Gifting 101: How to find the right influencers for your brand?
Fashion retailer Suncoo was facing an all-too-common but difficult challenge: Increase brand awareness and boost website traffic by reaching the right people with the right products.
That’s where influencer gifting came in.
By sending free products to a wide range of micro-influencers — as opposed to shelling out a big budget for a few larger influencers — Suncoo built an always-on campaign that reached 2.3 million people through 114 Instagram posts in just five months. As a result, the brand saw a 60% increase in website traffic.
As Suncoo found, gifting is the solution to many roadblocks that stop marketers from working with influencers: too expensive, inauthentic, and not scalable. Influencer gifting remedies all of these issues and then some. With gifting, instead of paying people to create branded posts, influencers can feel free to create genuine, personalized reviews for their audiences.
Suncoo isn’t the only brand to understand the value of influencer gifting, either. Companies like Lalalab, Anastasia Beverly Hills, and Daniel Wellington have generated millions of dollars and social engagements with their micro-influencer marketing strategies.
Ready to harness the power of gifting for your company?
To help you get started, we’re rolling out Gifting 101 — a series of four posts that will provide a step-by-step guide to succeeding at influencer gifting.
Let’s kick it off with the first section: How to select the right influencers for your gifting campaign.
How to find the right influencers for your brand on Instagram and YouTube
Over 2.6 billion people across the globe use social media. You have to find the ones with sizeable audiences and who post content that’s relevant to your business.
There are three key ways to do this:
- Search for relevant hashtags on Instagram and relevant keywords on YouTube. If you want to promote a new eyebrow product, for example, then you might look for #eyebrows (12.8 million mentions) or #eyebrowmakeup (29,000 mentions) on Instagram. On YouTube, you might search for “eyebrow product reviews,” “eyebrow shaping,” and “eyebrow makeup tutorial.”
- Search for your competitors’ product reviews on social media and see which influencers they work with. This is simple to do on YouTube. Just enter your competitor’s brand name, such as “Anastasia Beverly Hills reviews,” “Chella reviews,” and “Glossier reviews.”
- Check the automated suggestions on Instagram and YouTube. It’s not arbitrary! Social channels use your account data to find users similar to you, and this can be a very effective tool for finding the right partners for your influencer marketing campaign.
Once you’ve conducted these searches, scroll through the different profiles that pop up to find micro-influencers that best fit your brands and products. Really get in there, too. Check influencers’ bios, feeds, and recent videos to make sure that they’re accustomed to talking about products similar to yours.
After all, you want to work with influencers who can provide authentic reviews. If you’re selling beauty products, you don’t just want any influencer with “beauty guru” in their handle or bio. You want to dig deeper to find someone who can create an engaging message and won’t be forced to talk about a product that doesn’t fit with their content.
Which brings us to our next section …
How to decide which influencers truly fit your brand
Now that you know how to find plenty of influencers who might be relevant to your business, it’s time to narrow down your list.
Check their authenticity
You don’t want to collaborate with influencers who pay for fake followers or have unengaged audiences. Consider this: Mediakix created two fake Instagram accounts just to prove how easy it is to do and a recent study from Points North Group found that major brands like Ritz-Carlton and Neiman Marcus have the highest percentage of fake followers for their sponsored posts.
That’s why it’s important to check influencers’ accounts to spot unusual behavior.
Here are some red flags to look out for:
Unusual increases in followers. This could be a sign that an influencer is buying or accruing fake followers. You can use tools like SocialBlade to detect any unusual increase in someone’s follower count.
Keep in mind that if a spike in followers only happened once, that may not mean the influencer paid for fake followers. Possible reasons for a one-time spike include:
- The influencer may have been mentioned by another account with a huge follower base
- The influencer may have launched a special giveaway
- The influencer may have promoted their post with Instagram ads
To find out for yourself, investigate the influencer’s past posts. If you find evidence of one of the above occurrences, the influencer may be in the clear. On the other hand, if you see regular spikes and even sudden decreases in follower counts then you should become suspicious.
You can also randomly check some followers’ profiles to see whether they are fake.
Do they have a profile picture? Do they have a bio? Do they post? For fake accounts, the answer to these questions may be “no.” Also, check out how many accounts they follow? Fake accounts or bots typically follows several thousands accounts. See a high follower count? Get those antennae up.
Poor engagement rate. This can also indicate that an influencer has fake followers. Consider that the average engagement rate on Instagram is around 2%-3% depending on influencer’s size. If their engagement rate is below 1%, that’s a red flag.
Still, you want to be careful about making any quick judgments here. If influencers can buy fake followers, they can also buy likes and comments. So be aware that a great engagement rate does not always indicate that the influencer is authentic.
Too many likes, too little comments. A huge number of likes without any comments is a sign that the community is not super engaged. You want to see audiences jumping into conversations and influencers engaging with their followers in the comments.
Generic or automated comments. Sure, we all leave generic comments sometimes. But too many generic comments can be a sign of bots or fake followers. You want to make sure your influencer will be sharing your product with real buyers instead of a bunch of computers.
Check the audience demographic relevance
You can’t judge an influencer by their cover. That’s because the demographic of an influencer doesn’t always match the demographic of their audience.
Let’s break it down: Say you want to reach millennial women in Europe in a micro-influencer campaign. You find a 25-year-old fashion influencer from the UK who fits your target audience, but her followers are actually men from the US. Despite seeming like the perfect influencer, she’s actually not a good fit for your brand.
That’s why you have to analyze an influencer’s audience by factors like age, location, and gender. To do this manually, you have to check the list of followers and also the people who like or comment on their posts. You should be able to grasp the demographic of the most engaged followers.
Yes, it’s a bit of a headache. But the good news is there are also some paid services you can use to complete this process for you. Some that we know to be reliable are InfluencerDB (Octoly’s partner), DeepSocial, and Hype Auditor.
Create a list of influencers to contact
Tada, you’re done! Well, OK … almost.
You did the hard part. You found those golden influencers who can help you take your business to the next level. Now you just want to keep all of your information organized.
The best way to do this is to create a quick list in a spreadsheet with these categories:
- Name of the influencer
- Link to the account(s)
- Age
- Country
- Language
- Email (many include it in their bios on Instagram or “About” pages on YouTube)
- Reach
- Average engagement
To make this easy for you, we’ve created this Google Spreadsheet that you can copy and customize.
Working with influencers at scale
While gifting can be incredibly lucrative for your business, there is a caveat here: It takes time. Whether you’re conducting influencer marketing manually or with the help of an agency, it’s important to know this. You cannot invest in a new marketing strategy without the necessary resources — time, money, and manpower — to put behind it.
That being said, if you don’t have the resources or time to work with micro-influencers at scale, there are many tools on the market that can help.
At Octoly, for instance, we have a unique approach to identifying the right influencers for your brand: Instead of searching for hours or even days trying to find the perfect matches for your campaign, we let the influencers come to you. That’s what we call the “pull model” — inviting creators to pull their favorite products from a selection supplied by brands.
With this model, brands can create campaigns and target specific influencers based on key interests and demographics. It’s then up to the influencer to contact the brand and collaborate. Once the influencer initiates, the brand gains access to detailed information about the influencer and their audience. From there, the brand has all the data it needs to make the right decision and make the perfect match for its next influencer campaign.
Ready to find your influencers and give the gift that truly keeps on giving? Download our Gifting 101 guide, which compiles all our tips and tricks!
Want to test the Octoly way? Request a demo or sign up to our newsletter.
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