Finding Influencers for Your Next Brand Campaign

blogfoster
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read
Do more during your next influencer marketing campaign

Influencer is the latest buzzword in marketing, and for good reason. With a reported 74% of global marketers planning to incorporate influencer marketing into their next strategy, a fully integrated marketing plan would no longer be complete without first considering an influencer marketing strategy. But those already well-versed in this new marketing discipline will know that successfully executing an influencer collaboration is no simple task. How can you find influencers? How do you identify the best influencer for your brand? What KPIs should you be looking for? How do you do effective influencer outreach? What’s the best way to manage the collaboration?

While this may seem daunting, by considering a few key factors, you can find the right influencers for your brand and your next influencer collaboration.

Where to Start

Depending on the product or brand you want to market, finding the right influencer will come down to clearly identifying your niche. Try to think which IAB category your product or brand best fits into and try to segment your target audience based on this categorisation. Influencers are typically known for their expertise in 1–2 key topics, so determining where your brand fits into this will help to narrow the field and find influencers in your industry.

Size Isn’t Everything, Engagement Is

It would be perfectly rational to think that the best way to reach your influencer marketing goal, whether that be brand activation or lead generation, is to find influencers with the biggest following. But choosing an influencer based on their 150k+ followers won’t necessarily translate to great engagement. Studies have shown that micro-influencers (with a reach of <25,000 followers) achieve consistently higher engagement rate than their Instagram star peers. This phenomenon is due to the fact that micro-influencers tend to have cultivated a comparatively smaller but more loyal and engaged following than their influencer ‘celebrity’ peers.

Identifying Your Influencer

Unlike traditional forms of PR or marketing with more established databases, to find influencers requires manpower and plenty of time. After you have identified your niche and started to think about the types of influencer you are looking for, you will have to sift through the thousands of profiles on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook… (the list goes on) to actually find the influencer that meets the requirements for your campaign. Depending on the platform you can do this via popular hashtags, groups or similar accounts.

Co-creating Content

The joy of working with influencers is that the best ones already have a strong visual identity, voice and creative ideas. Don’t be daunted by this: their personal branding is the precise reason they gained their loyal following and this will help you to create an authentic influencer collaboration. Clear communication and support is important here, to ensure that your goals and vision are aligned with that of the influencer.

Measuring Success: The Missing Link

Arguably, one of the biggest challenges marketers face in influencer marketing is the lack of clear and precise measurement. Traditional marketing has established a number of KPIs and metrics that make tracking the success of a campaign relatively straightforward. Influencer marketing is a different beast. It is much harder to measure the direct impact of an influencer collaboration on your brand and even harder to work out your ROI. This is probably one of the biggest challenges that marketers face: influencer marketing is clearly impactful, but how can you measure its success in comparison to your other marketing activities? And how can you look to revise and optimise what you cannot measure? This has a knock-on effect, impacting your ability to work out your marketing spend.

This is easier on social media as you can keep a track of some metric such as engagement. This can prove more challenging when trying to track external social shares and especially blogs.

The Simpler Way to Find Influencers

In 2017, blogfoster launched over 10,000 influencer collaborations, bringing a wide range of brands and the best influencers together to execute successful brand-influencer collaborations. We understand the time, energy and resources that go into creating a successful influencer collaboration and have streamlined this process for you. With over 10,000 registered blogs and 22,000 influencer profiles signed up and ready to collaborate with global brands, we have already found the influencers for you. Our expert team works with you to establish your goals, audience and desired reach, then we take it from there. We work with the influencers to build a campaign that matches your brief, provide support to ensure this stays on-message and deliver your campaign.

The blogfoster Insights analytics tool automates the process, providing brands with accurate and measurable reporting on the performance of the campaign. This enables you to measure the performance of the influencer collaboration against your other marketing strategies and target your budget in the most effective way.

Want more like this? Head over to the blogfoster Academy.

The blogfoster Academy

A knowledge hub for all things influencer marketing

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blogfoster

Written by

blogfoster is an innovative influencer marketing company, which creates influencer and brand collaborations supported by Insights, its analytics platform.

The blogfoster Academy

A knowledge hub for all things influencer marketing

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