A while back, influencer marketing was all the rage.
The time for it is passed. It has grown to be an important part of modern marketing strategy for many companies.
According to Google Trends, questions on influencer marketing have quadrupled in the last five years.
It comes as no surprise that two-thirds of marketers aim to boost spending on influencers in 2023, and that more than three-quarters of firms plan to allocate funding to influencer marketing in 2023.
Perform an influencer search before diving headfirst into the world of influencer marketing.
This article will teach you the fundamentals of influencer marketing, including why it’s so crucial and how to select the best possible ambassador for your business.
The Importance of Aligning Your Brand With the Right Influencers and Why It Is Crucial to Do So
One thing most influential people never lack is a job offer.
HypeAuditor reports that 30% of influencers receive more than seven monthly offers from brands to work together, while 87% receive at least one offer each month.
Unfortunatley, one-third of influencers think the vast majority of partnership communications they receive from businesses feel untailored and impersonal.
For what reason does this matter?
Success rates skyrocket when you pair up with influencers that are a natural fit for your product and your target audience.
As an added bonus, the likelihood that those opinion leaders will wish to collaborate with you increases dramatically.
This will not occur, however, if you aim for maximum reach at the expense of selecting influencers who are a good fit for your company.
The Ways to Determine If an Influencer Is Suitable for Your Brand
Okay, so it’s crucial to discover influencers that mesh well with your company’s image.
Here’s how you do the proper due diligence when selecting influencers:
Probe the Numbers
It’s simple to become preoccupied with the quantity of one’s followers rather than the quality of their content while searching for influencers.
But if their involvement is low, then that headline figure is meaningless.
While exact numbers might differ between platforms, most social media marketers consider engagement rates of 1-5% to be rather successful.
Any number lower than that is indicative of either ineffective content or a large number of fraudulent followers.
Although engagement statistics are not readily available, there are a lot of resources that will do the math for you (more on that in the next section).
However, there is more to measuring success with influencer marketing than looking at engagement rates.
Think about how many people typically visit the blogger’s site each month and how many people typically see each piece while deciding whether or not to collaborate with them.
Verify Your Partners
Metrics can help, but they don’t reveal everything.
Consider looking at the people who are really commenting on each post, rather than just the engagement rates.
Is it possible to tell if they’re robots or actual people? Is there any meaning to the comments, or are they just meaningless drivel generated by a bot?
Your search for the ideal influencer ends if all their interactions come off as spammy.
Perform Quality Assurance
A brand’s influencer partners act as unofficial brand ambassadors.
Consequently, you should guarantee the quality of their material.
Do the captions they publish interest you? What is the writing quality of the captions; are they clear and concise or full of typos? I’m curious whether their graphics are up to par.
Would you feel comfortable with this individual representing your company?
Check Their Associates (& How They Promote Sponsors)
It’s usually not a good idea to form an alliance with influencers that also promote products from your competition.
Beyond that, see how they endorse associated brands.
You may get lost in the shuffle if a significant number of their postings are brand partnerships (more than, say, 20 percent).
Also, check to see that the promoted content is properly representing the advertised product. Is there a clear emphasis on the product? Can the features and advantages be seen clearly?
Take a Look at the Rates
Having gone through the preceding actions, you should have a shorter list of possible influencers to work with.
You should now evaluate their prices and the value you receive.
Don’t be scared to haggle with influential people to create a set of deliverables that satisfies your needs and benefits everyone involved.
Manual methods for identifying influential people
Are you unable to afford compensated influencer marketing platforms?
Are you having trouble getting the outcomes you require with the free tools we mentioned earlier?
Manually identifying influential people is doable for those who don’t mind a little dirt under their nails.
What follows are three approaches:
Find Bloggers Using FeedSpot
We didn’t mention Feedspot before since it isn’t truly an influencer search engine.
Instead, it’s a reader that aggregates a user’s preferred material into a single location, saving them time and effort over navigating to other sources.
In what ways may it assist you in locating influential people to promote your brand?
If you want to find bloggers that write about a given topic, you may use its search bar to locate them. The results will include a list of the best blogs in that field, together with information on the bloggers’ social media followings and the frequency with which they post new content.
Then, all you have to do is go to those sites, check out their authors, and contact the ones you think might be a good fit for your business.
Search for Useful Hashtags
You may use hashtags to find specific posts on any social media site.
You may find numerous influencers that might be perfect for your next campaign by searching for hashtags associated with your company, industry, target audience, and product.
