How To Find Influencers Who Deliver Results?

Digital marketers are always looking for various ways to create successful campaigns. In the present day, rightfully so, influencer marketing tops the list. Marketers are working with as many as 10 influencers at a time on a single campaign to bring results. It is no surprise as recent reports by Twitter and Annalect shows that almost 50% of the buying decisions are based on recommendations from an influencer. It is also a cost-effective way to get more customers. Though influencers are beneficial for your business, finding the right one is not easy. So here’s a guide on how to find influencers that suit your business.

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Tips to Find the Right Influencers for your Business

A well-executed influencer marketing strategy will aid in creating and building brand awareness, build authority in your domain and help to connect with your audience. An influencer brings more organic traffic to your website and creates more leads for the product or service that your business offers. It is important to know what kind of influencer you want for your business. Influencers can be categorized as below:

• A user who has become an authority in the specific niche.
• Individual with a huge following and has an influence over their purchasing decisions
• Individuals with authenticity to attract viewers consistently and motivate them to spread the word about the brand.

The influencer is the heart and soul of this type of marketing campaign, it is essential to find the perfect one for your business. Here are a few tips to find one:

Identify your audience

Audiences are a key component in any influencer marketing strategy. So before you identify the influencer that connects with your target audience, you should know who your target audiences are. For example, If you are a beauty brand and are promoting an anti-aging cream, to sell it, you decide to connect with a blogger who writes about beauty products. But that may not be the right decision, as not all bloggers will have the same target audience. The anti-aging cream is targeted mainly by middle-aged women and the blogger may have millennials as their audience which does not work out for your product.

So before you decide to start working with an influencer, ensure that the target audiences of your brand and influencers are the same. That way, your products will be shown to relevant people who may actually be interested to buy it.

Evaluate the influencer

Evaluating the influencer is important for the success of the influencer marketing strategy. Below are a few parameters using which one can assess the influencer:

• Reach: This is the number of followers the influencer has on the blogs or on social media platforms. Ensure that he/she has a good following especially on the digital platforms that you plan to run the campaign on.
• Engagement: This is another important parameter to consider when gauging the influencer. It shows the number of followers who are actually interested in the content posted by the influencer. It is more important than the reach, as it shows the influencers’ capacity to sway purchasing decisions. Research has found that influencers with followers of about 1k to 5k have better engagement than other bigger influencers.
• Authenticity: There are many influencers who engage bots as followers. As a business, you will want to promote your services or products to humans and not to bots. There are many tools that can help you identify fake accounts. Hiring an influencer should not be based only on the number of Shares, Likes, Subscribers, or Followers, suggests SocialBook, but rather should focus on organic growth. Their recommendations should be authentic and trustworthy. It should not look like they are writing blogs or creating vlogs because they are paid for it. The quality of audience and comments, video views, followers to likes ratio are some of the criteria to check for fake influencer account.

Relevant target audience

The influencer may have passed the authenticity test and the audience is also engaged but may not be relevant to your brand. So it is essential to check if the influencer’s audience is the same as your target audience. That can be done by validating the following:

• Posts: The posts are considered engaging and high-quality if the audiences have good and lengthy discussions about it.
• Demographics: An influencer’s target audience is women, but if your business sells men’s sportswear, then it won’t match.
• Geography: It is important to know if the reach of the influencer is local and limited to a specific place. If so, it may be a waste of money for your business.
• Personality: The influencer’s personality should be in line with your brand values and mission statement. That will ensure that the content is not just relevant but also appealing to the target audience.
• Niche: The influencer’s niche should be the same as your business or industry. Finding relevant people is essential for the success of your campaign. For example, if you are selling tech gadgets, then you should find influencers from the tech niche.
• Can they increase sales: The main goal of hiring an influencer is not just having audience engagement but they should have the potential to convert them to leads and sales. So it is necessary to learn if the influencer can ensure ROI. An influencer who will most likely do that is one who will regularly show the post or message to the target audience more than once. The influencer should be creative and add value to the message they share about the brand. They should also be able to motivate others to share the message or promotion.

Where to Find the Right Influencers?

You must know where to look. Here are a few tips to find them. Ensure you choose the right one though.

• On social media: It is the easiest way to find them. People who mention your brand on social media are the ones to look out for. There are many tools that can help in finding influencers who are talking about you.
• Use hashtags: Look for hashtags that are relevant to your brand, so that you can find influencers who are good for your business.
• Google Alerts: Set keyword alerts that are relevant to your business or brand which can help you find people writing about your products.
• Influencer marketing platforms: They can help you find people who are good for your business easily and quickly.

These are the many ways to find the perfect influencers. However, once you find the right influencers, your main focus should shift to building a long-term relationship with them.