These is how to find the right influencer for your brand
Finding the right influencer for your brand can be difficult at times, which is why I wrote this blog post. Let’s start with an explanation of what influencer marketing is.
Who is an influencer?
An influencer is essentially a public figure endorsing and promoting a product or service. – according to Forbes
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that involves endorsements and product placements from influencers… a hybrid of old and new marketing tools. It takes the idea of celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign. – influencermarketinghub.com
Influencer marketing, in my own words, is a type of marketing that uses influencers or celebrity endorsements to drive marketing and sales.
Why influencer marketing, Does it work?
Have you ever been perplexed when deciding on a product? For example, you want to buy face powder that is best for your face and skin type. So, if you see a makeup brand’s ad a few moments later and then see your favourite influencer or celeb do a review of how amazing it is, which are you more likely to choose? Perhaps not even an influencer, but a friend or family member
People will take a recommendation over being advertised, which is why influencer marketing has been so successful.
And In fact, giving traditional advertising a run for its money.
In marketing, ‘trust’ is a very important currency and a whopping 92% of consumers trust the recommendations of people they follow on social media – According to Expertise, people are quite sceptical or out rightly don’t like being advertised to, so this takes your ad away from the realm of advertising to people to creating relatable content or conversation with people they like.
History of influencer marketing
Contrary to popular belief, influencer marketing neither started from social media nor during the social media age. The Queen, Pope and Santa Clause are arguably some of the early influencers.
The Queen and the Pope were said to have influenced the purchase of certain medications for the common folks by just endorsing these products. On the other hand, Coca-Cola 1931 introduced Santa as part of their advertising which linked Coca-Cola to the holiday cheers and spirit and families began to share Coca-Cola as part of the experiences and rituals of the season, Santa was, therefore, their influencer.
There are several such examples throughout different historical eras but social media blew things out of the waters as for the first time in history common men who were neither actors nor singers or television faces began to shape and influence opinions in different niches just by having a large amount of following and a niche.
Now there are different categories of influencers based on the amount of following they have;
- Mega-influencers with more than a million followers (mostly celebrities)
- Macro-influencers with 500K to 1 million followers
- Mid-tier influencers with 50K to 500K followers
- Micro-influencers with 10K to 50K followers
- Nano-influencers with 1K to 10K followers
https://www.simplilearn.com/types-of-influencers-article
As much as this is a good thing, it has also created its unique headache of figuring out the right influencers for you.
On the surface, the influencer with the largest amount of following should be the right one but that can be so misleading as factors like engagement rate, followers quality, community etc are very important. There is also the issue of fake followers which can sometimes be detected by auditing this influencer plus there is also engagement farming which means buying engagements, comments, likes etc This one is very hard to detect but a likely solution will be discussed later in this article
Below are 5 factors to consider when choosing an influencer.
5 factors to consider before choosing the right influencer for your brand.
- Understand your audience;
The result for every type of marketing is the ability to reach the desired audience, so not understanding that audience will have dire effects on the marketing process and result. A brand needs to understand (which could be business, actor, musician etc) needs to know its target demographic, interests etc
This simply answers the question of “who am I doing this for” are they Genz that like piercings? Millennials that like RnB, nursing mothers who still want to be snatched etc. This informs all the work to be done in your marketing campaign.
2. Determine your goals for the campaign;
There are different reasons why brands run marketing campaigns, this can range from sales, subscriptions, GROWING AN AUDIENCE, ENGAGEMENT, BRAND AWARENESS, LEAD GENERATION, BRAND VISIBILITY, music downloads, brand recognition etc
Determining the goal for your campaign helps you choose the type of influencer to work with, for example working with a popular celebrity against a niche influencer. A niche influencer may get you more sales because they have your core audience, while a popular celebrity will get you more brand awareness and brand recognition. This is not to infer that popular celebs will not get you some sales, a combination of both could be a winning formula.
3. Consider working with or buying out influencers used by your competitors;
If your competitor is using them, then they most likely have your target audience. But even with this you still also need to conduct further research like taking a look at their engagement and some of the other details mentioned in this article.
4. Engagement rate & authenticity over the number of followers;
Followers, followers, followers!!! This is certainly not the most important factor as some Nano influencers will give you more value compared with some mega influencers.
Don’t get carried away with numbers always seek out influencers who have an authentic voice, a community that listens to them and a good engagement rate no you do not need to contact the influencer before finding out these details. You can simply audit them by using tools like SocialBlade and hype auditor or contact us to help you handle the process.
5. Test, test, test!!!;
In any form of marketing, it is essential to test the waters. Instead of going big on your first interaction with an influencer, you should start with a small partnership and then Use the result you get to determine if this relationship should continue if you should graduate to bigger one-off deals or work over some time, should the influencer create content for the brand etc
Whatever you do, never forget that the idea of influencer marketing is to not seem so much like advertising while reaching your marketing goals. So it is advised that you work with the influencer to make to blend things into their regular posting or lifestyle pattern which makes it hard for the audience to tell that it is an ad or influencing gig.
Please note;
Because the influencer and content creator markets are unregulated, there are no set prices or best practices. This has made navigating this sector somewhat difficult.
Influencers appear to charge what they believe they are worth, with no gatekeeper to checkmate the quality of delivery or whether they deliver at all. This can be a major source of frustration because a single influencer or content creator can hold your entire campaign hostage.
It is therefore recommended that you contact whichever influencer you wish to work with days or even weeks before the start of your campaign so that the materials required are already available and scheduled ahead of time.
This is especially true when your chosen influencer is creating content for your brand.
Need help handling influencer marketing for your brand? Contact us
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