The real value of influencer

Brand vs Following

Lloyd Jong
3 min readMar 20, 2017

There are ton of articles that explain the importance of influencers marketing. It’s a good alternative to traditional ads campaigns and the growth of investments in social media ads suggest that 2017 is going to be a special year for the influencers on all big platforms.

For businesses, content shouldn’t be random post but completely designed campaigns with a clear objective over a defined period of time. Businesses should align beautiful creative and results analytics on social platforms. They should use social platforms to gain more awareness and also to convert their audience.

In order to build a good influencer campaign, it’s primordial to understand what’s the real value of influencers, and to know what will make one influencer convert more than others.

It’s important to evaluate all these value in a world where it’s possible to buy followers.What’s the real value of influencers? And how to decide between influencers?

Engagement : Beyond the number of likes and impressions, we need to wonder if the influencers we are evaluating are getting topics related engagement.

Is the engagement from our target audience or from people who will turn into unqualified leads? Are the influencers building a relationship with their audience by responding to comments and connecting? Did the influencers build authority to our audience? Is the content they produce easily sharable?

The first step is to confirm that the influencers are able to provoke emotions in our audience and get them to engage.

Cross Channel Reach : It’s important to understand what content works on what channel and what channel will be the best fit with our product? Retailers and e-commerce in overall are getting good sales numbers on Facebook and Instagram.

The objective is to evaluate the number of channels the influencers use and to assure the content we create fits with our target audience on that channel. Great influencers have a variety of content they share on different channels. Influencers who have a Blog + Instagram + Facebook page, will help hit multiple targets with different formats of the content.

Brand potential : Brand is the relationship with the audience. Solid influencers have a solid brands. The magic happens when the target audience associates their favourite influencers with our company’s brand.

Influencers have little rituals that work for product placement. Shonduras (Snap-chatter and YouTuber), has a solid brand. His ritual of eating cereals, his love for skateboard, cameras and editing softwares, makes it perfect for brand placement.

Engagement, Cross Channel Reach, Brand potential help to evaluate the real value of influencers. Influencers campaigns are a good substitute to social media ads campaign. It’s important for Businesses to start building relationships with the best influencers while they are underpriced.

-Thank you for reading

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