Nowadays, influencer marketing has become one of the most adopted strategies to build a name for your brand online; even Forbes has found that influencer marketing is truly growing faster than digital ads (business owners take notes!) and is effective when it comes to raising awareness among a specific target audience.
However, to establish a trust between your brand and potential customers, a thought-out budget is not enough; you will surely need to put in extra effort to find the right influencers who fit within your brand’s image and are capable of connecting with your followers. To help you out on your influencer selection journey, we’ve put together a 7-step guide to make sure you collaborate with the right digital figures.
1. Know your target audience
If you plan on launching an influencer marketing campaign, you will need to set a target audience and then do your research to understand it. By looking closely at a specific section of people, not only will you be able to understand their consumer behavior but also predict if your chosen influencer will be able to resonate with them. After all, the whole point is to find someone who can add credibility to your brand, products and services.
In addition, selecting an audience can narrow the scope and allow you to find the influencers that your target community is already interacting with; it’s most likely that they already trust and take into consideration these influencers’ opinions.
2. Search for potential influencers among your followers
What you’re searching for can be right in front of you. Remember that influencers are humans who also have their interests; so why not look for the ones who are already using, talking about or following your brand? If they’re already promoting your business for free, imagine what they can do if they get paid for their efforts.
Also, by choosing influencers who already engage with your business prior to a collaboration will only add authenticity to your campaign.
3. Search for relevant hashtags
Is it essential to know that this step depends on your type of industry and what is relevant to it as each type adopts a series of branded hashtags that could include industry-specific technical terms. By monitoring these hashtags, you’ll be able to locate influencers who are within your niche and produce related content.
For example, if you have a branded hashtag, such as for example Nike’s #JustDoIt, you can look through the posts to potentially find influencers who added it to their captions.
4. Look for influencers in your competitors’ followers
No matter which industry your business operates in, you’ll most likely end up with competitors. However, you can still make the most out of the situation by going through their followers and locating influencers who are interested in their services or products and in turn would be interested in yours. CMO Neal Schaffer believes that you attract your competitors’ influencer followers and spark their interest in your brand by giving away samples or free trials of your product or service to influencers.
5. Consider micro and nano influencers
To get results from an influencer marketing campaign, you don’t always need to collaborate with people who have millions of followers. In fact, Later.com has found that nano influencers “who have less than 10K followers — who have the highest average engagement rate with 4% across all feed posts and sponsored ones”. Micro influencers with 5,000 to 100,000 followers are also capable of generating engagement, proving that smaller numbers are sometimes better.
6. Use influencer marketing tools
Last but not least, influencer marketing has gained importance in the last couple of years so it’s not very surprising that a few tools were created to facilitate the process of finding influencers for campaigns. Platforms such as CreatorIQ, SocialBlade and Intellifluence will provide you with global analytics for any content creator and organize the collaboration procedure.
7. Ask your followers for recommendations
Seeing that your followers will eventually judge the content you produce for them, why not give them what they want to see? Not only will this method optimize your chances of finding the right influencers, but it will also strengthen your relationship with your clients, making them feel like they play an important role in your decisions.
Whichever method you do decide to adopt, it is of utmost importance that you also check your influencer of choice’s past performance while also vetting them for fake followers & engagement because you wouldn’t want your money to go to waste now would you?
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