In recent years, influencer marketing has emerged as one of the most efficient and sought-after marketing strategies for any business. Using famous influencers not only helps increase the business’s reach but also establishes trust between the company and its customers.
Still, with thousands of influencers for every genre, how can you expect to find the correct one for your brand? Selecting the wrong influencer for your brand may harm your business. So, how would you find the right influencer for your brand? Let’s find out.
What is Influencer Marketing and Why Does It Matter?
Influencer marketing is a practice adopted by several brands and organizations where an individual with a substantial presence on social media promotes your business product or service. They create and share content that makes the audience aware of the particular brand’s products or services, increasing the target audience.
Choosing the correct influencer for marketing increases your customer base and creates trust between the customers and the business. The relationship shall look natural and sustaining. Wrong or irrelevant influencers can render the marketing campaign ineffective or even harmful to the organization’s image.
How to Find the Right Influencers for Your Brand (5 Easy Steps)?
Now that we know the meaning of influencer marketing and its importance, let’s discuss how to find the right influencer for your business.
1. Define Your Brand Goals and Target Audience
The first step to finding the right influencer is to define your brand goal and the target audience. Whether the goal of your brand is to make it famous, get more direct sales, or just be more active on social media. Decide your influencers based on this goal. For instance, if you want a brand to be more famous, you can collaborate with macro/mega influencers who have an extensive reach. On the other hand, if higher engagement is the goal, you can work with nano and micro-influencers as they tend to have a closer relationship with their followers.
Your brand goals are only one side of a coin, understanding the audience is as important. Who are they? Why do these people like surfing the web, what is their age, and how do they behave? The deeper the understanding of what customers are like, the easier the process of searching for an influencer who can reach such customers becomes. Targeted audience definition will make the influencer search more effective and only those will be targeted who are right for the business and its customers.
Once you know who your audience is, look for an appropriate person among potential influencers. The best influencers are those who have an audience that is within your targeted audience. This is where frameworks like Instagram Insights and Twitter Analytics come in handy to help understand the details of the said audience such as the age, location, interests and level of engagement of followers about the target customer. For brands aiming to engage audiences through creative content, understanding how to make videos on trending music can be a valuable asset when collaborating with influencers.
2. Type of Influencer
Now that you have decided on the target audience, it’s time to decide the type of influencer with whom you want to work. Influencers differ based on the number of followers. Here’s the classification.
- Mega influencers: More than 1 million followers
- Macro influencers: From 100,000 to 1 million followers
- Micro-influencers: From 10,000 to 100,000 followers
- Nano influencers: 10,000 followers or less
At the bottom of the range are Nano influencers (1k-10k) who possess a small but highly interactive network while, Mega influencers (1 million and above) can reach out to a large number of customer base, creating a marketing campaign based on mass marketing. In the middle are Micro-influencers (10k-100k) who focus on niche-based markets but still manage to create a higher level of engagement, while Macro-influencers (100K-1 million) create a higher level of engagement than their predecessors.
Generally, choosing an influencer does not only depend on statistics. A large number of follower base doesn’t guarantee high engagement. For instance, a nano influencer might have less followers but higher engagement rates, which can be valuable for attracting loyal customers. So, decide your influencer type based on your brand’s goal.
Additionally, it’s also important to choose relevant influencers, as some specialize in specific fields. For example, if you’re promoting a tech product, it’s best to collaborate with a tech influencer who creates content in that area and if your product generates tattoos, it’s best to collaborate with a tattoo artist in the niche. Similarly, if your brand relates to art, partnering with graphic designers or creators in that niche can yield better results.
3. Research and Shortlist Potential Influencers
After deciding your brand’s goal, and the influencer type that you want to employ, research and shortlist some potential influencers, and select your influencers from social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. You can also take the help of specific hashtags relevant to the particular industry, like ‘#TravelBlogger’ or ‘#TravelInfluencer’, to identify influencers active in the relevant industry.
If your strategy includes growing your presence on TikTok, consider enhancing your profile’s visibility by buying TikTok followers. Not only it can help to attract the right influencers by showcasing a stronger fan base but also increases your brand’s presence and credibility. That will certainly help to negotiate and cooperate with potential influencers better.
You can also use online tools to enhance your research like Upfluence, Traackr, and HypeAuditor. These resources are efficient and most importantly help in identifying specific experts who are actual influencers in your brand niche.
Once you have several candidates shortlisted for influencers, study their analytics. We consider a number of different metrics such as the number of followers, engagement rate, reach, and audience profile to assess the effectiveness of an influencer. Decide your preferred influencer based on these parameters.
4. Evaluate Influencer Credibility and Authenticity
Many people think that a large number of followers, or likes implies higher engagement, but that’s not true. The level of engagement is decided based on comments, shares, and meaningful conversations. Check whether they have a good number of followers who are present and active, writing real comments and having discussions on relevant topics. This also offers insight into how well the influencer and the audience are connected.
Look for any previous endorsement history of the particular influencer with any brands or products. Have they worked with similar companies before yours? Were their previous published advertisements realistic or were they too promotional to exude real feelings? Get to know the influencer through his old posts and promotions.
5. Reach Out and Establish Mutually Beneficial Partnership
After you have decided with which influencer you have to collaborate, it’s time to approach them. Try not to send a generic common message, instead send a customized pitch, taking into account their portfolio, brand compatibility, and your vision of how the cooperation will look like. Since every influencer gets a lot of these requests, it’s highly recommended to make yours more peculiar and unique.
Once the influencer expresses any interest, proceed to discuss the terms of the partnership. What content do you expect, what will be the posting frequency, and is there any special requirement for the content? In case of payment, do state how the payment will be done. Stating all these precisely minimizes the chances of conflicting or contradictory interpretations of those terms in the future.
Monitoring and Adjusting Your Influencer Marketing Strategy
Even after you have collaborated with your preferred influencer, your work is still not done. You need to monitor its performance to see if it meets your goals. Check whether the reach and engagement, traffic, and sales of your product or service align with what you expected.
If not, you can adjust your influencer marketing strategy according to the situation. Maybe you require a different class of influencers or a different kind of influencer.
Conclusion
I hope you have an idea of how to find the right influencers for your brand. Finding the correct influencer for your brand requires research, patience, and a clear strategy. By following the above-mentioned steps, you can select the correct influencer who aligns with your brand values, with whom you can build successful partnerships that drive results. Keep in mind that the influencer is an image of your brand, so choose someone who genuinely aligns with your ideology.
