How to Find the Best Influencers for Your Brand
Finding the best influencers for your brand is a necessary challenge to an influencer marketing campaign. You want influencers that will contribute to your brand’s persona, not cost your entire marketing budget, and result in real sales.
This is what you need to know before beginning an influencer marketing campaign for your brand.
Only Work with Those Who Contribute to Your Goal
This sounds selfish, because it is. Focus on your company goals, and only work with influencers who will help you reach them.
Caveat: Don’t take this to the extreme. Make sure the partnership is beneficial to both parties, and don’t try to take advantage of influencers.
If you’re a fitness gear company, you won’t work with a beauty influencer that never posts about fitness. If you’re selling an app for small business owners, you’ll want to target those with a similar audience.
Use hashtags and accounts you follow yourself to find influencers that fit your brand, and begin interacting with them and building a relationship before even asking about a partnership.
Large Followings Aren’t Always Better
It’s tempting to work with established influencers with 500,000 followers or more, but with more followers comes an increased cost. And, in some cases, decreased engagement.
While tools like Social Beam no longer work due to Instagram’s API changes, you can still get a sense of who may be buying followers.
- Aim for those with a 2–5% engagement rate. (Likes + Comments / Followers)
- Are there consistently a very similar number of likes on each photo? If so, they may be buying likes. Normal engagement ebbs and flows.
- Do the comments appear real, and do the influencers comment back?
An influencer program can be a big investment for many companies, which is why using micro influencers can be just the way to get in front of the right users for a decreased cost.
Benefits of Micro Influencers
While working with some of the biggest influencers can be valuable, there are also benefits to working with micro influencers. These accounts have typically anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 followers, and are often engrained into a niche.
These followers are more engaged, compared to the significant number of passive followers on celebrity accounts. The higher the engagement, the higher the chance you’ll see a ROI on the partnership.
Micro influencers will also be cheaper, so you can work with multiple accounts for the same cost as one mainstream influencer. This expands your reach across multiple follower bases as well.
When to Work with Mainstream Influencers
There are times when mainstream influencers will help you meet your goals. For example, products that a wide range of users would find helpful. From clothing subscription services to subscription toothbrushes and contacts, mainstream influencers could be the key to expanding your company’s reach.
Create Long Term Partnerships
The importance of long-term partnership goes back to sales basics. You need to sell to people more than once in order to close a deal, which is why one post with one influencer often won’t result in sales.
Instead, create a partnership with multiple posts over three to six months. Include a blog post if they’re a blogger, Instagram posts and Stories, and even an Instagram Live.
This will not only solidify your partnership with the influencer, but also reach their followers multiple times over a longer period in order to really create a relationship with them.
While these tips are what we’ve seen work for influencer marketing, there’s no right or wrong way to conduct influencer marketing for your brand. Rules are made to be broken! Start with these steps, then use your judgement for when to break through and experiment. With the right mix, your influencer marketing campaign will take off and result in growth for your company.
