Working with influencers to promote a brand is an inseparable part of conducting social media marketing campaign. Regardless of its evident benefits, without selecting the right influencer to collaborate with, it is going to be a wasted investment. Most business owners may opt for a faster way to choose the influencers: by using single-metric definitions to measure significance of influence such as social media followings or unique visitors, but there’s much more you should look. Below, you will read four crucial steps to commit to pick the right social media influencer for your brand.
How to Choose Well-Suited Social Media Influencers for Your Brand
- Perform social listening of the influencers
To select the best-suited influencers for your brand, they have to be relevant to your offered goods or services. The list of fitting candidate can be made by performing social listening.
How the social listening is done? It involves taking time and energy to find out which influencers are users or fans of your brand already, as well as learning about who is followed by the users of your brand. This way, you can find the influencers who are in line with the target audience of your brand.
- Learn about the engagement metrics and other analytics of the influencer
Currently the best way to examine the influencers’ authenticity is by looking thoroughly on their audience engagement. Beyond the numbers, it is also important to inspect the data analysis to identify the influencers’ strengths and shortcomings then discover their target market, to build a successful marketing plan.
You can choose from plenty of tools to discover these insights about the influencers and determine if they’re going to be suitable for your brands’ marketing framework. Some examples of the tools to inspect engagement and audience quality of the influencers are Hootsuite, HypeAuditor, and Sprout Social.
- Observe the influencers’ technical skills
In this age, any person who has somewhat an appearance of an influencer and a good enough camera can be one, and even if they lack in one area, they may compensate by having interesting personality, great social skills, or ability to tell stories or write captions intriguingly. These are parts of what makes someone gain attention and rake following on social media.
However, beyond the mentioned competence, technical skill is also needed. It goes more than engagement, likes, or communication to promote brand and it is especially needed in the event of arising problem. Having a skill in crisis management for an influencer is a big bonus for brands that collaborate with them. Not everyone consider it as significant, but it’s quite vital component of developing brand and optimizing platform.
- Communicate with the influencers
Selecting which influencer who matches with your brand requires you to see the bigger picture. During the early phase of the whole process, obviously you need to reach out to them and become more familiar with them.
During this step, you may inquire about the prior campaigns and projects that the influencers have been involved in, along with their results. You’ll be able to know their ability to deal with the ones that yield less desirable outcome and how they made improvement based on those. On the other hand, if the influencers are quite new in the industry, you may seek information of how they manage problems in general.
Selecting the right influencers to partner with is an essential part to attract interest and audience to your brand. Making a wrong choice regarding the influencers may generate you less successful campaigns, which means your business spent money, energy, and time inefficiently – it is a counterproductive effort that risk your brand to be introduced to uninterested and untargeted audience which may result in forming negative reaction regarding your brand.
