of Indian brands report dissatisfaction with at least one influencer campaign — almost always due to avoidable mistakes in strategy, selection, or execution
Why Most Influencer Campaigns Underperform in India
Influencer marketing in India is a ₹3,500 crore industry growing at 25% annually. Yet the majority of campaigns deliver disappointing results — not because influencer marketing doesn't work, but because brands keep making the same avoidable mistakes. After managing 2080+ campaigns, we've catalogued every error pattern that separates campaigns that generate real ROI from those that waste budgets.
The fundamental problem is that most brands approach influencer marketing with the same mindset they use for traditional advertising — control the message, maximize reach, measure impressions. But influencer marketing operates on different principles: authenticity over control, cultural fit over reach, and engagement over impressions. When brands apply advertising logic to creator partnerships, campaigns fail predictably.
Here are the 15 most common mistakes, ranked by how frequently we see them and how much damage they cause.
1 Choosing Creators by Follower Count Alone
This is the single most expensive mistake in Indian influencer marketing. Brands open Instagram, sort by followers, and pick the biggest names in their budget. The result is almost always overpaying for underperformance because follower count tells you nothing about audience quality, engagement authenticity, or cultural fit with your brand.
A creator with 500K followers but 0.5% engagement rate reaches fewer real people than a creator with 50K followers and 8% engagement. Worse, large follower counts in India are frequently inflated through follow-for-follow loops, purchased followers, or engagement pods that create an illusion of influence.
What to do instead: Evaluate creators on engagement rate (minimum 3% for micro, 2% for mid-tier), audience demographics (do their followers match your target customer?), content quality (would you be proud if this appeared on your brand page?), and comment quality (are comments genuine conversations or generic emojis?).
2 Treating Integration as Positioning
Most Indian agencies deliver "integration" — they hand a product to a creator, the creator takes a photo or shoots a 15-second Reel saying "use code XYZ," and the campaign is done. This is product placement, not marketing. Integration creates a transaction. Positioning creates meaning.
When you integrate, you're renting a creator's audience for a moment. When you position, you're building your brand's meaning through the creator's world. A travel photographer doesn't just hold up your camera — they show how that camera captures the light at dawn in Ladakh. A food creator doesn't just eat your snack — they make it part of a family moment that resonates culturally.
What to do instead: Brief creators on brand positioning, not just product features. Give them creative freedom to integrate your brand into their storytelling naturally. Evaluate campaigns by brand association and recall, not just reach and clicks.
3 No Clear Campaign Objectives
"We want brand awareness and also sales and also followers and also website traffic." When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Campaigns without a single clear objective produce mediocre results across every metric rather than exceptional results on the one that matters.
What to do instead: Choose one primary objective per campaign. If it's awareness, optimize for reach and impressions. If it's conversions, optimize for click-through and discount code usage. If it's content generation, optimize for production quality and usage rights. Secondary metrics can be tracked but shouldn't drive decisions.
4 Over-Scripting Creator Content
Brands send 2-page briefs specifying exact camera angles, dialogue, hashtags, posting times, and caption wording. The result is content that looks, sounds, and feels like an advertisement — which is exactly what audiences have trained themselves to ignore. Over-scripted content gets 40-60% lower engagement than creator-led content because audiences can instantly detect when their favourite creator is reading from a script.
What to do instead: Provide a one-page brief with brand messaging pillars, key product benefits (maximum 3), mandatory disclosures, and things to avoid. Then let the creator interpret your brand through their creative lens. The best campaign content comes from creators who genuinely understand the brand and express it in their authentic voice.
5 Ignoring Regional and Tier-2/3 Creators
90% of Indian influencer marketing budgets go to Mumbai and Delhi-based creators creating content in English or Hindi. Meanwhile, regional creators in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Bengal, Gujarat, and the Northeast have deeply engaged local audiences at a fraction of the cost. Brands targeting pan-India consumers through metro-only creators miss 60-65% of their potential audience.
What to do instead: Allocate 30-40% of your influencer budget to regional creators. A Tamil food creator with 30K followers drives more restaurant footfall in Chennai than a Mumbai food blogger with 300K followers. Regional campaigns also face less competition, meaning your content stands out rather than getting lost in the noise of metro-focused campaigns.
6 Running One-Off Campaigns Instead of Ongoing Partnerships
Single-post campaigns are the default in India — hire a creator for one Reel, measure performance, move on. This approach never builds the repetition and association needed for genuine brand recall. Research shows that audiences need 5-7 brand exposures before taking action. One post gives you one exposure. Then you're forgotten.
What to do instead: Structure 3-6 month partnerships with your top-performing creators. Monthly content from the same creator builds authentic association — their audience starts associating your brand with a creator they trust. The cost per engagement drops dramatically after the first month because the creator understands your brand better and the audience becomes familiar with the partnership.
7 No Tracking or Attribution Setup
Brands spend ₹5-10 lakh on a campaign and then measure success by looking at likes on the creator's post. No unique discount codes, no UTM links, no custom landing pages, no post-purchase surveys. Without proper attribution, you're essentially throwing money into a black box and hoping something good happens.
What to do instead: Before launching any campaign, set up: unique discount codes per creator, UTM-tagged links for every shared URL, a dedicated landing page for the campaign, and post-purchase survey questions. This isn't optional. Without attribution, you cannot optimize future campaigns because you have no data on what worked.
8 Expecting Viral Results From Every Campaign
Brands see one viral Reel from a competitor and expect every campaign to produce the same. Virality is unpredictable by definition. Building a strategy around the expectation of virality is building on sand. For every viral campaign you see, there are 500 campaigns that performed solidly but didn't break the internet — and those solid campaigns are what actually builds brands over time.
What to do instead: Set realistic benchmarks based on the creator's average performance. If their Reels typically get 50K views, expecting 500K from a branded post is unrealistic. Plan for consistent base-level performance and treat any viral moments as bonuses, not expectations.
9 Slow Content Approval Processes
Brand team creates brief → Creator submits draft → Marketing reviews → Legal reviews → CMO reviews → Feedback sent → Creator revises → Second review → Final approval. This 2-3 week cycle kills campaigns. By the time content is approved, the trend has passed, the creator's content calendar has moved on, and the authentic moment that inspired the content is gone.
What to do instead: Establish pre-approved brand guidelines and messaging frameworks. Empower a single point of contact to approve content within 24-48 hours. For real-time campaigns on Twitter or during events, pre-approve content templates that allow the creator to execute within guardrails without per-post approval.
10 Ignoring Content Repurposing
A creator produces a beautiful 60-second Reel for your brand. It gets posted on their feed, reaches their audience once, and then effectively dies. That same content could be repurposed across your brand's social channels, used in paid advertising (with usage rights), embedded on your website, included in email marketing, and cut into shorter clips for different platforms.
What to do instead: Negotiate content usage rights upfront — it typically costs 20-40% extra but multiplies the content's value by 5-10x. One well-produced creator video becomes 8-12 content assets across platforms and campaigns. Build a content library from every campaign and repurpose systematically.
11 Choosing the Wrong Platform for Your Objective
Every platform serves a different role. Instagram drives discovery and aspiration. YouTube builds trust through long-form reviews. Twitter drives conversation and opinion. LinkedIn reaches B2B decision-makers. Brands that put their entire budget into Instagram because "that's where influencer marketing happens" miss the platform where their audience actually makes purchasing decisions.
What to do instead: Match platform to objective. For product consideration, use YouTube reviews. For brand awareness among young consumers, use Instagram Reels. For B2B lead generation, use LinkedIn thought leaders. For real-time relevance, use Twitter. For deep trust, use podcast partnerships.
12 Not Vetting for Fake Followers
Fake followers remain rampant in the Indian creator ecosystem. An estimated 30-40% of India's influencer follower counts include some degree of artificial inflation. Brands paying per-follower or per-impression rates without vetting are paying for audiences that don't exist. Signs of fake followers include sudden follower spikes, engagement rates below 1% for accounts under 100K, generic comments, and follower-to-engagement ratios that don't align with platform benchmarks.
What to do instead: Use free tools like Social Blade to check follower growth patterns — organic growth is gradual, purchased followers create spike patterns. Check comment quality manually — real engagement includes specific questions and detailed responses. Request Instagram Insights screenshots showing audience demographics and genuine reach numbers.
13 Treating All Creator Tiers the Same Way
Nano creators (1K-10K), micro creators (10K-100K), mid-tier creators (100K-500K), and macro creators (500K+) all serve different purposes and require different management approaches. Giving a nano creator the same detailed brief you'd give a macro creator wastes time. Giving a macro creator the same ₹5K payment you'd give a nano creator insults them. Each tier has different strengths, expectations, and ROI profiles.
What to do instead: Use nano creators for volume and social proof (20-30 creators, simple briefs, barter or minimal payment). Use micro creators for authentic engagement and conversion (10-15 creators, moderate briefs, fair compensation). Use mid-tier for reach with credibility (3-5 creators, detailed collaboration, premium compensation). Use macro creators for awareness and brand positioning (1-2 creators, deep partnership, significant investment).
14 No Post-Campaign Analysis
Campaign ends, team moves on to the next project. No analysis of what worked, what didn't, which creators performed, which content formats drove results, or what to do differently next time. Without post-campaign analysis, every campaign starts from zero. With it, every campaign builds on the learnings of the last one, creating compounding improvement over time.
What to do instead: Within one week of campaign completion, compile a performance report covering: per-creator performance metrics, content format comparison, platform comparison, audience feedback themes, conversion attribution data, and specific recommendations for the next campaign. Share this with your team and your agency.
15 DIY When You Need Professional Help
Brands trying to manage 15+ creator relationships, negotiate rates, review content, track performance, and handle payments internally — while also running the rest of their marketing — inevitably produce lower-quality campaigns. Internal teams lack the creator network, market rate knowledge, content quality benchmarks, and operational workflows that experienced agencies have built over thousands of campaigns.
What to do instead: If you're spending under ₹1 lakh per campaign with 3-5 creators, DIY is manageable. Above that threshold, the complexity of creator management, quality control, and campaign optimization justifies working with a specialized agency that can deliver better results while freeing your team to focus on strategy.
The One Rule That Prevents Most Mistakes
If you remember nothing else from this list, remember this: cultural fit over follower count. When you choose creators whose values, aesthetics, and audience genuinely align with your brand — rather than just chasing the biggest numbers — most of the other mistakes become far less likely. A creator who genuinely fits your brand will create authentic content naturally, engage their real audience meaningfully, and deliver results that justify the investment. This is the difference between integration and positioning, and it's the difference between campaigns that waste budgets and campaigns that build brands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Choosing creators based on follower count alone. This leads to overpaying for inflated audiences, mismatched brand-creator partnerships, and content that feels forced. Evaluating cultural fit, engagement quality, audience demographics, and content authenticity produces dramatically better results even with smaller creators.
Minimum three campaigns over 3-4 months. The first campaign teaches you about your audience's response. The second lets you optimize based on learnings. The third shows the true potential of the channel with data-driven decisions. Brands that judge influencer marketing on one campaign are making a premature evaluation.
Almost always yes. One-off posts generate one moment of attention. Exclusive monthly partnerships with 3-5 creators build consistent brand association, allow for content repurposing, and cost 30-40% less per engagement compared to repeated one-off campaigns with different creators each time.
Compare results against the creator's own average performance metrics. If their organic Reels average 50K views and 3% engagement, your branded content should achieve at minimum 60-70% of those numbers. Below 50% of their average suggests something is wrong with the brief, creative direction, or brand-creator fit.
Related Reading
Stop Making These Mistakes
With 2080+ campaigns behind us, we've made these mistakes so you don't have to. Let our experience be your shortcut to influencer marketing that actually works.
Get Started