10 Ways to Find the Right Influencers for your Brand
Partnering with influencers is very difficult and time consuming. It can be stressful to put your brand’s reputation in the hands of an influencer that doesn’t have the right audience, engagements, reach or doesn’t understand your goals.
To find the right influencers for your brand you need to review them carefully, otherwise you run the risk of collaborating with fake influencers or influencers that are not in line with your brand’s mission.
But how do you know how to find the right influencers for your brand?
Below are 10 guidelines to help you find the right influencers to ensure your influencer marketing campaign is a success.
1. Review Influencer’s Audiences
In order to find the right influencers for your campaign – you first step should be researching influencer audiences, paying attention to their demographic and psychographic characteristics which gives you a comprehensive picture of the type of person they reach.
For example, if your promotion is targeted to moms of toddlers, you will want to work with influencers that have a large mom and parenting audience with an affinity towards toddler products and services.
Most importantly you need to ensure that your target audiences are the same as your influencer’s.
2. Review Brand Relevancy
A relevant influencer shares content relevant to your brand and should have an audience that aligns with your target market. So, before looking at unique visitors, impressions, clicks and other metrics, it’s important to look at how aligned an influencer’s content is with your messaging. Read through their posts and get a sense for what kind of content they are posting about.
3. Find Influencers With Great Engagements
Engagement rates are extremely important when finding the right influencers for your brand and have become the holy grail for determining how good or bad a piece of content resonated with an audience.
The more the platform grows, the more users like, follow, share and tag other users, the easier potential customers are able discover your brand.
4. Reach is Important
Post engagement is the holy grail of success but attaining the highest reach per post is also an important metric.
Influencer’s reach is the number of people who potentially can see their content. It’s the size of the influencer’s audience (followers), plus the number of people who see the content through search results or recommendations. Therefore, a better opportunity to spread brand awareness so it’s important that you choose an influencer that has a good reach on the channel where you wish to run your campaign.
5. Work With Authentic Influencers
Authenticity is the essence of a successful influencer marketing campaign. People look up to honest influencers with a unique and genuine voice.
Authentic influencers don’t just talk about products or services because they have been paid to do so. In fact, they might have spoken about the product or service even before the brand even approached them for a partnership
6. Review Posting Frequently
In order to find the right influencer for your brand it’s important to review how often they are posting. Influencers should post regularly if you want their social media accounts to appear fresh.
This can be as much as one to three posts per day and should focus on producing quality posts ahead of quantity.
7. Niche (Micro Influencers)… Something To Consider
Influencers that are considered “Niche” typically are on the smaller side “micro influencers”with followers under 50,000 and are usually more affordable.
Niche or “micro influencers” may not have a ton of followers; however they usually make up for it in their engagement rates. When your brand works with a niche influencer the campaign is more likely to see better results than you would if you partnered with a less-specialized influencer.
8. Use Google Alerts, Hashtags and Monitor Tools
Searching through hundreds of influencers content to find the right collaborators can be time-consuming and even counterproductive. You might not know where to start. You might waste a lot of time on unproven influencers.
The easiest way of finding the right influencers is to look for the ones who are already talking about you and or your competitors. This makes it easier to negotiate and persuade them into promoting your brand.
- Social Media Monitoring Tools
Social media monitoring can have a multitude of benefits and can help you monitor various aspects of your social media presence and performance.
In fact, Clutch found that:
86% of businesses monitor requests, concerns, and questions from customers with the help of social listening
25% use it so they can learn how to improve their products
24% use it to attract customers
21% use it to provide better customer service.
- Research Hashtags
Hashtags make content searchable and accessible on social platforms.
You should first identify your brands values and mission – then come up with a list of keywords that best fits your brand and the audiences you are going after.
Then, you can use some of these words as hashtags when you’re searching for influencers on various channels and tools.
- Set up Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free and easy to way to get the latest updates about brand mentions and relevant topics about your brand or industry. You can create alerts about the most relevant keywords you want to monitor. And then you’ll get emails whenever someone uses those keywords online.
9. Look Out For Fake Followers
There’s nothing worse than finding the perfect influencer partnership for your brand and then learning that their thousands of devoted followers are actually bots. Unfortunately, the game of buying likes and fans is still very much alive, so it’s imperative to catch red flags.
An influencer might have fake followers if they have tons of followers on Instagram with just a few comments, shares or likes. Look into their followers and check for authentic bios and profile pictures – if many are missing or blank, it’s shady. If a social account has a small engagement rate but tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, it might be worth examining a bit closer.
10. Use an Experienced Influencer Marketing Agency
An experienced influencer marketing agency will dedicate their time and resources from start to finish from determining the timeline of the campaign, developing creative content and managing content production, and finding the most suitable influencers to get the word out about your product or service.
Be sure to reach out to ShopHer Media for any influencer marketing inquiries.