Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Someone read this post on 7 common influencer marketing mistakes businesses make and how to fix them and reached out to find out how to identify the right influencer marketers for his brand.
While we have a list of recommended influencer marketers for SMEs and MSME experts, we thought it right to provide a comprehensive guide on choosing the right influencer marketer for your brand.
Business needs differ, and so does the target market. So, what works for one may not work for the other, and that necessitated this guide.
So, let’s get to it. Here are 6 ways to identify the right influencer marketer that is best suited for your brand.
Contents
Know your audience
Audiences are among the three cornerstones of any influencer marketing campaign. And this is where most brands get it wrong. They fail to ensure that the influencer marketers’ followers are their target audience before engaging such influencer. And this explains why you must first start with knowing your audience.
Knowing your audience seems quite simple but can sometimes be challenging when getting to the specifics.
For instance, let’s say you run a beauty brand. In order to promote your products, you chose to work with a beauty influencer or blogger. Does this seem like the right decision for you?
Well, this is where some get it wrong. What most businesses don’t understand is that the same industry does not always translate to the same target audience. In this case, now, all beauty influencers and bloggers do not have the same target audience.
Some may be interested in millennials as their audiences.
Others may focus on moms or middle-aged women.
It would be best if you were sure that your target audience is the same as that of your influencer. This is important when you want to find influencers for your brand because the right ones will ensure that relevant audiences see your products. And that means you stand to get good results from your campaign.
Set clearly defined goals first
Now that you know your audience, what’s next is clearly defining your goal. Your goal will guide you towards the right influencer marketer for your brand and the campaign.
Ask yourself what you want to achieve from the campaign and itemize them with a timeframe.
Your influencer marketing goal may include:
- Brand awareness
- Building brand identity
- Lead generation
- Audience building
- Engagement
- Link building
- Sales
- Customer loyalty
With your goal in mind, you can access the influencer marketer options at your disposal and go with the one that would most likely help you achieve your goals.
Consistency
How often do they post?
The digital space today rewards consistency with engagement. From social media to blog platforms, the rules are the same.
Content creation is not easy, so it only makes sense that those who are able to create contents constantly are rewarded accordingly. The advantage of this on your brand is that it will get a wider reach.
Authenticity
This may sound counter-intuitive, but influencers and bloggers who have a smaller ratio of sponsored content tend to be more trusted and appear to be more authentic. Real stories that include genuine mention or use of a service, product, or brand are more trusted than straight product reviews or advertisements.
Engaging and compelling stories also tend to get more engagements than deals and product reviews. While it’s tempting to ask influencer marketers to write an excellent long review of your product (which readers pay less attention to), a health brand, for instance, could engage influencers to write a post about things they have on their bucket list and how that list is a motivation to remain healthy and live a long, active life. Contents like this are highly engaging for readers, authentic for the influencers, and connect such health brand sponsor to a genuine health-related conversation among a large audience.
Irrespective of your niche, you should look out for influencer marketers who can to create quality, authentic content that their audience expects while associating your brand with such content, rather than posting an obvious ad.
Reach
Choosing the right influencer is mainly a numbers game. The size of their audience correlates to the number of people your brand message can potentially get. How many social media platforms they use will determine the type of audience you are trying to reach. Defining an influencer’s social reach sets the stage for how you will eventually assess their overall value for your brand.
It may not be the most critical metric, but it is certainly a valid consideration. However, business owners should resist the urge to only look at unique visitors as a measure of reach. Traffic and followers are only useful to the extent that the influencer reaches your brand’s target audience.
For example, if you sell phones and their accessories, a smartphone influencer with a small reach is more influential than a food influencer with 100,000 unique monthly visitors.
It is also essential to think about the other social platforms your customers visit. If you are a fashion or food brand, someone with a massive following on Pinterest or Instagram may add more to your brand than someone on Facebook with a large fan base.
Relevance
The fact that a social media influencer marketer generates engagement from a large following doesn’t mean they are the right fit for your brand’s influencer marketing program. You have to put your target audience into consideration.
For instance, if an influencer’s contents resonate more with people within the 30-50 year age range, and the target audience for your product is pre-teens and adolescents, you may have to look for another influencer.
Before you get carried away with engagement, unique visitors and other static metrics depending on the platform, it’s essential to consider how aligned an influencer’s content is with your brand. Read through the influencer’s old content to get a sense of the kind of people they appeal to.
In Conclusion
Influencer marketing is a relatively new form of advertising, and everyone is still adjusting to it. So there are chances of making mistakes. While that is understandable, this guide on influencer marketing mistakes will help you avoid some of the pitfalls.
That said, the above guide should help you choose the right influencer marketer that suits your brand. Cheers.
