influencer know really clearly what your goals are. Perhaps in your case, it might be working with a bigger influencer, and you're happy for them to just share that content they
create to their audience in and you're hopefully being introduced to new people, there's that brand awareness created and you don't really care about repurposing or re sharing the content. So if that's the case, and you're just hoping to get that brand awareness, and if it's a bigger influencer, probably some sales. That's one goal. Over here. Now, if you are a small business, mostly small businesses are crying out for fresh content, and you hope to reuse that content in whether paid or non paid marketing, make sure it's really clear, and you stipulate that in the brief when you start because you like I said, you don't want to get those, you know, crazy DMS from random people across the across the globe asking for more money. So be really, really clear on what is expected. You don't need some sort of big contract unless it's a significant amount of money. I would say that making sure that it's just really clearly outlined expectations in an email form so that there's a paper trail and you know, from the very getgo what the expectations are and when you're setting those expectations also include things like whether or not the product needs to be ironed if you're a fashion business because we have said that quite a bit. Also, we've had photos submitted to us for approval where it's just a side on shot. And I think this particular product was this maxi Lynx dress and the influencer had her daughter on her hip. So you couldn't actually even see much of the dress. So just be really clear about, you know, whether you want to front back and sides or you want to see the product in full length, you know, whether it needs to be ironed and whether it needs to be returned, or whether they get to keep it because there's all different expectations and, and whatnot. And I've got another horror story, which I'll share in another episode. You know, in different countries, they have different sorts of expectations, we worked with one in the US where she assumed that she was going to keep the $2,000 worth of product, despite wanting to charge us 1000s of dollars for the thing, I'll do a whole nother episode on that one. But like I said, just make sure it's crystal clear. You don't have to have some sort of complicated contract unless of course, it's costing you 10s of 1000s of dollars, and there's a huge amount of amount of money on the line. But just having that paper trail, with the expectations and stipulations clearly identified. So everyone's knows what's what's going on what's expected of them from the very beginning before any money is even exchanged.
I hope this horror story was helpful to you. I'm going to share some manufacturing horror stories next week. Oh my lord, I could do a whole separate podcast just on that. But I hope this was helpful to you if you've got any ideas of things that you would love for me to to cover on this podcast. Feel free to DM me on Instagram. @iamJodie Minto. Because I would love to hear how I can help you further.
That's all for me this week. Thank you for joining me and I will talk to you next week. Bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of online store success with Jodie Minto. If you loved it, please share it with your friends on Instagram and tag me at I am Jodie Minto so I can say thank you. And if you really want to make my day please leave me a review on Apple podcasts.
If you'd like my help in starting or scaling your online store, be sure to check out my free resources and programmes at Jodie minto.com Thanks again and best of luck with your store.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
