I keep running into clients who think one TikTok post will make them viral overnight. How do you folks manage expectations without crushing their dreams? Getting tired of explaining why reach doesn’t equal sales.
Had a SaaS client who wanted instant demo bookings from their first LinkedIn influencer campaign. The influencer content bombed for direct conversions, but here’s the weird part - six months later, I checked our bottom-funnel keyword rankings against their content calendar. Those influencer mentions had built enough topical authority to push our comparison pages up 40 positions. That’s when we stopped talking immediate ROI and started focusing on building a content ecosystem.
Had a client who thought their first micro-influencer campaign would go viral overnight. I sent weekly reports showing how influencer traffic works differently - great email open rates but people take longer to buy. Once they saw their influencer subscribers had 60% better engagement in our email automation than paid ad traffic, it clicked. Sometimes you’ve got to tie influencer results back to channels they already get.
Did this confusing influencer audit last year and found something wild in the logs - Google was crawling influencer backlinks 3x faster than our paid ad sources. But here’s the kicker: when we checked branded searches, those influencer campaigns boosted our long-tail keyword visibility by 180%. Keywords we weren’t even targeting! That’s when the client got it - influence isn’t about instant sales, it’s building search momentum.
Had a client in e-commerce who wanted instant ROAS from their first influencer campaign. Instead of focusing only on direct sales, we tracked micro-conversions - email signups, video completion rates, branded search lift. Two months later, we showed them how influencer touchpoints were guiding users through a longer buying journey. Game changer: customers from influencer campaigns had 40% higher lifetime value, even though the initial CPA looked awful.
Had a client who was totally obsessed with vanity metrics. We switched from showing them weekly reach numbers to three-month sentiment reports on their influencer campaigns. Once they saw how real conversations slowly changed how people talked about their brand - and started getting organic mentions - they finally got it. Influence isn’t about going viral overnight, it’s about building trust. What really clicked for them was seeing the cultural ripple effect their campaigns actually created.