7 Tips on Selecting the best Influencers for your Marketing Campaign
Collaborating with influencers is a key tool to spread the word about your product or service. Choosing the right influencer will have ample benefits for your campaign as you will connect with your audience through humanising your brand. Not only this, but you will be reaching beyond your existing audience as they promote your brand to their following as well.
The potential downside to influencer marketing is collaborating with the wrong influencer. There must be a strong selection process with agreed budgets and an influencer who works well for your brand. That being said, we have come up with a selection of tips that we always go through when setting up influencer collaborations for our clients:
The influencer should fit your brand
Ideally, the influencer you collaborate with would look just like your target consumer. Does this person have the habits and personality of someone who would buy your product or use your service? Influencer partnerships works best when the influencer is passionate about the product or service being promoted. Therefore, our suggestion would be to start looking at influencers who your target audience follow or even with those who already follow your pages.
Prioritise their engagement over their number of followers
When building your list of potential influencers to collaborate with, take some time to look at their engagement over time. As it is very easy to buy followers and likes, it is important to understand whether they truly have influence by understanding whether their engagement is consistent. Check out their comments, links and who is tagging them in posts. Someone with 10k followers and high engagement would likely provide better results than someone with 75k and minimal engagement.
Research their previous brand collaborations
Have the influencers you are targeting had any previous collaborations? It is important to understand who they have collaborated with so you can see if there will be any conflicts of interest. Not only this, but you will be able to see the kind of results that previous collaborations have gained, as well as the style of content you would get for free or for a fee, depending on the influencer.
Does your target audience align with their following?
Collaborating with an influencer might be a great fit for your brand, but will their followers engage with your product or service? As you are debating who to work with, the influencer will question whether their followers would appreciate hearing about your business. For this reason, we would advise to think ahead and only reach out to influencer’s who have the same audience as your target audience.
What style of branded content do they post?
Influencers promote content in so many different ways. Many will simply add it as product placement and tag the brand in a photo or video. While other influencers tend to produce beautiful images or videos using the service and give information or review a brand in their caption. Depending on what you are looking for, we would suggest looking at their previous collaborations and the style of post they produce.
Consider hiring an agency
An influencer marketing agency already works with and has a relationship with influencers, whether local or international, there are different expectations and style of communication required in deciding on terms of a collaboration. Their expert advice, large influencer databases and existing relationships with influencers could help you achieve better results.
Use clear communication to set your expectations
When reaching out to influencers, you need to set clear goals and expectations with each other. They need to know what you expect from them, but you also need to know from them what kind of realistic results to set. More often than not, many businesses set expectations too high and don’t attempt to attain understanding of what influencer marketing can do for a business.