How to identify the right influencer for your brand?

Online content creators and influencers for many years have become the initial point of reference for a brand when it wants to promote products, services or events to a specific audiences with certain tastes. The growing popularity of social media and public figures has turned influencer marketing into a market of more than 13 billion dollars worldwide! and every year it grows much more.

However, for many companies, brands and people it is a huge challenge to know how to choose the right KOI or influencer to promote their company, product or service. Should it be the one with the most followers? Should it be the one that generates the most likes in photos? Should it be the one that appears the most in press and the one with the most shares due to its viral content? Or rather, should it be the one with a suitable audience aligned with the potential buyer of the brand? Should it be the one that shows values and tastes completely congruent with those that the brand wants to project of itself? Let's check:

1. Identify the influencer aligned with your brand

The first step in developing an influencer marketing strategy is to identify that the influencer's content, speech, and style are aligned with the brand that want to be promoted. If we are a brand of luxury items, such as pens or expensive watches, we must select an influencer whose style is consistent with what we want to project or sell, otherwise we will only be spending money in vain, since the audience we are looking for will not be in the networks of the person we select.

When collaborating with an influencer, either as an ambassador or for a very specific marketing tactic, this person becomes a spokesperson for the brand; it automatically becomes an extension of what we project as a company, therefore, we must take care that what it is used to do, say and show is aligned with the core and vision of our brand.

THE INFLUENCER MUST TRANSMIT VALUES SIMILAR TO THOSE OF YOUR BRAND SO THAT THE AUDIENCE OF THE CREATOR CAN HAVE A CONECTION WITH THE BRAND.

2. Know and research the influencer's audience

After having a potential list of influencers whose style is aligned with your brand, you should start researching and looking for information about their audience (commonly, in agencies like SM QUERY, we offer a Media Kit with all the relevant data of the influencers so that you can know in detail the information of the people who consume your content and make this tedious task much easier).

Be Careful! Do not start this point of the process without first having a very well defined audience and target audience of your brand, through your own social networks or through market studies, identify demographic variables (age, sex, location, economic position, etc ...), tastes , aspirations, dreams and other valuable information about your buyer persona so that you can identify the influencer whose audience is compatible with your brand.

You must keep in mind that the influencer must be on the same channel where your audience is. If your audience mostly uses LinkedIn, your influencer should be there; If your audience uses Instagram, in that social network you must initially deploy the campaign. Likewise, to find audiences related to your brand, you can search for keywords related to the activity you do: if your brand sells sports clothing, you can take advantage of hashtags such as #fitness #workout #gym and other related to find the influencers who can have an important audience in the specific niche of your brand.

Last but not least, contrast the figures provided by the influencer with the reality of their networks. Remember that interaction is much more important than followers, and more importantly, it is the ability to convince to generate effective calls to action in your audience by the influencer. Study common metrics such as the number of followers, engagement rate, average interactions per post, number of actions generated by a post, etc ... In the Media Kit that the influencer must provide you with this information, it must be stated, if you want to obtain one additional help to configure your campaign in SM QUERY we have more than 3 years of experience in this type of strategy.

3. Define your goals with the campaign and relevant metrics

This point is key so that you can know first-hand if the campaign is working or if, on the contrary, you are burning money that you could use for other marketing efforts. Do you want to get traffic on your website? Do you want to strengthen your social networks so that they have a greater reach? Do you want to get the most leads in a form? The most downloads of your app?

By identifying your objectives, you can begin to investigate if you need one or more campaigns with influencers achieve your goal. Any objective that you set for your company must have specific tactics which you must follow and review constantly. In addition, knowing your objectives, you can present a “brief” to the influencer where you indicate what you are looking for with the pieces of content that he will create and share with his audience. These specific goals that you set for the influencer campaign should be contrasted with your audience and with the influencer's style: the more information you have, the more ability you will have to predict whether the campaign will work or not.

YOUR OBJECTIVES MUST BE THE NORTH STAR TO SELECT THE PEOPLE WHO WILL COLLABORATE WITH YOUR BRAND.

4. Identify the remuneration model that is most viable for both parties

Now that you have the right influencer and you are sure that their profile fits with the objectives of your brand, it is time to negotiate how much this will cost for your company. Many influencers have fixed prices for each specific action (promotional video on YouTube, story on Instagram, Post on Facebook, etc ...). However, once you build a relationship of trust, you can be more creative with how you pay the influencer, so that both parties benefit more.

If it is a long-term strategy, you may consider proposing a content creation package by the influencer and paying monthly for their services. Or if, for example, your goal is to get downloads for an app or sales in an ecommerce, you can give a % of the total sales obtained by the influencer's audience (for example, through a referral link) or a fee for each download effectively achieved. Remember that by negotiating the terms you can obtain a final result that benefits both parties, at SM QUERY we love working on campaigns under these performance models because we know that a good, well-executed strategy guarantees the expected results!

5. Track your goals

After the influencer publishes the content, his audience knows about you, and you start getting traffic, sales or downloads, the strategy does not end. Remember that you should always seek the optimization of resources and try to replicate those actions that were successful. Based on the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you raised when defining your objectives, check if the actions of the influencer (or influencers) had a positive impact on your overall strategy.

It is vital that the objectives are measurable and that you have access to the statistics of the publications that the influencer made for your brand. In order to be able to define if the campaign was a success or not.

The success of an influencer marketing campaign depends on the brand's ability to identify its target audience and find the opinion leaders with influence over this group! In addition, if you have clear objectives and know your brand's audience, influencers will be an excellent tool to achieve what you are looking for.

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