The core formula of building successful influencer marketing campaign is to choose the right influencer to collaborate with. Selecting well-suited, engaging, authentic, and relevant influencers can contribute immensely to the image and values of your brand. Discovering the right one to work with may seem like an overwhelmingly challenging task, so the list below is meant to inform you about several crucial factors to consider when choosing influencers to partner with your brand.
What You Need to Consider in Selecting Partnering Influencers for Your Brand
- Following
Prior to making commitment of collaborating with certain influencers, you need to ensure that there’s compatibility between your targeted audience and the influencers’ following. Begin by determining the market segment of who you aim your products and services to and see if their followers match with it. Therefore, the first and foremost step on ensuring a success influencer marketing campaign is by understanding your audience first.
- Relevance
The next factor to consider before looking at other static metrics is to decide what type of content will align with your brand’s messages. A look into the influencer’s archived posts may be able to reveal what type content they produce that appeal their followers.
Some brands may suit more with coffee drinkers, street style models, or economical travelers. Some brands may avoid provocativeness and profanity as they don’t match with their personality. In the end, the contents of the selected influencers are arguably more important compared to their traffic.
- Engagement
A useful indicator to measure the interaction of an influencer with their followers is engagement. How often their audience gives responds, writes comments, or shares their contents? How well the influencer can retain their followers or gain new ones? These are the questions that can answer how strong the relationship is between both parties.
- Reach
Reach may not be the most essential metric to consider from this list, but it is still valuable to gain insight of. Reach shouldn’t be measured merely by the amount of unique visitors, other concerns such as followers and traffic also contribute to how well the reach that an influencer has over the audience.
The type of social media platform that suits your brand and target audience should be considered as well. A fashion or culinary brand is going to be more suitable to work with Instagram or Pinterest influencers rather than LinkedIn account even with greater followings.
- Frequency
It has been proven that there’s direct correlation between the rate of retained audience with the posting frequency and the traffic. Take an example of website promoting, you’re typically going to require several times of exposures before you get the visitors to click and drop by your website, as well as to come back to it.
The influencers who post contents with great quality regularly will rake more loyal audience. In the same vein, those who don’t post as consistently are going to have less loyalty and lower rates of return and turnover audience.
- Authenticity
In terms of marketing, authenticity may seem like a counter-intuitive factor. However, influencers are more likely to be considered as authentic and trusted when they have lower percentage of sponsored contents.
Genuine mention or use of a brand, good, or service through personal stories are more appealing and engaging to audience than a straight-up deals and reviews. Regardless of your brand’s niche, it is possible to choose to collaborate with influencers who create more authentic and quality contents.
Choosing the most ideal influencer to work with your brand is a task that requires commitment and research. It is such a vital factor to accomplish maximum result of your marketing efforts. Selecting the right influencers and briefing them in such an efficient and effective way will result in common vision, compatible partnership, and engaged audience.