How to Pick the Perfect Influencer for Your Brand

With more influencers that are joining this 2019, more brands are seeing the value of engaging with influencers to reach their target audience. Influencer marketing has been proven to be an effective marketing strategy in reaching and connecting with the community. Even micro-influencers with fewer subscribers turns out to deliver a 60% higher engagement rate because they are personally invested in their crafts and followers trust in their recommendations. You don’t have to choose mega influencers who can create a big impact on your brand, but there are influencers who will be perfect for your brand.

In this article, we will help you identify how to pick the perfect influencer for your brand.

Tools To Find Influencers

There are many available tools that can help you find influencers for your niche, but we are giving you here the top 5 mentioned tools.

1. HypeAuditor – This tool helps you determine the top Instagram influencers by the number of quality and engaged followers. They gather data from different sources, depersonalize and cluster it. They only get real followers and likes from them. You can either select the top 1000 influencers, covering all niches or break the list into categories.

2. Discover.ly – This is a Chrome plugin that can help you with networking. You can use this plugin to see your mutual connections from email recipients, Facebook, and LinkedIn social accounts and updates. With this tool, you can see if any of your existing contacts have connections with influencers in your niche.

3. Alltop – If you’re looking for influential blogs, Alltop can help you to aggregate blog posts. The result is curated by people and not by an algorithm. You can use this tool to find the top blog posts on your niche and will help you give an idea on the most influential blogs on your topic.

4. Social Crawlytics – This tool allows you to discover which posts are most popular and shared on particular websites. You can analyze your competitors to determine successful content and how people share it. Social Crawlytics will include details of top authors and their total number of shares, and from this, it could give you possible influencers.

5. Influence.co and Social Blade – Influence.co is a tool that helps you easily find and connect with influencers who wants to work with brands.

By the time you are able to search for potential influencers, Social Blade is a tool that gives you a free influencer data which include the user’s Instagram stats followed by a rank that is based on their engagement and following.

Influencer’s Reach

It is essential that your social media influencer reaches the target market of your brand. If not, you’re wasting your time and money reaching to people who are not interested in your brand. An influencer with a small reach in your brand is more effective than one influencer with a huge reach but is not related at all with your brand. A brand or business should seek influencer content that is consistently on-brand since in the long run the relationship with trusted influencers will move from transactional to strategic partnerships.

Influencers Authenticity

You need a true person with a great lifestyle, sense of humor, judgment, and creativity. Your influencer should have tried your product first and presents your product with passion.

The demand for authenticity and transparency will continue to rise in 2019. Social media influencer with less sponsored content is usually more trusted and seen as more authentic. It’s tempting to ask an influencer to write a nice review, but it would be more striking where your influencer will tell a real story and is working your brand into it. With many fake advertisements and news nowadays, people want to relate to what they see and hear. People will connect with influencers because they want an honest and transparent insight into products.

An influencer with large follower count seems promising, but what if 70% of those followers consist of fake and inactive accounts. Working with an influencer with poor audience quality is a waste of time and money. There are tools that you can use to evaluate your influencer’s audience to measure their demography, authenticity, engagement rate, and reachability.

Quality Engagement

How the influencer’s audience engage with the content is also essential. If they engage, it often means that they’re likely to return to the platform and the relationship will grow. Look closely to the quality of the engagement. Does the audience react favorably to the influencer? Is the engagement of the audience and influencer natural? These factors will affect how the audience will react to your brand’s promotion in the future.

Relevancy Matters

You have to be sure that the social influencer’s content is relevant to your brand. A sudden shift of interest might not make it to the long run for your brand. Using a social media influencer that focuses on home living won’t be an effective strategy for travel and backpacking lifestyle.

Mutual Interests

You should consider mutual interest with your influencer so that the partnership will have a higher chance of successfully reaching your target market. Your target market will trust an influencer who has like-minded beliefs and ideas to them.

Choose the Right Platform

Using the right social media influencer also depends on the right social media platform to create awareness for your brand. Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube are the best options to choose from. Having the right social media platform to use, this would help on engaging the target market, especially with the increasing competition also of influencers recently.

As Instagram would likely be on the top list of all social media platform, but that doesn’t mean to ignore other platforms as well. Consider other platforms to work with influencers that other brands are ignoring. Influencers based their price on following, engagement, and value. If they get tons of offers to promote brands on Instagram, then they’ll likely increase their price because of the value. But if they have less following on other platforms and the demand is less, then the value is also decreased.

While you may not reach the same number of people as you would on Instagram, you could generate a better ROI if you’re paying less and getting better conversions.

FTC Guidelines

If you want to avoid facing any legal troubles, make sure the influencers you work with disclose that they’re being compensated for promoting your brand. It’s as simple by putting #ad or #sponsored in their post. Here are some tips to keep your influencer marketing:

1. Disclose very paid price of content
If you signed with an influencer to create 3 posts every month, you can’t just let them disclose that you’re working with them on the first and not the other two. Even if the content seems like an obvious ad, still it has to be disclosed that it’s a paid post.

2. Check each paid post
Review each paid piece of content and make sure they’ve noted that they are being compensated. Otherwise, you put your brand at risk.

3. Use something less spammy than #ad
There are other ways to disclose partnerships aside from using #ad. Influencers can use something like #XPartner, where X would be your brand’s name.

The image below is a sample influencer’s account where she used the #sponsored hashtag to indicate that this is a paid post.

Useful Content Not Just Ads

Today, influencer marketing should look a lot less like generic ads and more like content marketing. Great content entertains, educates and invoke some level of emotion to your audience. What story do you want to tell your audience? What benefit it does to your audience will get from the content?

Ensure to partner with an influencer who has the same vision and passion for creating quality content for marketing.

So there! We have given you some important tips to choose a perfect influencer for your brand. Influencer marketing has always been successful because of how it allows human connection and brand creativity. We hope that this article has given you an insight into choosing a perfect influencer for your brand.