Steps on how to find the perfect influencer for brand marketing
Many brands and businesses want to build their interaction with larger audiences and overall expand their outreach in order to be successful within social media marketing. When trying to find the right influencers to collaborate with, there are things to consider before reaching out.
These are the top 6 things to consider so you can confidently know how to find influencers that provide brand value:
1. PLATFORM
Before getting started, it is important to find the ideal platform in which you are going to showcase your brand. There are many different platforms that help target the audience you are looking for including the major ones such as Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and beyond.
With visual platforms, your influencer is able to post videos and photos to show off your brand with the guidelines that you give them.
2. REACHING OUT
After determining the preferred platform and target audience for your influencer campaign, you can start reaching out to influencers. You can start by reaching out to them directly such as sending an email or direct message (if email isn’t an option).
Take the time to know your influencer to have a better partnership with them.
3. AUTHENTICITY
The audience is attracted to social influencers due to them being credible and connecting with on-brand content that the audience likes to see. Having an influencer that just pushes the product onto the audience will not get you the best results. Softly promoting, while subtly directing the attention towards your brand is the better approach.
You want your influencer to have originality and no fake followers. Fake followers are accounts that aren’t active or have little to no activity. People can purchase these followers to make their page look as if they have a larger audience outreach.
The following are tools to help you determine whether or not an influencer has fake followers:
4. BUDGETING or BUDGET
It comes down to budgeting, the different platforms, and the amount of followers, that will determine the range of costs.
Influencers on instragram can charge brands anywhere from $100 to $3,000 per post. This all depends on the amount of followers each influencer has and the activity that they post.
Above is an example, but again – each influencer on different platforms have different costs.
In order to have efficient promoting of your brand, be sure to consider the budgets and audience you want to reach.
Often times there are cases where brands that have just started out aren’t able to pay the influencer. This is a common scenario for brands who prefer to work with micro-influencers (influencers that have 10,000 followers or less).
To work with this zero budget, you can create a gifting arrangement with the influencer where you send them free products and they agree to post the content in a creative way.
Gifting is the easiest and most simple way of working with influencers if you are in the works of expanding your brand and aren’t able to pay them just yet.
5. BEING IN CONTROL
An important part of working with influencers is making sure you have control of what type of content is being posted, and ensure that specific hashtags are being used, etc.
I.e. You send an influencer a product from your brand that you want them to promote. If you were to just send them the product with no instructions, it’s likely that you lose advertisement.
When sending a product, it is important to send special instructions in order to keep control and follow up on any partnerships in the future.
Some instructions that can be sent are:
- How to showcase the product or your brand.
- Specific hashtags that are relevant towards the product/your brand.
- Caption guidelines to go along with the content influencers post regarding your product/brand.
6. INFLUENCER PARTNERSHIP
A key tip when working with influencers is building a relationship with the influencer in order to have a better outcome.
Never assume that an influencer has a particular skill (such as high quality photography) that you would like them to demonstrate to promote your brand. Do research beforehand and look into past partnerships that these influencers had to get a better understand on how they work.
Having control of the partnership and content posted is a good thing, but allow for the influencer to be unique. This allows them convey your brand in a way that they know their audience will engage with.
The best thing that influencers do is create amazing content. Allowing them this freedom can result in more successful promotional campaigns.
Gifting them with products occasionally can also help create a better partnership because it allows for them to test out the products from your brand, review it, and post content.
CONCLUSION
So if you’re still trying to figure out how to find influencers to represent your brand, consider the following of authenticity, budget, partnership, platform, and target audience. Whether it be wanting to expand your brand that has barely started or wanting more exposure, influencers can help do so. After all the research to find the perfect influencer for your brand, what do you consider to be a perfect influencer prior to what you researched?
