The key to any successful influencer marketing is choosing the right social media influencers for your marketing campaign. By right social media influencers, we mean influencers who are relevant to your business, are authentic, have good engagement rates, are well-matched to your brand values and image and shall contribute immensely to your campaigns. In order, to ensure that you have chosen the right influencers it is important that you keep in mind all the nine factors discussed below.
The first and foremost thing is setting your campaign goals. Once you’ve outlined your campaign goals it becomes easy to choose influencers based on your variety of goals. The different campaign goals may include:
- Brand awareness
- Content creation
- Sales or app downloads
- Followers on social media
Depending on your goals, on how you want to collaborate with influencers you can choose influencers.
- Audience
In order to reach your target audience, it’s crucial that you work with influencers who have a relevant audience as per your brand. You can use audience demographic features, that are available on influencer marketing platforms, to identify influencers who have an audience in your target location, age, or gender as this gives you the opportunity to reach the right audience and communicate about your products and services effectively.
- Engagement rate
Next factor that matters the most is ‘Engagement rate’. Engagement rate indicates how well an audience resonates and responds to the influencers’ content. Good engagement rates depict that the audience actually cares about what the influencers publish. Besides engagement rates it is also important to check whether the influencers are taking time to respond to their followers.
- Relevance
Always make sure that you collaborate only with those influencers who are the best fit and relevant for your brand. When you’re browsing through the influencers’ Instagram profiles, you should be able to imagine your products or services being advertised by them.
- Authenticity
Authentic influencers tend to have a dedicated following that they’ve built over the time. These influencers have build up audience loyalty and trust by becoming experts in their niche, such as food & drink or fashion. They show their expertise by sharing genuine content such as personal stories, tips, and advice along with their posts.
- Values
Before collaborating with the influencers, you should check that you and the chosen influencers have matching values. To get a sense of their values, make sure to go through the influencers’ Instagram bio, photos & videos, and captions.
- Content quality
It is very important that you check content quality of the sponsored content that is being curated by the influencers as this content will be representing you. Look closely for content and make sure that it is clear, well-composed, creative, consistent, and optimized for Instagram.
- Frequency
When you explore influencers’ Instagram profiles, be sure to look at how often the influencers publish content. In order for influencers to build a loyal audience, they need to engage their followers by posting high-quality content on their Instagram regularly. Don’t forget to check how often the influencers publish sponsored content and also look at the ratio of sponsored and normal content. If you notice that influencers have published 3 or more sponsored posts in a row, their credibility may be at risk.
- Reliability
To ensure that your collaborations run efficiently, it is crucial that the influencers you choose to work with are reliable. Reliable influencers are proactive, and hence they should typically reply to all of your messages promptly and professionally.
- Audience quality
When searching for the right influencers for your influencer marketing campaign it is very important that you determine the audience quality of the chosen influencer. Look for fake followers, engagement rate, content quality, and other factors that may help you assess the audience quality of your influencer.
Make sure that you don’t forget to follow all the factors discussed above before selecting influencers for a smooth and effective social media influencer marketing campaign.
