The influencer marketing industry is becoming quite competitive, with more people striving to grow followers and get noticed by brands they love.
Luckily, brands looking for influencers don’t need a big Hollywood name to back them up to succeed with influencer marketing. In fact, 77% of marketers prefer using micro-influencers over macro influencers to market products and services.
Keep reading to learn how to find the right influencers for your brand.
Your audience won’t fall for marketing schemes that give them even the slightest hint that your main goal is to achieve business objectives rather than genuinely resonate and gain their trust, so ensure you do an influencer authenticity check. Trust can be time-consuming, but when done right, it results in the ultimate achievement — a genuine advocate your consumers community can depend on.
When a brand seamlessly meshes with an influencer’s lifestyle, the influencer has a higher chance of making an authentic connection with what they’re promoting. When their audience sees this relationship, they’ll know that you’ve worked together to create a lasting, meaningful connection to bind the brand and community together, rather than you just paying someone to promote your product or service. Authentic influencers typically already use your products (or similar products) or services, understand your target audience, and can easily vouch for their quality.
Brands looking for influencers shouldn’t focus on the number of followers they have — here’s why: dishonest influencers can easily add countless fake followers who don’t care about your brand. Instead, focus on the influencer’s audience demographics and engagement rate. What percentage of their fans comment on, like, or share their posts? What is the quality of the comments — do they contribute to the discussion? Quality engagement is worth much more than a significant amount of silent followers.
Your influencer should also have followers that align with your products or service. For example, influencers representing a toddler toy brand should preferably have followers with small children.
Experienced influencers use their creative marketing skills, and the power of storytelling to produce high-quality messaging and visuals for specific audiences. The most successful influencer content creators have a well-balanced knowledge of crucial digital marketing principles, allowing them to create images, videos, copy, ads, and messaging that speak to the right audience at the right time, therefore increasing engagement rates.
Look for influencers using consistent colours, image types, copy, and hashtags. They are the ones who have built a brand for themselves, and it shows they have carefully thought out how to present themselves online and stand out in an oversaturated crowd. Clear branding lets you see how the influencer will represent your products or service and if their messaging aligns with your brand, values, and promotional goals.
Brands looking for content creators should get a sense of an influencer’s niche before committing to any contract. For example, a brand looking to hire a content creator to represent its apparel brand, should look for influencers with a proven track record of collaborating with other apparel or fashion brands.
When an influencer has recognition for the value and expertise they’ve brought to other companies, they’re worth a second look. Additionally, when reviewing the influencers most recent posts, it might be helpful to consider what is the split between their own organic content, and sponsored campaigns they are being paid for.
From our experience, working with creators that continue to create their own unique content on a regular basis helps stabilize engagement rates and connection with their community. The power of influencer marketing is reaching an engaged audience as opposed to just a large audience
With so many influencers out there, it’s easy to choose the wrong one. Unfortunately, this can have costly consequences, like losing your audience’s trust or experiencing a public misstep and getting canceled.
Take your brand to the next level with MODERNSPEAK. We eliminate your worries by managing each stage of influencer marketing, from outreach to content creation, so you don’t have to.
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