Using influencers to speak for your brand is one of the best ways to gain popularity and increase brand awareness, but how would you define the best influencer for your brand?
With the craze of social media, the future of influencer marketing is very bright. Marketers have already started moving to influencers for advertising their brands and increasing their sales. But, finding the right influencer is still one of the biggest challenges that brands face.
With hundreds of vendors available around you, it’s not easy to choose the right influencer for your brand as they come in all shapes and sizes. So, in this article, we will take you through some essential factors that you should consider to define the best type of influencer for your brand.
- Define Your Business Objective
Influencers are not just social media marketers; they are excellent content creators who made their success from being creative and know exactly how to engage the target audience. Also, hiring an influencer is often cheaper than other paid media advertisements. Therefore, when you think about influencer marketing, think bigger than the traditional digital approaches.
First, identify your business campaign goals and requirements, and then approach the influencers that meet these requirements. Most influencers will have a hard time to keep up with your digital benchmarks if they don’t understand your business objectives. So, take your time to analyze their marketing ideas like engaging the audience, understanding of your brand, or content creation, and then select the right influencer for your brand.
- Influencer’s Reach
Although not considered as the most critical factor, it is vital to ensure that your influencer reaches the targeted market of your brand, else you’ll be wasting both time and money reaching people who aren’t interested in your brand.
Sometimes, an influencer with a small reach can be more effective for your brand’s market than one with a huge reach. For example, if you’re an auto parts seller, a travel blogger with a small reach will be more effective than a food blogger with 100,000 unique monthly visitors.
Also, it is essential to know what other social platforms your targeted audience visit. For instance, if you’re a fashion or food brand, then an influencer with a large following on Instagram might be more valuable to your brand than someone with a large fan base on Facebook.
- Relevancy
One mistake that most marketers often make when choosing influencers is not ensuring that their niche is relevant to their brand. Don’t hire influencers based on their unique visitors and other static metrics, keep in mind that you partner with influencers because you want their audience to know more about your brand.
Look at their posts or content to understand what kind of customers they have and how they align with your brand’s message. Just because an Instagrammer posts pictures of food doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a perfect match for an organic food brand.
Find whether their audience is relevant to your brand or not. For instance, if your brand’s targeted audience is millennials, ensure your influencer knows how to advertise to millennials. These are the most important things to look for in the content and audience of an influencer.
- Don’t Consider Over-Promoting Influencers
Promoting a brand in excess amount makes it look spammy, and hence becomes less credible. Over-promoting often gives a clear indication to the followers that the influencers are doing it for money not because they actually believe in that brand’s products. It makes the followers lose interest in influencer’s content, and sooner or later they might even unfollow them.
Go through the previous posts of your potential influencers to ensure they haven’t overpromoted any brands or products. Also, make sure the content of your potential influencer looks credible and natural. When an influencer combines a personal story with a product review, it automatically makes the content look authentic and real.
Though it’s hard to find the right influencer and keep up with them while managing other tasks for your campaign as you can make routine mistakes. So, prefer using automation for avoiding routine mistakes, and focus on finding the right influencer.
- Engagement with the Audience
Audience engagement refers to the number of likes, shares, and comments a social media post gets. It indicates how interactive a logger’s audience is with the content. Engagement is considered as the crucial identifier when it comes to choosing a relevant influencer for your brand.
For instance, an influencer having a million followers but getting only 500 likes per post on an average, is not the right choice for you. It clearly proves that having a huge following cannot determine if your influencer is influential; it’s their engagement rate that shows how much the audience engages with their posts.
Influencers who can share their personal stories with your brand creatively are genuinely authentic; it makes them appear more credible to the followers. Also, when sponsored posts are attached to personal stories, they look more believable and less promotional, which in turn increases the engagement rates.
- Influencer Authenticity
Influencer’s who have less sponsored content usually tends to be more trusted and appear more authentic. An influencer with interesting, compelling stories that include the genuine use of a product or service is more trusted than one who writes straight long product reviews. Also, a compelling and engaging story tends to get more comments and shares than straight deals and product reviews.
Though it’s tempting to ask publishers to write a helpful review about your product or service, it won’t be as prominent as an influencer telling a real story and including your brand into it. People often prefer to read stories they can relate to.
Conclusion:
Creating brand awareness or increasing sales with the paid campaign is both difficult and time-consuming. However, hiring the best social media influencer for your brand can help your marketing campaign reach its maximum potential. And finding their engagement rate, past work, and reach can help you define the best type of influencer for your business campaign.
About the author:
Shirley Lowe is a professional content creator and real estate marketer from Burbank, CA. She is fancy blogging and writing about the innovative approaches to business and brand creation. Shirley creates articles for Landlord’s Tips and Rentberry.com, and has been featured on REAL Trends and Rank Watch.