What You Need to Know About Your Influencers (and Are Likely Overlooking)
As influencer marketing continues to ramp up in investment, influencer campaigns are growing in both scale and scope. Campaign managers need to move faster than ever to identify influencers, secure their interest and commission content that feels differentiated and pulls consumers down funnel. But as influencer campaigns continue to scale, at what point do we stop knowing the people behind the accounts?
We’ve previously dissected the perks and pitfalls of working with micro and nano creators, but regardless of what tier of influencer you may be setting out to work with, comprehensive vetting tactics are invaluable to guaranteeing a successful campaign. It only takes one ambassador with a scandal to encounter a PR nightmare, as we have seen in recent months. Take, for example, Samsung’s recent hiring of Girl With No Job’s Claudia Oshry, who has previously come under fire for a series social media posts published in 2014. At ACTIVATE, we use comprehensive vetting tactics. Next time you are considering partnering with a creator, here’s what you need to know before you extend a partnership offer:
Know Their Present (and Future)
We prioritize working with influencers who exhibit relevancy both online and offline, aligning with tastemakers who have unique career or life experiences that make them credible brand ambassadors.
When assessing influencer options, you should consider what endeavors the creator in question is currently promoting as well as projects that creator has in the pipeline. For example, an influencer may be preparing for a book release or launching a podcast. Those are valuable opportunities for incremental promotion that can benefit your brand further than a singular social post.
On the flip side, it’s important to understand if those projects are in alignment or in conflict with your brand’s values and mission. For example, tapping an influencer for a cookware campaign if they are preparing to launch their own line would be unwise.
Know Their Connection to Your Brand
ACTIVATE offers several opportunities for marketers to assess brand affinity, and we recommend taking full advantage of this. We track brand and retailer affinities using first-party data and every collaboration affords influencers the opportunity to submit an application message. Each creator has the opportunity to provide context on why they want to work with you and what value they feel they can bring to your brand.
Beyond gathering first party intel on your prospective creators, you should do your due diligence to know what they’ve said about your brand within public channels. Leveraging our platform’s Hashtag Discovery as well as Content Exploration features, brands can find any instance in which an influencer has spoken about or referenced your brand organically. You can also run these searches around competitor brands. Partnering with an influencer who regularly references rival brands would result in audiences finding your sponsored less authentic and relevant to the influencer’s editorial voice.
Know Their Audience
Of course you’ll want to partner with an influencer who embodies your target consumer, but beyond the creator themselves you should ensure you are reaching an audience whose demographic aligns with your target. We offer audience breakdowns including basic information like age, gender, location (city, state, country) as well as lifestyle information like marital or parental status and category interests. Companies like Demographics Pro are continuing to innovate in this space, rolling out deeper audience psychographics and interests like music, sports teams, collegiate affiliations and career categories. Before you partner with an influencer you should have as complete a picture as possible of who their audience is, where they reside and how they engage with content the influencer publishes.
Know Their Past
Understanding an influencer’s past is a qualitative and quantitative exercise. From a metrics perspective, it’s important to understand factors like month over month growth in reach and engagement — Keeping an eye on this ensures you are aligning with creators who are on the “up and up” with audiences and can wield more efficiency and value in long-term partnerships beyond creators who have stagnant or wavering growth.
From a qualitative perspective, we recommend leveraging ACTIVATE’s Content Exploration tool to vet for unsavory, unsafe content or mentions of “red flag” terms before committing to an influencer. We’ve seen older content from megawatt influencers resurface to great backlash and lost endorsements, so by vetting content up front marketers can avoid these embarrassing and potentially costly situations.
ACTIVATE is a fully end-to-end influencer marketing platform, covering influencer discovery, program workflow, measurement, and analytics. The platform consists of an opt-in network of 150,000+ vetted and authenticated influencers. Pinpoint niche groups by leveraging our geo-targeting and micro-survey capabilities or dive in deep with our curated networks of creators. Notably, the networks span a diverse variety of influencers including ‘vegan foodies’, ‘outdoor enthusiasts’ , ‘bohemian stylistas’ (and more!). Need a hand? Leverage ACTIVATE Studio, our in-house team of influencer strategists to build out and execute custom influencer initiatives.
Want to learn more about ACTIVATE or Bloglovin’ ? Just drop us a note at research@activate.social.
