7 Reasons Influencers Did Not Share Your Promotion
By: Bailey Richert
Tags: Online Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Digital Marketing, Online Business, Collaboration

When you team up with partners or peers in your niche with bigger audiences than yours, who we might call “influencers”, you hope those people will promote your project — whatever it may be — so you can get a wider reach.

This is especially true of virtual summits, where the host partners with many peers / influencers in their niche. The success of a summit is almost entirely due to the speakers’ affiliate promotions of it to their own audiences.

As someone who has hosted many virtual summits for myself as well as multi-millionaire entrepreneurs like Russell Brunson, Julie Stoian, Steve J. Larsen and more, I’ve learned a thing or two about why speakers do or don’t promote collaborations they’re a part of and what we can do as the hosts/organizers to get them to share.

Whether it’s a virtual summit, podcast, launch promotion or something else entirely for which you want to partner with influencers, keep these reasons they might not share in mind, and avoid doing them!

#1: You came out of the blue.

The ‘law of reciprocity’ in relationships says that if you do a lot of stuff for someone else, they feel almost obligated to return the favor. So, as an influencer, I’m way more likely to do favors and share stuff for people who have already invested in my community a ton.

If you came out of the blue and asked an influencer to do an interview when you never engaged with them before, never joined their email list, never contributed to their Facebook group, they’re not going to feel “obligated” to “return any favors”.

You have to understand:

the influencer is doing YOU a favor by providing you content for your podcast, summit, etc.

That is already enough of a favor, so by asking them to share it, you’re asking for MORE favors. They need a reason to want to go that extra mile for you.

#2: You ghosted them after you got the content you needed.

If you ask an influencer to do an interview, then disappear for 3 months, then reappear telling them it’s been published and you want them to share it tomorrow, you can bet that’s not going to happen.

Bonus: you have to give people time to work their promotions into their calendar. The bigger the influencer, the further out their year is already planned.

#3: You made sharing your promotion a requirement.

People are always amazed when I tell them that I DON’T make it a requirement for speakers on my virtual summit to share it.

“Surely, that’s the way to really ensure that your influencers share it, right?”

Hardly!

Even if you make an influencer sign an agreement saying they will share it, how on Earth are you going to enforce that? You can’t. So don’t bother.

No one likes to be told how, where, when and what they should be sharing with their audience.

Instead of making it a requirement, the onus should fall on you to make your promotion actually worth sharing. If it really is, then they really will.

#4: You changed the details on them several times.

If you tell an influencer your virtual summit is going to be in August, and they’re prepping promotions for August, then you push it back and back again, you’ve lost them. You seem super unorganized. They’ve lost faith your promotion is going to be a good thing for their audience. They carved out time for you in August, but now that time is going to someone else, and they’re not bumping someone else in December for your thing.

#5: Your interview/collaboration did not produce content unique or valuable enough to share.

I really wish more people understood this: no influencer is going to spend valuable real estate in their weekly email newsletter to promote a 20 min podcast interview where they’re answering the same questions and telling the same stories their audience has heard a million times.

You need to ask yourself how you can make your promotion so good that the influencer would rather promote it over their own content.

#6: You didn’t remind them.

If you interview an influencer for a virtual summit, for example, but that summit doesn’t go live for 3 months? They’re going to forget when it’s about to go live, even if they wanted to share it. 3 months is like 3 years in entrepreneur time. A lot happens, and if the content is already done (if they already recorded their interview for you), it feels like project is finished in their eyes because so many things have occurred since, even if your event is not even close to being over.

The interviews get scheduled, but the promotions often don’t.

You need to make the promotion schedule clear, and remind them often.

#7: You didn’t provide them promotional materials.

If you make it hard for the influencer to promote by assuming they will write their own social media posts, email copy, etc, they probably won’t do it. Create assets they can copy/paste/post, and you increase your chances they will share.

Bonus: Don’t send your influencer partners a Google drive link where they have to go in and get the promotional assets. Don’t ask them to set up an account in your affiliate software so they can go dig around for their promotional assets. Send the files (e.g. social media graphics, documents with email copy) individually as attachments to an email that people can download with 1 click. Yes, you have to make it that easy.