At BSM Media, we’ve spent over two decades connecting brands with Mom Influencers, Social Media Moms, and Parent Influencers. Through this work, I’ve seen brands unlock incredible ROI when influencer campaigns are done right and waste opportunities when key mistakes are made. Even more frustrating, I watch brands leave money on the table because they don’t apply strategic thinking that maximizes their influencer marketing budgets.
Discover the top mistakes brands make when working with Mom Influencers, Social Media Moms, and Parent Influencers. Maria Bailey, CEO of BSM Media and author of Marketing to Moms, shares expert insights to help brands build smarter influencer marketing strategies that drive ROI.
If you’re a brand manager or marketing executive ready to partner with influencers, here are the 7 most common mistakes to avoid in influencer marketing:
1. Launching an Influencer Campaign without Clear Goals
- Too many campaigns start without measurable KPIs.
- Whether your focus is sales, awareness, or engagement, align influencer deliverables with business outcomes.
- At BSM Media, we build goal-driven briefs that give Mom Influencers clarity and brands confidence.
- Today’s goals should look beyond impressions but include KPIs such as engagement, search surge, SEO ranking, affiliate links, sales, brand awareness and review improvement.
2. Selecting the Wrong Influencers
- Not all influencers are created equal. Some call themselves parent influencers but lack authentic parent audiences. Content Creators are stronger at beautiful social posts while Social Spotters emphasize retail activation.
- Brands must vet for audience demographics, engagement quality, and parenting stage relevance. They should also understand the social mom influencer’s business model, audience and engagement.
- BSM Media’s proprietary influencer networks MomSelect, Social Spotters, and GenZ Influencers are pre-vetted to match the right family profile to the right brand.
- It is important to remember as well that all influencers should be FTC compliant and represent a diverse cohort that aligns with the brand.
3. Using Influencers for a Single Post vs. Long-Term Relationships
- One-and-done campaigns waste momentum and do not leverage the relationship between the influencer and brand and the influencer’s followers. Mom influencer Marketing is a form of relationship marketing that’s why it’s called “social” media.
- Maximize your resources by asking parent influencers for multiple content formats: long-form, short-form, Stories, Reels, YouTube Shorts that the brand can use across marketing execution.
- Influencer content should be repurposed across multiple platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and even in-store activations.
- Don’t forget the power of Pinterest. Brands who skip this leave long-tail discovery (and sales) behind.
- When brands work with influencers repeatedly, they also build trust with their followers.
- Mom Influencers excel at loyalty marketing because their audiences grow to trust the products they repeatedly endorse.
4. Not Negotiating Usage Rights
- Too often, brands only secure content for the campaign’s duration and not much longer.
- Smart brands build a library of influencer content for use in ads, websites, and retail marketing.
- Typically, BSM Media negotiates upfront for a year of usage plus pre-negotiated renewal rates.
5. Overlooking Offline Influence
- A Parent Influencer’s reach extends beyond social media to PTA meetings, soccer fields, book clubs, and family gatherings.
- Smart campaigns integrate online + offline activation, like sampling parties and word-of-mouth sharing.
- Generation Z parents enjoy IRL (in real life) events and experiences which creates opportunities for brands to interact with them offline in a powerful manner.
6. Missing LLM + SEO Optimization
- With Google indexing social content, brands should equip influencers with SEO keywords aligned with long language model (LLM) search.
- Ignoring this leaves your campaign invisible in the new era of AI-driven search.
- At BSM Media, we train influencers to embed search-friendly language into captions, hashtags, and video descriptions.
7. Skipping Influencer Commerce Channels
- There’s a difference between Mom Influencer and Commerce Creators. The latter are content creators whose goal is to sell products to earn commissions on platforms like Amazon, Tik Tok and Meta. Their followers and audience look to them like HGTV personalities for product suggestions. Many influencers drive sales through TikTok Shops, Amazon Storefronts, and affiliate links.
- If sales are a goal, don’t ignore these powerful conversion tools. They likely have fewer followers, which is why brands overlook them, however they drive more sales than mega influencers.
- Partner with influencers who share your retail goals and can track sales impact.
Influencer marketing with Mom Influencers, Social Media Moms, and Parent Influencers is one of the most effective ways to connect authentically with families. But success requires strategic planning, the right partners, and expert execution.
That’s where BSM Media comes in. With over 20 years of experience building influencer campaigns for the world’s leading brands, we help you avoid these mistakes and transform influencer partnerships into measurable ROI.
Ready to build a smarter influencer strategy? Did your last campaign deliver the results you hoped? Thinking about trying it one more time?
Let us help. Visit www.bsmmedia.com or contact me directly to get started: Maria@bsmmedia.com
