HOW TO CHOOSE INFLUENCERS FOR YOUR BRAND

The top tips on how to choose influencers for your brand. How to select influencers that are the right fit for your next influencer marketing campaign.

Brought to you by Mau, a Senior Influencer Marketing Specialist at eDigital.

HOW TO CHOOSE INFLUENCERS FOR YOUR BRAND

There are tons of ways to influencers fabricate metrics:

Buying followers on any social network
Buying engagement (likes, retweets, comments) on any social network
Buying YouTube views
Buying (quality) blog post comments
Buying website traffic
Rapidly growing social followings via the follow/unfollow technique.

⚡️ Trending today > The best Influencer Marketing Platforms

HOW DO YOU VET THE RIGHT INFLUENCERS

Before knowing how to work with influencers and get the most out of your influencer marketing budget, you need to know how you are going to cherry-pick the best influencers for your next marketing campaign.

USE CREATIVE AUDIENCE DEMOGRAPHIC MATCHING

The most important thing to consider is whether or not the influencer is a perfect match for your brand and demographic. You need to be crystal clear on who your specific audience is because it might not always be who you think. Imagine you’re selling healthy delivered homemade meals. The first thought is you need to reach food bloggers to work with. No, probably not. Food bloggers are usually talking about the food they make themselves and their readers probably make their own food too. Instead, your audience might be busy people. People who don’t have time to cook. Perhaps mommy bloggers who clearly have a lot on their hands or even interior design bloggers that can use the service to complement their decor. You could even get more specific by zeroing in on people who are health conscious. The bottom line is that you need to find the exact fit in terms of targeting. Some platforms are awesome for this sort of thing (not all). Some allow you to be hyper-specific and narrow down to the right influencers. For example, you can easily search and find maternity bloggers living in Sydney who wear vintage clothing and shop in high-end stores. You can even narrow down to the posts where they talk about the specific aesthetic, products, or brands you’re searching. That’s pretty powerful when it comes to gauging the success of those posts and finding the right bloggers to work with.

⚡️ Popular this month > The world’s top 10 influencers on Instagram

Cherry picking the right influencers can produce hundreds of million views for your brand as seen below on the Walmart’s closet makeover influencer marketing campaign.

Walmart Influencer campaign on TikTok closet makeover. Photo: Arielle Mae @arielle_mae.

DETECT FAKE FOLLOWERS

Everyone is going to have some random followers. This is unavoidable. What you want to avoid is people who have more than 50%-60% randos and do this exercise for at least for your top 20 influencers you are spending most of your budget with. Look for blocks of odd profiles because these fake followers will show up as one big group. Too many Russian-language profile descriptions or English words that do not make any sense are “red flags” for fake followers.

You will also like > How to craft an Employee Influencer program

DETECT FAKE ENGAGEMENTS

If you see someone with intensely sporadic engagement on social posts, then that’s probably the best indicator because when someone purchases engagement, they usually have to specify one of their posts that will receive the engagement (rather than spreading the engagement out across posts in a more natural way. If someone is getting no engagement for most of their posts, then all of a sudden there is one post with 1,000 retweets, you might want to go ahead and question that. Scan through blog comments instead of just looking at comment counts. I’ve seen some bloggers comment like 44 times on their own posts without any real engagement, so it’s pretty easy to detect. Check for spammy comments that are totally irrelevant to the conversation. “My cousin makes $50,000 a week by filling out surveys….” Or “Check out my homemade Viagra…” While most bloggers have put up spam filters to keep out all the random viagra-peddlers, you’ll see some bloggers that have unusually high amounts of spam comments. It’s important to just glance through the comment section for at least 10 or 20 of your top 100 influencers to make sure that the engagement is legit.

Marketers are using > How to write the best Influencer brief + template.

DO YOUR CHOSEN INFLUENCERS HAVE REPEAT DEALS FROM HAPPY CLIENTS?

Ask the influencer to tell you brands they’ve worked with in the past. Are any of those brands repeat clients? Are those clients the same size and industry as yours? If there are a few repeat customers, you are likely to have found a legit successful influencer.

Editor’s pick > The world’s top 10 Youtube influencers

Conclusion

Choosing the right influencers is essential for effectively reaching and engaging your target audience, building credibility and trust.

Picking the right influencers for your brand ensures authenticity and relevance, maximise content quality and expanding reach and engagement.

The right influencers for your next marketing campaign should align with campaign goals, fostering long-term relationships, and achieving measurable results.

By investing time and resources into influencer selection, brands can maximise the ROI of their influencer marketing efforts and drive sustainable growth and success.

eDigital can help you conceptualise, plan, develop, run and optimise successful digital marketing campaigns that generate leads and sales for your brand.

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Celebrity and influencer marketing campaign strategy.
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Consumer contests/competitions/giveaways.
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