Choosing the Ideal Influencers for Your Brand | Key Methods
How to Pick the Ideal Influencers for Your Brand?
If you have ever thought of picking the ideal influencers for your brand or business, then please keep reading ahead.
It is nothing unexpected to see that influencer marketing is one of the most effective channels for business owners to reach their target audience in this digital age.
From Kylie’s Lip Kits to Adidas’ #MyNeoShoot contest with Selena Gomez, these big brands managed to build their billion-dollar empires around influencing marketing strategies. The power of influencing the target audience can offer stellar returns. However, only a few truly know how to play the game successfully when choosing the ideal influencers.
Thankfully, we have pointed out existing issues that stand in the way of consistently high ROI (return on investment) after working with over 120 brands from 10 different industries.
In this article, we have shown the primary approach you need to see to find the ideal influencers for your brand or business.
What are Influencers and How Do You Characterise the Ideal Ones?
Young influencer woman creating social media videos with smartphone camera while putting on makeup – New digital jobs trends, technology, cosmetics and fashion concept.
Over the earlier year, social media users have grown by over 10%. Taking into account the July 2020 Data Portal report, there are about 3.96 billion web-based media users. What is more surprising is that the rate makes up more than half of the world’s total population.
In Indonesia alone, the number has reached 160 million users in January 2020.
As a result, the term is used for somebody who has gained a reputation for their knowledge, background and skills based on one particular subject or theme. Influencers would consistently create posts set up on their preferred social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok.
The posts frequently get an enormous number of enthusiastic users who follow or are exposed to them. With their social capability, they can impact others’ consumption habits and ideology.
1. Define Your Brand and Understand the Need
One phrase: know your brand. Before considering whom you want and need to pick, it is crucial to understand your brand better. You can ask yourself some of the questions which include:
- What does your product or service do to make people’s lives easier?
- How does your brand bring values to your audience?
- What are your brand’s ambitions?
While you can answer these questions to reflect on your brand, we also use several marketing assessments to allow your brand to fill out its general profile.
2. Outline Your Goals
Social media influencer presents and reviews about product using smartphone on tripod for social media channel.
Brands and organisations regularly forget to set up their objectives or even ignore them. They would end up rushing quickly to discovering influencers for their campaigns. Eventually, they end up not achieving the ideal outcomes.
While it relies upon what you wish to accomplish, some of the objectives may include:
- Brand awareness
- Brand perception
- Increment in sales
- Growth in the number of followers or subscribers
- Reduction in bounce rate
- Increase in lead generation
3. Set Out Your Target Audiences
Senior tattooed influencer using smartphone app for playlist – having fun with mobile phone technology.
Influencer marketing efforts regularly become an epic disappointment, since they tend to neglect that their intended interest groups are the ones following a specific influencer.
To check their relevance, you should look at their target demographics including their age, sexual orientation, financial assets and current employment. A high-end influencer focusing on high-earning Generation X (individuals born from the early 60s to late 70s) will be unsuitable for brands who attempt to promote bubble tea to teenagers.
Psychographics of an influencer’s audience is another viewpoint to consider since we have to understand what they love. You can consider factors, like the audience’s needs, beliefs, desires and aspiration.
Besides this, it remains important to look at their geographical locations. An influencer might be well-known among citizens in Jakarta, yet the case would not be the same in Bali. If you do not establish the influencer’s most effective area, it will be a waste of money and time.
Some marketers subscribe to a social media monitoring tool to see the influencers most of them follow. However, you can also view their profiles manually by searching their names up.
The step does not end here. You need to recognise that not every influencer has the same kind of target audience. While some may target high school students, others would target high-income earners.
Our Case Study
An Indonesian food influencer has previously promoted our client’s (Cheil Jedang) product Korasa Chilli Sauce.
In the image above, an influencer has previously promoted our client’s product Korasa Chilli Sauce. If your brand deals in food and condiments, then your role is to find social media influencers who create such content.
This would effectively expose your products to the right audiences as potential shoppers. Other influencers may also be interested in making a partnership with your brand or business.
4. Analyse Your Influencers’ Engagement Rate
Asian woman using smart phone for social media with emoticon bubble.
Examining your influencers is essential so you will not end up with the less suitable ones. The most common error marketers make is that they observe the number of followers that influencers have.
Do not get yourself blinded by the large numbers. If your goal is to promote a nearby vegetarian restaurant, it may sometimes be smarter to pick a vegan influencer from that area with less than 5000 followers rather than to invest in a meat-lover with over 50,000 followers.
This is the main motivation behind why highly engaged influencers charge higher than the ones who only have a large number of followers with lesser engagement rate.
One technique to assess the engagement is to measure the click-through rate. If the influencer’s caption contains a direct link to a sponsored product, you can measure how many people have clicked on it.
In addition to calculating the engagement rate, you should also read the comments received by the influencers. Skimming through them allows you to understand what their followers and visitors think of them.
If the conversations between influencers and their audience generate a value where people see them as their inspirations, the engagement is undoubtedly high.
Checking their response time is another consideration. Influencers who quickly reply or react to comments would likely create a meaningful relationships connection with their chosen groups. Consequently, their followers could potentially become their supporters.
5. Know Their Values
Beauty blogger present beauty cosmetics sitting in front camera for recording video. Asian woman use cosmetics while reviewing make up tutorial to broadcast live video to social network by internet.
Finding the right influencer is just like attending a blind date or matchmaking. You would expect your potential sweetheart to do background research about you. Virtually, the cycle connects back to your influencer collaboration effort.
Understanding their values should be possible by going through the influencers’ postings, captions and biography. These will help you uncover several brands they used to associate with, their preferences and whom they support. Such an assessment will give you more insight towards how they will display your brand.
6. Measure the Authenticity and Transparency
Checking the authenticity and transparency need to be weighed. If an influencer’s recommendations sound genuine, they can easily earn their followers’ trust.
Brand-sponsored content should not look like something they discuss just because brands pay them to show their products.
In case you notice a sudden increase in the number of an influencer’s followers with nearly zero comments, we can expect that the user has purchased the followers. Meanwhile, the follower number from a credible account tends to change more frequently and grow consistently at the same time.
In closing, you would not want to waste your time on someone who promotes your products or services to bots and inactive users. This is something you need to be aware of in case your businesses need more ‘human’ visitors to your e-Commerce website.
In Conclusion
If you are planning to grow your brand or business online with influencer marketing, you should always consider these steps in your thoughts. Once you know how to find the right influencers, you can also learn about content localization here.
