Social media influencer campaigns can do loads of good things for your business. From raising brand awareness to driving sales, it’s one of the essential parts of your marketing toolkit. However, finding the right creator for your campaign is an absolutely vital part of success; we cannot stress this enough. Influencers who are relevant, engaging, authentic, and well-matched to your brand values and image are the main contributors to your campaign but picking them is no easy feat.
However, we’ve made this nifty guide on how you can choose the ideal influencer to collaborate with. Only nine criteria to follow, and it should make your decision that much easier. Or, you could just trust Agenic’s data-driven platform to pair you up with the most relevant influencer, but we’ll get back to it later.
For now, let’s see the guide, shall we?
Audience
When looking for influencers, ensure their audiences are relevant to your brand – it’s the basis of your campaign’s success. For instance, if you’re selling running sneakers, you wouldn’t want them to be advertised by someone whose followers are all about skiing, right?
To define if the influencer’s audience matches your brand’s, you can use audience demographic features available on social media platforms or influencer marketing platforms (like ours, for instance). This way, you can identify influencers with an audience in your target location, age, gender, and many more metrics. Then, after analyzing the data, you can make a pretty accurate choice and reach the exact right audience.
Engagement Rate
Simply put, an engagement rate is a metric that tells you how well the influencer’s audience reacts to their content. Good engagement rates are a tell-tale sign that the audience actually cares about the influencer’s content.
And, if you don’t trust any engine to count the rates for you or just want to refresh your high school algebra knowledge, there’s a formula you can use to count it yourself.
This is what you should do – add the total number of likes and comments the influencer gets on one of their posts. Next, divide that by their number of followers, and then multiply the number you get by 100. You should do this for at least ten posts to find the average rate. Easy peasy!
In addition to these engagement rates, you should also check whether the influencer finds the time to answer their followers’ comments. A quick reaction builds a better bond between influencer and follower, and a better bond usually means that the fans are more invested in the content.
Relevance
The influencer of your choice must be a good fit for your brand. Think of it like this: if the influencer you like is into high fashion and you are selling pet care products, your brand might become irrelevant to their followers. A pretty simple notion, however, one that’s sometimes overlooked.
So, the next time you’re scrolling through social media influencers’ profiles in hopes of finding the right ones for your brand, try and imagine your products or services put into their feeds. Does it fight right in? If so, you’re on the right path!
Authenticity
Authenticity usually stems from the influencers being experts in their niche – be it food, drinks, fashion, or pet care. So, if you see posts where their expertise shines through in personal stories, tips, and advice, you might’ve found an influencer who’s truly authentic.
Why is this so important? First, people nowadays are all about genuine content, preferably one that is truly useful for them. And second, influencers who share authentic content usually have a more dedicated following.
Same with sponsored content – if you see captions that are helpful for their followers, they’ll likely find such content more relevant or enticing. This could come off with the influencer highlighting why they are promoting the product, how to use it, and why they love the brand.
Values
Matching values are just as important as any other part when choosing an influencer for a collaboration. Think of it like this – you’re a brand that’s producing vegan foods, and the influencer you like posts pictures of them eating a steak regularly. In such a case, your vegan foods would seem really out of place in their content. So, to get a sense of the values an influencer is representing, take a deeper look into their bio, photos, videos, and captions.
The bios might reveal the creator’s likes and dislikes, what causes they represent, and with whom they might already be working. Then, look for pictures that might be relevant to the industry you are working in. Lastly, check the captions – do they match the things you’d like to talk about? After that, you’d be able to evaluate the content they create as it might be representative of the content they’re likely to create for you, too.
Content Quality
When collaborating with an influencer, you must give them the creative freedom to develop sponsored content for your brand. And, because the sponsored content will represent you, you might want to check if their content quality matches your brand image.
How to define the quality of content? When you’re skimming through influencers’ accounts, you’d want to see content that’s clear, well-composed, original, authentic, consistent, and optimized for Instagram.
Frequency
The posting frequency is also one of the more important criteria when looking for the right influencer to represent your brand. In order for influencers to build a loyal fan base, they should be posting quality content regularly – think about a post every one to three days.
Another thing to check here is the ratio between sponsored and normal content. If, say, an influencer has posted a couple of sponsored ads in a row, their credibility might be at risk in the eyes of their followers. And if you check the comments under these posts and find negative ones, it might be an indicator that the influencer is promoting too many brands already.
Reliability
It is only natural for you to want an influencer campaign to run as smoothly as possible. For that, you’ll need an influencer who’s reliable. For instance, if a creator is a slow communicator, this might present some issues in posting content on time.
So, if an influencer does not reply to your messages in a professional tone, takes more than a week to do so, or does not reply at all, it might be a tell-tale sign that they are not to be relied on.
Audience Quality
Now, this one’s tricky, but if you want to safeguard yourself from an influencer who has fake followers or engagement, look for these signs:
- Poor quality content, but lots of followers;
- Little amount of content pieces, but a high number of engagement or followers;
- They have a too high or too low engagement for the number of their followers;
- The influencer is following more people than they have followers. This might be the result of ‘follow-for-follow’ tactics;
- A large part of an influencer’s crowd is made up of profiles that have little to no content, no profile photos, odd usernames, copied bios, or stock photos as their profiles photos;
- The influencer’s profile is fairly new, but they already have a large following;
- Sudden and irregular patterns of follower growth;
- The majority of comments under their posts are generic, repetitive, and spam-like;
- The creator’s videos have a low number of views compared to their follower size.
However, bear in mind that even if the influencer’s profile shows one or two of these traits, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are fake. So, examine their profiles carefully and always in the correct context.
By using this simple guide, you are sure to find the influencer that is exactly right for your brand. Or, you could just start working with Agenic, and we will do all of this for you automatically. All you have to do is fill in a questionnaire about your values, image, and goals, and we’ll pair you up with an influencer to match that!
