Selecting the right influencers can be tough. Influencer marketing is one of the most successful business strategies for brands and companies, no matter how big or small they are.
Increasing brand awareness is not an easy task to do, especially on social media.
Due to this, influencer marketing can be the key push you need to increase sales and traffic to your site. Once you know you want to try this strategy, you need to start searching for the most suitable influencers. But what is the best way to do this?
Here you can find 5 key factors for selecting influencers:
1. Know your target audience
Do you know where your buyer personas come from or how much your clients spend on your product or those similar to yours? A deep analysis of your target audience is essential when choosing influencers.
With Heepsy, you can find out the influencer’s audience information. This way, you can know if their followers match your customers or leads. You can analyze the language, location, gender and age of the influencer’s audience.
Moreover, you can see the audience's interests and check if they match with the type of product or service you want to promote with the influencer marketing campaign.
2. Pick good engagement
Engagement is one of the most important metrics when choosing influencers. If an influencer has good engagement, it means that their audience is interested in the content they post. This engagement could be shown by how people interact with an influencer's profile: Liking, commenting, sharing a picture or video, etc.
To check average engagement, you need to consider several posts, since the information of just one post might not be relevant. You can use Heepsy's engagement filter to analyze the percentage and the quality of it. The quality of the engagement varies depending on the category because a 4% engagement might be good in the Lifestyle category but to low for Foodie influencers.
Also, you should check if the influencers interact with their audience. If you want an influencer to talk about your brand, are they willing to answer their followers’ potential questions?
Maybe the influencer gets thousands of comments, so it might be quite difficult for them to answer everybody. However, influencers who answer and react quickly to comments develop a good relationship with their audience.
3. Check their authenticity
How can you trust the quality of their audience? You might find an influencer who matches your brand’s interest and they have good content, but then they might have fake followers. How are you going to reach the right people then? You can do that by checking the percentage of suspicious followers vs real ones. The more real followers they have, the more impact you can make with your campaign.
4. Price and budget that matches
When finding influencers, you need to have the price in mind that your company is going to spend on this influencer or on the whole campaign. If you have a low budget, you don't need to worry because you can find micro influencers who have a lower amount of followers but are trustworthy and have great engagement. Also, depending on the type of campaign you want to do, the budget that you spend might be higher or lower. Some campaigns may require just inviting the influencer to an event, or sending them your product.
However, some top influencers might have a fee, regardless of the type of campaign. You can have an idea of the cost per post or video inside the report for the influencer in Heepsy. There, you can check the estimated cost of a promotional post or video.
5. An aesthetic that works for your brand
If you are planning on hiring several influencers, you might be working with influencers who have a unique style. It is important that all of them post content with an aesthetic that will work with your content in case you want to repost it. If all of them are working on the same campaign, there needs to be some cohesion with the color scheme, typography, and photographic style.
Influencers should have freedom when posting and creating their content. At the same time, it is important to share your brand values and message to them, so they know what type of posts might fit better.
All these tips should help you out when choosing the best influencers for your campaign. Follow these 5 steps and use our influencer marketing platform to be sure to have great quality content and an audience that is engaged with your brand.