Struggling to increase your campaign reach? Find the right influencer.
With social commerce gaining immense popularity over the past few years, it is no surprise that an increasing number of marketers are trying to leverage this channel for their brands. In fact, about 71% of brands plan on increasing their influencer marketing budget this year.
Surprisingly, a significant chunk of marketers are not aware of influencer discovery platforms and tools to find influencers.
In this blog, we will share a step-by-step guide on how you can do a thorough influencer search.
Why is it important to find the right influencer?
Finding the right influencer is important for your brand to come across as genuine as possible. When you collaborate with an influencer who understands your brand well and shares similar values, it does not look like a marketing campaign. Instead, it looks like a genuine brand endorsement.
By typing up with the right influencers, you can not only reach wider audiences who could have potential interest in your brand but also increase your return on investment exponentially without appearing too sales-y.
When an influencer campaign is carried out effectively with the right partner, here are some of the additional benefits your brand can reap:
- It boosts your company’s bottom line
- It can improve your SEO efforts
- Eases the buyer’s purchase decision, thus increasing sales drastically
- It acts as a time and cost-effective method of marketing
- Greater visibility in lesser time
For example, cashing in on Squid Games actress — HoYeon Jung — overnight global success, brands like Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein and Adidas were quick to collaborate with the model-turned-actress to reach new audiences.
(images: HoYeon Jung)
10 steps to find the right influencers for your campaign
Here is a simple step-by-step guide that will help you assess which influencers you should be working with:
1. Define your campaign goals and objectives
The first step to choosing the right influencers for your campaign is deciding what your campaign goals are. Are you looking for increased brand awareness, increased traffic, more conversions, etc.? This is your objective and defines the type of influencers you will work with.
Secondly, when it comes to finding influencers for your product, you need to first decide what kind of influencers you need for your campaigns such as social media influencers or highly-followed bloggers that align with the product.
If you’re trying to reach a mass audience, you might want to work with social media influencers that have large audiences. For a more specific target audience, you could work with micro-influencers that have small but highly engaged audiences. This will act as the foundation of your campaign strategy when figuring out the best influencers to work with.
2. Define the target audience
Having a clear idea of who you are targeting is vital to a successful campaign. If there is no clear target audience for a campaign then it’s unlikely to achieve its goal. Therefore, you should spend some time clearly defining your target audience to get a better idea of who you want to reach out to.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Who do I want to reach? What are their demographics? What do they like? What do they dislike? How do they like to consume media? Once you’ve completed this exercise you can start to think about which influencers are likely to have influence within your target audience. This will help you to formulate a strategy to approach them and will make sure your influencer campaign has the best chance of getting results.
By understanding the demographics and psychographics of your audience, you’ll be able to narrow down the list of influencers who fit the bill.
3. Document your vision and mission
It really is important for the influencer to align with your brand’s mission and vision because that is the only way they can create something completely genuine and authentic to what you stand for. Work with influencers who you feel can strive to create content and engage with their audiences in a way that aligns with your brand’s message.
The most important reason to remember this is that you want your influencers to deliver the kind of content that is useful and helpful to your audience. If the content focuses on the wrong things, it could be detrimental to your brand’s image and could lead to the campaign being a major flop.
So, even if the influencer you eventually partner up with is great at their job, they may not know what to create if both parties aren’t on the same page.
For example, if your brand sells vegan, health-focused products, you can’t work with an influencer who actively posts about meat or an unhealthy lifestyle.
4. Identify topics and themes associated with your campaign
The next step is to identify things that are relevant to your campaign. For example, themes, goals and objectives are factors that play a huge role in determining which influencer is right for your campaign and will help you better understand which direction to take your campaign in.
Whether you are doing a product launch or advertising specific services, you will have to spend time researching the best matches for your campaign. Influencers, whether they are bloggers, YouTube creators or Instagrammers, will have a wide range of demographics they appeal to. By choosing the right type of influencer based on your goals and the topics you want to cover, you can make sure that your campaign reaches the right people.
5. Make use of social listening
If you are going to make use of digital platforms for your campaigns for products you are promoting, social listening is crucial to your strategy. You want to reach out to the people who are already talking about similar topics online and get in touch with them.
You might want to find influencers with a significant following in your industry that can help spread the word. Alternatively, you can also look at micro-influencers who talk about similar topics in a positive light frequently. Of course, you will also need to assess whether there are people looking up to them in this niche.
Don’t have a social listening tool that can identify influencers? Book a demo of Radarr today.
6. Check their engagement
If you want your campaign to be successful with an influencer, you must ensure that they have real, active engagement on their channel. However, simply having a large following does not guarantee good engagement and a successful brand-influencer partnership.
It is important to look at how many comments, likes, shares and views each influencer has. If you want to develop a successful partnership, look for those influencers on social media platforms that have consistent engagement. To find out the engagement rate of an influencer, you will need to assess the number of likes their content is getting, the average number of comments, how many people find their content interesting enough to share and more such factors.
While it’s important to know these numbers, you also need to look at the content quality. A lot of times, influencers will have a high number of followers and engagement, but their actual photography and content may not be that appealing. Check out the content and make sure it’s something you’re happy to associate your brand with.
7. Do a sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining and lexical analysis, has been a hot topic of discussion in the social media world. In order to find out the opinion of the users on a particular topic, this area of study pokes away at the sentiments and emotions of the users and their language. There are a number of software and platforms available in the market, but one needs to know what to look for when conducting sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis is paramount to any influencer collaboration. With it, you can gauge how the audience will react to your message once the influencer posts it to their page. It is not just beneficial for influencer marketing, but with sentiment analysis platforms, you can use them for other campaigns and to also figure out what people think about your brand as a whole.
Not sure if your influencers are stimulating the right sentiment in your audience? Let’s find out with Radarr.
8. Shortlist from the list of influencers
If you have a business goal or vision that you are trying to accomplish, consider the following- who will be the most interested in doing business with you and when?
There are many types of influencers and each of them has different goals, values and ways of communicating with their audience. Some influencers focus on building relationships that result in long-term value while other influencers rely on short-term gains.
For example, a small business that is trying to get new customers might benefit the most from working with micro-influencers, who have a relatively small reach but quality engagement. Additionally, they are also a cost-effective solution if your influencer budget is limited.
For a business trying to increase their brand awareness, a macro-influencer with a wide reach and high engagement might be the most effective.
9. Document your requirements and clearly discuss them
It’s important to be transparent about your expectations. Before you start working with an influencer, you should talk about how you want to collaborate, how you want to work together, what you want them to produce, how they will need to deliver the final product, what your brand’s guidelines are, how photos and videos will be used, and anything else that is important for you to consider.
By making sure you both agree on this, you’ll ensure that there are no unpleasant surprises which, in turn, will ensure the campaign is a success and that there is room for a long-term relationship with scope for future collaborations.
Be sure to clearly document all this information and discuss it with them before you start working on the campaign. By doing this, you can make sure to work together more effectively and avoid misunderstandings. It is also a good idea to provide them with an official contract that includes the expectations for the campaign and takes care of all the legal aspects before both parties enter the working relationship.
10. Monitor progress to decide future steps
Once you sign the contract with an influencer, it’s important to closely monitor and assist them with work to ensure the campaign’s success. Even if you have given the campaign outline and brief details to an influencer, it is necessary that you remain focused on ways to improve their results for other content items related to your arrangement.
You should still be flexible and ready with plans for changes along the way should certain changes be required. If the final content makes followers question your product or service or maybe even details of a giveaway you might be hosting, then you will need to do another round of revisions and upload other creatives that provide clarity.
Be sure to provide them with guidance in order to create more effective assets that will not ensure the success of the ongoing campaign but something that can also be repurposed later down the line for your brand’s social media pages.
To get rich, real-time insights from your ongoing influencer campaigns and to optimize them in a manner that sets your brand up for success, consider using Radarr.
Summing up
Influencer marketing is a powerful way to promote your brand, but it can be tricky to find the right people to collaborate with. The right influencers don’t necessarily need to be celebrities or those with millions of followers. They can even be micro-influencers with a voice in their community and can get people excited about your brand.
But it doesn’t work if the people who are speaking on behalf of your brand don’t resonate with their followers.
That’s where Radarr comes in. We help brands connect with influencers who have an authentic voice and a loyal following within their community. We’ll help you find the right influencers so that when they speak on behalf of your brand, people will listen!
Here is our complete guide for How to Choose the Best Influencer Management Platform.
Book a demo with Radarr today and let us help you identify the perfect influencer for your brand.
