5 Tips To Help Find The Perfect Influencer For Your Business

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Trying to find the right influencer?

As your customers turn to social media to direct their buying decisions, your business might begin to feel the strain on your bottom line if you rely on traditional marketing campaigns.

Over the years marketers have seen a declined effectiveness of mass marketing campaigns. This is because customers are skeptical of many traditional marketing techniques, and are putting more trust in their social network and opinions of trusted online influencers.

Instead of relying on mass marketing tactics, large businesses are turning to digital relationships and word of mouth to drive future profits. It is no secret that word of mouth marketing is the most effective form of marketing. Many studies show that word of mouth marketing help drives about 20-50 percent of all purchase decisions (source).

Influencer marketing captures the benefits of word of mouth marketing and the power of relationships and applies the benefits of this strategy to the digital marketing landscape.

An influence marketer is someone who is seen as a thought leader and a trusted source in a particular market segment (deeper explanation). These influencers usually have common traits throughout their online presence:

  • Large online following on networks you want to penetrate.
  • Highly engaged with their audience and relevant business sectors.
  • Produce quality content about their area of interest.
  • Precise follower segments you are trying to reach.

If your business is struggling to capture more market share, you could be missing out on the benefits of influencer marketing. However, before you choose an influencer marketer to increase the exposure of your brand, you will want to follow a few basics to choose the right influencer

Finding The Right Influencer For Your Brand

Influencer marketing offers many benefits for your business through sales and long-term interaction with your target audience.

However, influencer marketing can be a wasted investment if you do not choose the right influencer marketer for your brand. Here are a few suggestions to consider before you hire an influencer marketer.

Context Of Engagement

The most important thing to consider when choosing an influencer marketer is their contextual fit with your brand. Identifying the context that a potential influencer plays in the market is vital because this will determine how relevant their audience interests are to your brand.

Just because an influencer you are considering has millions of Instagram followers, your brand needs to decide if that person’s expertise aligns with the products and services your business offers. For example, while Kanye West is a popular music and popular culture influencer, a large brand like Microsoft might not choose Kayne to promote Windows 10. This is because Kanye’s brand does not have authority in the area of computer software.

Another aspect of context to consider is the audience of an influencer. If you are trying to raise awareness for prune juice, your business should not choose a YouTuber influencer who plays Battlefield. This is because the audience who watches Battlefield on YouTube are likely not in the market for prune juice.

Actionability

Working with an influencer who can prompt their audience to take action is an important part of an influencer marketing campaign. While influencers shouldn’t force their ideas on their audience, they should have a connection with their sphere of influence in such a way that empowers their audience members to take action based on the products and services they promote.

If you want your influencer marketing campaign to be profitable, then your business needs to partner with an influencer who can sway their audience towards your brand. While there is no perfect way to predict or measure the impact that an influencer will have you can look at the Click Through Rate of specific links on past campaigns.

Engagement

The goal of an influencer outreach campaign is based on relationships. A post on Instagram won’t last forever, but a relationship an influencer builds with their audience provides the basis for a lucrative partnership with your brand.

The most valuable influencers are highly connected to their audience. An influencer who has an audience base who considers them a trusted friend will be more influential than someone who has a large following but lacks meaningful engagement with their audience. The number of followers and subscribers an influencer has on their accounts won’t accurately indicate how engaged their audience is.

Unless an influencer is directly selling products, it will continue to be difficult to attribute sales to an influencer. However, when choosing to partner with an influencer marketer your brand should look to some key metrics, including:

  • Likes, Comments, Retweets, and Shares on relevant posts.
  • Comments and interactions at the bottom of blog posts and videos.
  • Clicks on trackable links displayed on specific posts.
  • Response rates by the influencer marketer to comments left by their audience.

Quality Of Content

When you partner with an influence marketer, you have to be willing to give up a certain level of control over your message. This is because you need to ensure that the voice and personality of the influencer are not diluted. When your brand integrates influencer marketing into your marketing mix, you are looking for an influencer to promote your brand through their personality to their audience.

Since you will be giving some control of your brand’s message you want to be sure that the influencer creates and promotes high-quality content. The key to a successful influence marketing campaign is to allow the influencer to set up their content or else the message won’t feel authentic. The good thing is that influencers know how to create content that works well on their respective channel, but it is still important that your marketing team agree that the quality of content produced by an influencer meets your brand’s voice and branding guidelines.

Professionalism

Last but not least, before choosing to partner with an influencer you will want to make sure they are professional and serious about their craft. There are lots of individuals who have strong followings on social media, but they could also lack consistency and communication your business expects.

Research elements like response time, dependability, and past experiences of an influencer so you determine the best influencer for your needs. There are different ways to validate how professional influencers are, but having insight like the tools provided in our platform can give you the best way to vet influencers before signing a deal with them efficiently.

Leverage Data To Connect With Your Customers

If you are ready to grow your market and reach new customers, then influence marketing could provide you with the edge you need in a competitive marketplace. However, as with any business decision, you need to find the right criteria to maximize benefits for your business. Our industry-leading influence marketing platform will give you the insights you need to ensure your influence marketing campaigns are a success!