Discovering a relevant influencer on social media channels is like finding a needle in the haystack, for they are in millions now. It can make you skeptical about them, as some may not be genuine or relevant enough if you plan to execute an influencer marketing campaign.
The biggest roadblock is selecting someone who will create a remarkable story around your product or service in their authentic storytelling style and reach out to the most significant section of your targeted audience.
All this may seem overwhelming. But if you decide upon a marketing objective, target audience and identify the ways to define the success of your marketing campaign, then finding the right influencers gets streamlined.
It helps you opt for the right tools, platforms, or partners to address your needs. There are agencies or SaaS platforms like affable.ai with strong filters to narrow down your selection approach and find the perfect influencer.
Let us deep dive and learn more about how to find the right influencers for your brand.
Why do You Need to Find Influencers?
Influencers are a small set of individuals having the potential to let your idea, product or service diffuse through a population.
Several studies have shown that we believe in the recommendations given by friends or family before buying a product. Influencers play a similar role because of their objectiveness and candidness.
Influential social media talents are persuasive, and word of mouth marketing by them is more targeted. They can easily reach out to the most significant number of your interested customers.
Read more: Different types of influencers based on follower count and niches they serve
How to Find Influencers?
Finding the right influencers largely depends on how you plan to execute a marketing campaign. It can be done manually, by onboarding an agency, or using the services of an automated platform. Some of the different ways are:
- Google and other search engines: Identify the right keywords to search for the influencers in your niche. You can use the keyword as the search alert on Google or any other search engine.
- Hashtags: One of the easiest ways to conduct online searches is by using hashtags. Identify hashtags resonating with your brand and use them on different social media platforms for the influencer search.
- Tracking your brand mentions: Rigorous social media monitoring to follow your brand mentions can lead to finding the right content creators. Even those making conversations around your niche can also be relevant for you. Influencer marketing platforms or other social media listening tools can help you here.
- Competitor brands' tags and mentions: Follow the titles and comments on your competitor's social media platforms. Keep checking people posting stories for other brands in your respective industries.
- Follow bloggers: Bloggers have been active much before the social media craze. They have a solid follower base as they hold expertise in a subject. They are also active on social media to promote their content. Go through their blogs to find out if they are viable for you.
- Hiring an agency: Various agencies have a network of influencers or use a proprietary tool for the search. Sometimes they do the task manually, and many times people in their roster may not be the perfect fit for your brand.
- Influencer Marketing Platforms: These are automated software with a vast database of creator profiles across multiple social media channels. Their algorithms can easily capture details like audience demographics, interest, age, engagement rate, brand affinity etc., and spot those with fake followers.
Influencer Vetting Process: Reliability, Expertise and Engagement
Vetting an influencer for audience demographics, brand affinity, and other parameters helps you narrow down the search process. Above all, the right social media talents will have the expertise and credibility to create an influence.
They will also have an actual audience size and a certain level of relationship strength with their followers or subscribers.
Influencer marketing tools factor in some critical aspects while vetting content creators. Like reliability comes with a natural liking for the brand and is gauged through brand affinity. On the other hand, the strength of the relationship depends on the engagement the influencer draws with the posts.
- Audience Size: Understanding the audience first is like an insight into finding that particular segment of the market you want to target - the target audience. One of the biggest challenges is working with someone with the exact audience you aim to reach.
- Brand Affinity: It is a natural likeness or understanding of the brand or product. It also comes with a content creator's expertise in the industry.
- Engagement: The response by audiences to an influencer's post indicates engagement rate. It can be through clicks, likes or comments on stories or posts. Various advanced features in influencer marketing platforms can efficiently collate engagement by searching through comments, emojis and user tags.
You also have to consider what content creators look for while collaborating. Are they just looking for the payment, or are they equally inclined towards the industry, or how much are they aware of the product or service you want to market.
Influencer Selection Process: Parameters and Criteria
The first step toward how to find the right influencers for your brand requires having the right idea and marketing strategy in place.
Based on that comes the questions like: Where will the influencer be located? What are their personality traits? What are their values, and how much do they share with the brand? What are the different categories based on their audience size? And who you will be working with, someone with celebrity status or those with a smaller number of influencers?
Key Points to narrow down your search:
- Content, styles and values to be aligned with the company or the marketing goal.
- Overall engagement and reach to be aligned with the goal
- Influencer's audience must overlap with your targeted customers.
- Brand affinity and responsiveness towards your product or service to be visible.
- Define what you are looking for in style, diversity, sentiments and value.
Engaging with Influencers and Owning a Talent Pool
If you are a brand willing to run multiple campaigns, time and again, then starting from scratch is certainly not the answer. In the long run, create a talent pool by building long term relationships with influencers.
Advantages of identifying influencers with whom you can have a long-term collaboration:
- It brings down the overall cost, time, and energy spent identifying the influencer.
- Speed of executing a campaign increases.
- Reduce the competition from other brands wanting to work with the same creators.
Wrapping Up
Finding the right influencer for your brand can help achieve the objective of your marketing campaign if it is awareness, consideration and conversion for your product or service. You are ultimately maximising your ROI.
.png)