How to Pick the Right Influencer for Your Brand?

Finding the right kind of influencer for your brand can be a daunting task. Clearly, you don’t want to waste your hard-earned money on someone who isn’t frequent and doesn’t resonate with your audience. That is why there are certain factors that you should focus on before you reach out to any of the social media influencers. Before we jump on the bandwagon to analyze influencer selection criteria. The prime step you need to take is to identify your goal behind the aim to hire a social media personality.

You need to ask yourself, why do you need to hire an influencer? Do you want to gain brand awareness or increase sales toward app downloads? Or maybe, you want to increase subscribers for your newsletter. Once you have identified the goal, then you should start going through the suggested factors, to make your influencer marketing plan smooth and effective. In this blog, you will find more than 5 factors to understand, how the process of choosing the right person works. Also, it will educate you on why it is important to hire an influencer in the first place. Without much further ado, let’s get into it.

• Audience
• Engagement rate
• Relevance
• Authenticity
• Values
• Content Quality
• Frequency

Audience

If there is any fixed rule in social media, it is delivering content to your target audience. Without this, your strategies will not only lack in response but also fail miserably. So, when you decide to embark on an influencer-hunting journey, make sure, the account you choose has a relevant audience to your niche. This is the no.1 rule in the guide to choosing the best influencer You can run a survey about the potential influencer's audience demographics before you decide to select them for your brand. Let’s suppose, your target audience is teenagers, ranging from 14 to 18, living in the USA then you don’t want to choose an account that has a target audience within the age group of 30 to 50, living in Canada.

Engagement Rate

Things from here can get slightly technical, so read each sentence attentively. Engagement rates showcase how well an influencer interacts with the audience. This also displays how much the audience enjoys the content produced by them. Believe it or not, there is actually a formula for this. Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as a mathematics one. But it is helpful for you to analyze the interaction between the chosen influencer and its followers.

So, you add the total no. of likes and comments on a post and divide it by the total no. of followers. Once you have an answer, multiply it with 100. Use a minimum of 10 posts to add the total no. of likes and comments. 1% to 5% is said to be a success rate for an account. Now, that you know how is social media influence measured by using this formula, in addition, you should observe how quickly an influencer responds to their audience. With these things in action, you can easily decide on a reliable account for your marketing strategy.

Relevance

To choose the best influencer you should make sure that their content is relevant to yours. For instance, a sportswear company will look really out of place on a junk food Instagram account. While browsing different Instagram accounts, you need to ensure that the account you are choosing to promote your products has the same audience and related content.

Authenticity

While building your influencer marketing strategy you need to make sure, that the influencer has audience loyalty. It is wiser to opt for those, who have a dedicated following and build trust with the audience by sharing their expertise on the relevant niche. Some may also share tips and personal stories, to gain credibility among their followers. To analyze their authenticity, you should browse through their sponsored and other content while looking for a thoughtful approach. For a sponsored post, they will most likely share their raw feedback for a certain product and service. You can also, go through brand hashtags and mentions to see if any of the influencers is a fan of your brand. If they turn out to be your fan, this will make the collaboration more authentic and fruitful, which will definitely gain attention from the audience.

Values

While you are on the hunt for the best influencer for your brand you want to make sure to partner with those who have respectable values. As the influencer’s image will be associated with your brand, you don’t want someone who isn’t aware of issues like global warming or women’s empowerment. To understand what they stand up for, go through their bio, images, videos, and captions. A bio will showcase, their likes and dislikes. Meanwhile, images, videos, and captions can convey what they believe in and how woke they are.

Content Quality

Another thing you don’t want to compromise on is content quality. An influencer would be in charge of producing the content which will represent your brand. Before you sign the deed or send them an influencer outreach, you need to make sure that they are consistent and create premium interactive content. You can say, this is something you cannot afford to compromise on.

Frequency

Similar to other factors, this is essential. You need to make sure an influencer is frequent when it comes to posting. Because the most active accounts receive impressions, engagements, and likes. And that is exactly what you need when they post about your product on their accounts. If a profile is posted once every 1 to 3 days, then that is the account you should choose. For further guidelines, you can visit an influencer marketing hub, that provides detailed ideas on how to do further unfold it.

Audience Quality Guidelines to Find the Right Influencer for your brand

Influencer marketing can be a tough job, as it is extremely hard to notice who is authentic and reliable online. Here is a quick guide on how to ignore fake or dummy accounts:

• Content quality would be poor but they will have a ton of followers
• They are not frequent in posting but have a huge engagement rate
• They have a large following list compared to the no. of their followers
• Most of the comments found on their post are spammy and generic
• Their videos have a low count of views compared to their following

Where to Find the Right Influencers

As we wrap up the blog for today, the ideal platforms to look for influencers are TikTok and Instagram. Many brands prefer these platforms as they have the largest audience currently in the world. Instagram has proven to be a popular one as you can generate engagement rate and awareness much more instantly. TikTok is another platform, but since it is too much competitive, influencers can be a little bit more demanding than what you can afford. With all this information, we hope you can successfully build an influencer marketing plan and achieve your goal effectively. In case you need further consultation for your business, feel free to reach out to us on our Instagram profile. With influencer marketing in the mix, building a brand has never been this easy!