In this era, influencer marketing is all the rage on social media. Gone are the days when people logged in to their socials only to connect with their peers. Now, social media is used as a search engine by netizens to explore new product and service recommendations. Social media influencers come in handy while looking for recommendations since most people trust them.
Influencers are called influencers for a reason; because they can influence people’s purchase decisions and make them buy products based on their suggestions. Businesses worldwide are now shifting from traditional advertising practices to leveraging the power of influencer marketing on social media. While it’s a great way to promote your word, choosing the right influencers to partner with is a crucial step to executing a successful campaign. Let’s delve deeper into the subject in this post.
Why is Choosing the Right Influencer Necessary?
Influencers are the face of your brand when partnering for a marketing campaign. They take your message forward to their followers who trust them. And you’d definitely want them to represent your brand accurately as well as to a relevant audience. If any of these two factors is missing, the essence of the campaign will be lost. So choosing the right influencers is critical to a campaign’s success.
In the next part, we will share some important factors to consider before choosing an influencer to ensure that they are the right fit for your brand.
What to Look for In An Influencer?
When shortlisting influencers for a partnership, this is a question many brands and marketers ask. What to look for in an influencer? What are those qualities that must be present in someone you are looking forward to collaborating with?
There are certain key points that you need to look for in an influencer when you are planning to collaborate with them. These factors will define whether the particular influencer(s) is the right fit for your brand or not.
- The niche they are working in. Is it relevant or similar to yours?
- Engagement rates and what kind of interaction they have with their audience.
- Their audience demographics and whether they fit your target audience.
- Analyze the quality and style of their content. Does it align with your brand ethos?
- How often do they post content on their profiles? Do they follow a specific pattern?
- Take a look at the sponsored content they have created previously.
- What kind of content from them gets the most attention and engagement from their audience?
- Have they created content for a similar product or category as yours before? If yes, what was the audience’s response to it?
- Did their previous collaborations make any difference for the brands they collaborated with?
- Do they post content on other social platforms?
- Do they fit in your budget?
Partnering With the Right Influencers
Now that you are aware of why collaborating with the right influencers is necessary, let’s move on to the steps or measures you need to take to streamline your partnerships.
Set SMART Goals
The foundational step for executing any kind of marketing campaign is setting goals that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). Defining goals makes it easier to devise a plan of action that is doable. Your goals could be anything from building brand awareness, boosting your TikTok followers, or driving more traffic on your website.
Determine Your Budget
One of the core aspects of influencer marketing is determining a budget solely dedicated to this purpose. Of course, there will be marginal changes up and down during the spend but it will help you stay within the limit you’ve set. You will be able to decide how many influencers you can take on board and how much each of them will be paid. Setting a budget will also help you negotiate better and eliminate the ones who do not fit your budget.
Know Your Target Audience
This is one of the key factors in deciding on an influencer. If you do not have a deeper understanding of your target audience, you won’t be able to select the right influencer. Dig down deep into the audience demographics and activity patterns of the influencers’ audiences and see if they align with your buyer persona. If most of your target audience and influencer’s audience align, you’re good to go.
Look for Influencers Within Your Niche
It’s best to look for influencers who are already working in your niche. Your business can leverage their niche expertise to tap into its potential target market. Another benefit of collaborating with influencers in your niche is that their audience is very likely to show interest in your products and services. So they will show engagement on the branded content created by the influencer(s) in partnership with your business.
Analyze the Shortlisted Influencers
Once you have roughly shortlisted the influencers you want to work with, it’s time to analyze their profiles thoroughly to nominate the best ones and make the most of your influencer marketing campaign. We have listed some basic pointers below that you need to analyze before finalizing the influencers.
- Content Quality and Style
Observe the influencers’ content quality and style and analyze if it aligns with your business values. Is the posted content of a similar kind or has diversity in it? How their content will add value to your brand? How does their audience show engagement on their content? Would they be interested in finding out about your brand?
- Brand Alignment
Do they align with your brand values and ethos? Will they be a good fit to represent your brand? How well will they be able to communicate your promotional message to their audience without making it seem too sales-y or as if it’s being imposed on them?
- Audience Interaction
Analyze how their audience interacts with their content, their average engagement rates, and how the influencers keep their audience engaged. Do they go live often, share stories, create interactive posts, or anything else?
- Previous Collaborations
Go through their sponsored content to analyze their previous collaborations with various brands. How is their branded content different from organic one? Is there a good balance between sponsored and original content? How often do they post branded content? See if they have worked with a brand in a similar niche as yours to get a better idea.
Use Influencer Marketing Tools
Doing every little task for influencer selection can consume a lot of time and you might derive inaccurate data. It’s best to use an influencer marketing tool that does the math for you. Whether it’s calculating influencers’ engagement rates, getting analytics, or anything else. Automating the overall process will make it easier to streamline things without any plausible errors.
Making Collaborations Effective
Influencer collaborations are great, but how to make them effective for both parties? We are sharing some tips to help you with that.
Establish Clear Communication and Expectations
The most basic yet practical piece of advice is to establish clear communication and expectations from day one. Don’t stay in ifs and buts, elaborate what you want in a precise brief shared with the influencer(s). Mutually agree on a timeline, deliverables, budget, and metrics. Document everything in a contract so there is no room left for misunderstanding in the future.
Define Your KPIs
Of course, you want to achieve a goal through your influencer marketing campaign. Define the key performance indicators for the influencer(s) to focus on. It could be enhanced engagement, increase in YouTube subscribers, brand awareness, more reach, leads, conversions, website traffic, etc.
Measure Campaign Success
The campaign success is to be measured through relevant KPIs and metrics that are to be calculated for each goal. For example, impressions and reach for brand awareness; number of likes, views, comments, and shares for engagement; CTR (click-through rate) for traffic, etc. a quantified measure of metrics helps you calculate the total ROI for the campaign.
Offer Them Value
The partnership between a brand and an influencer should be mutually beneficial. One where both provide value to each other in one way or the other. This is the key to building sustainable relationships with them. Value could be in any form, be it sending them a complimentary gift, an exclusive discount to their followers, early access to products, being flexible with the deadlines, or anything else.
Give Them Creative Freedom
Influencers are loved for the creativity they bring through their content. If brands suffocate them with scripted content, it’s a loss for both parties. Such content wouldn’t get enough recognition and engagement. It will decrease the ROI as well. So giving influencers creative freedom and the opportunity to express themselves however they like is necessary to bring out the best from your marketing endeavors.
Of course, you can ask for some teeny tiny changes if you feel something doesn’t align with your message or values before the branded content goes live.
Foster Long-Term Relationships
Influencer marketing is not just about partnering with influencers for work and forgetting them after you are done. Stay in touch to foster long-term relationships with them. This will also open room for future collaborations and more creative endeavors.
Use A Diverse Approach
In your influencer marketing campaigns, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. You have to know what works for your business and its audience. You might want to collaborate with multiple micro-influencers, a few macro or mega-influencers, or a mix of all, depending on your goals. Use a diverse approach to achieve your goals efficiently.
Pay Them Fairly
This is the last, but definitely not the least element to enhance the effectiveness of your influencer partnerships. Pay your influencers fairly and timely. Do not hold back or delay their payments in any case. This is not a good practice as it will ruin your relationship with them and affect future collaborations as well.
In A Nutshell
Influencer marketing is indeed a powerful tool to reach your target audience. Influencers can make or break the whole campaign. This is why choosing the right influencer(s) is a crucial step in executing the campaign. There are several factors you need to look for in an influencer when collaborating with them. These include their engagement rates, content quality and style, audience demographics, and more. Influencer collaborations can be made more effective by establishing clear communication and KPIs, giving influencers creative freedom, and building lasting relationships with them.
Awais Shamsi