Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful tools we have today. When building a brand, who we associate with is almost as important as our brand image. The people we choose to advocate for our business and products is often read as a two-way endorsement. Our product is endorsed by the influencer, while in turn, the influencer and their brand is endorsed by us. Choosing the wrong influencer can produce quite a bit of PR damage, possibly even lead to getting cancelled.
Marketing companies like Lefty offer services that help businesses find influencers that fit their brand and budget, however for the DIY marketer, today we’re discussing the basic points of finding the appropriate influencer to represent your brand to avoid the difficulty of working your way out of a PR disaster.
Knowing What You Need
Imagine you’re buying a car. You have a specific set of needs that the car needs to fulfill in your life. It’s a huge investment, and not all cars are the same. Some have more storage space, others a greater speed threshold. Some have more robust tyres and suspension systems for going off road, while others still have accommodations for long driving times such as cruise control.
This is how you should think of finding an influencer for your brand. There are hundreds of thousands of influencers out there, and though they all essentially do the same thing, it’s important to remember that there are different influencers for different industries and audiences.
Therefore the first step in hiring an influencer is to understand what you need this influencer to do for you. Are you looking for someone that furthers your brand voice? Someone with a lot of followers to expose your brand to as many people as possible? Someone known for humanitarian work that can promote your brand’s charitable efforts? Just like a car, an influencer can be a time-consuming and costly investment. Make sure you’re choosing the right one for your needs.
Find Influencers, Lots Of Them
In a day and age where a phone and some decent lighting are the only necessary equipment for starting a business, it should come as no surprise that there’s a significant glut of influencers on the internet these days. Statistics from last year indicate that around a quarter of 18-44 year olds in Australia consider themselves an influencer, or are in varying stages of a career in influencing.
So after you actually know what it is you need from an influencer, you then need to start finding and filtering influencers. Make a list of influencers in your industry, then start filtering out influencers from that list based on your requirements. If your audience is a younger demographic, you want to remove older influencers from your considerations. If you’re concerned with certain causes, then you need to make sure your list of prospective influencers is made up only of those that also support those causes.
Once you’ve got a shortlist, it’s time for the next part of the process.
Engagement vs Followers
Social media is a hot bed of interaction, but there’s really only one kind of interaction that matters in the social media marketing world – engagement.
In marketing lingo, an “engagement” is the term for an audience member directly and calculably interacting with a brand and their marketing or online presence. For example, when a person sees a social media post, that is not an engagement, because the consumer has only viewed the post. However, if that customer likes, comments on, or shares that post, the act of doing so is an engagement. The audience member has directly interacted with the company.
Many people struggle to understand the importance of engagement, as they are merely focussed on followers. Having a lot of followers is never a bad thing, but it’s only part of the puzzle. Most people follow a fair amount of companies and businesses, but it’s rare to interact with every single piece of media they release. Getting followers to engage with your brand is the thing that will get you conversions, that is, people doing what you want them to (buying a product, signing up to a newsletter, etc.)
Therefore when hiring an influence, make sure you’re not just blinded by the lights of followers, and check what their engagement rate is. Then compare their number of engagements to their number of followers, and the resulting percentage will show you how reliably that influencer can get their audience to interact.
The Simple Deception
There is, as with most things, a lot more involved in hiring an influencer, but these three things are the very basic considerations you want to take into account when going through the process. However, if you’re only a small business and don’t have the time to practically do the research, it is possible to hire professional marketers like Lefty to help you out. Simply contact them through their website, or request a demo of their services.
