The influencer marketing industry is still a white-hot trend ongoing in the social media landscape, with social media influencers edging into celebrity status gradually. They have managed to build trust & credibility among their audience and viewers, through their valuable content. And brands are, undoubtedly, quick to leverage this trust for their own benefit, by finding the right influencer for their campaigns!
As per Influencer Marketing Hub, this industry is set to grow up to a worth of $13.8 billion in 2021. Thanks to the 70% brands which have a dedicated budget for influencer marketing campaigns, out of the 59% of brands that have a dedicated budget for content marketing in their marketing budget.
Thus, it is the best time for your brand to invest and accomplish any goal from creating brand awareness to lead generation and more, to grow with influencer marketing, and this is exactly what we are focusing upon in this blog post today – how to find the right influencer for your brand? Although many brands choose to do this through a leading influencer marketing agency in India, however, you can also do this on your own.
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As per a 2019 survey by The Influencer Marketing Hub, partnered with Viral Nation and NeoReach, businesses make $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing, positioning it in a favorable light. However, if brands don’t partner with the right creator according to their niche, brand values, and brand message, this can turn out to be a wasted investment. Thus, finding the right fit for your brand is highly essential!
How to find quality influencers for your brand?
To find the perfect fit for your brand, make sure you understand your own buyer persona, the attributes of your products & services, and your position in the current market state.
Here are a few pointers to keep in mind before you go on to invest for your brand:
Know your Audience
Knowing your target audience or buyer persona is the very first, and mind you, the most important step in this process. Once you understand the needs & wants, and purchase behavior of your target audience, you understand what kind of influencer will better serve the purposes of your campaign.
Know your Goals
Every marketing campaign is designed from tail to head. The same goes in this case as well, thus, the brands first decide what they wish to achieve through a social media influencer such as brand awareness, lead generation, app downloads, sales, etc. Therefore, knowing your goals is another important factor that will help you find the perfect influencer in your niche.
Know your Competitors
Another important factor you can’t afford to be lenient about is your competitors. Before going out to find influencers for your brand’s campaign, make sure you do a sneak peek into what your competitors are doing – What strategy are they going for? What creators are they collaborating with? What goals are they trying to accomplish? This will allow you to position yourself better than them in the market and achieve more.
On the other hand, before you go on to approaching influencers, you must conduct a background check on them to make sure they will do justice to your brand values and your product.
Here are a few parameters you need to keep in check while finding the right influencer for your brand
Relevancy
By relevancy, we mean, how is the previously created content present in the creator’s library, relevant to the message of your brand. If their tone, frequency, and niche match with that of your brand, they could be the end game for your brand. However, there are a few more parameters to check before you choose the right influencer for marketing.
Authenticity
Another qualitative parameter to look for is the influencer’s authenticity and the authenticity of the content they create. This is so because these creators become the face of your brand, hence, the authenticity of their content and their authority in the niche, directly affect your brand’s image. Thus, it is important to know how to choose creators for your brand who add value to your brand’s messaging and values.
Engagement
This metric allows brands to understand how the creator’s audience is receiving and interacting with the content they are producing. Engagement is measured in terms of likes / comments / shares on each post / video. As per Influencer Marketing Hub, micro-influencers on Instagram boast an average engagement rate of 3.86%, whereas mega-influencers produce an engagement rate of 1.21%. Engagement is considered to be the most crucial metric while choosing an influencer, as it helps to determine how the audience will respond to your brand’s campaign.
Previous sponsorships
It is essential to dig deeper into a creator’s previous sponsorships. This helps you determine 4 crucial things: what kind of brands have they previously worked with, what kind of content they created to promote the brand on their profile, how did their audience perceive and respond to it, and lastly, how successful was the campaign.
Reach
Although this metric is not as important as “Engagement”, however, it is still worth consideration. Reach is nothing but how many people that creator can reach. When looked upon along with the average Engagement produced by a creator’s content, Reach makes the most sense.
How to find influencers on Facebook?
Social Listening
Social Listening or social media monitoring is essentially a process through which you can find and analyze posts around your target keyword. There are a number of different tools out there, that you can use. These tools can be used for a plethora of applications, the most popular one being to find influencers. To do so, evaluate the authors of the posts you are analyzing. Set up keyword monitoring and consequently, check the influencer reports to achieve your goal.
Database
Another, and certainly a much easier way to find a face for your brand is to access influencer databases. Here you can find, list and compare them based on various different parameters such as reach, engagements, locations, etc.
How to find influencers on Instagram?
Through hashtags
Begin scouring through posts using your brand name as hashtags in their posts. This step will help you in achieve a two-fold goal – firstly, you will understand the audience sentiment towards your brand through user generated content (UGC), and secondly, you find people who already use your product and know about your brand.
Through tags
Check your tagged images. Here you will find people who have used your brand and products and have tagged you, in order to get your attention. This way you can easily find active influencers who might be willing to collaborate with you and bring value to your brand. Moreover, through these tagged images, you can also see how their audience is reacting to these creators using your product.
How to find influencers on Twitter?
Klear
Klear is a prevailing tool, or essentially a database of Twitter influencers. Here you can search through and filter for over 40,000 categories such as location, influence, skill, etc., in order to find the right influencer for your brand. Once you find the right fit, you can view their full profile and even go on to track them in terms of content creation.
Little Bird
Little Bird is yet another super valuable and particularly easy to use at that, as it allows you to find influencers based on how many fellow influencers they are connected with. This tool comes with multiple exclusive features intended to make your search easier such as option to explore the most popular content produced by a creator, filter through blog posts, as well as the option to export all this data to further analyse it.
Finding the right influencer for your brand may seem tricky or unnecessary, however, keeping the above-mentioned parameters in mind will help you play your cards right and you might end up with a successful campaign in your hands!
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