To find out which influencers that are right for your brand and target audience can be a challenge. Always base your decisions on data, and if possible – human expertise, for example an influencer marketing agency or specialist.
How to find the right influencer for your brand
Remember that choosing influencers based on gut feeling is never recommended. To get an understanding of what’s important to keep in mind when looking for influencers to collaborate with, here are four helpful aspects about how to find the right influencer for your brand.
Focus on your defined target audience
In order to find the right influencers for your activation, your main focus should be on your defined target audience – not the number of followers’ an influencer has. Why? To make sure you reach the right people! If you focus on the number of followers instead of who the followers are, you can’t make sure that you reach the people you want (and need) for your influencer activation to give expected results.
Also, it can be difficult to see the difference between real and fake followers. Followers that may affect the result in a great number of comments and likes on your post (that seems to be real) – but that doesn’t generate any real results. By using the right analysis tools you can see data that shows exactly who the followers are, their interests and behaviours as well as how credible they are. Remember that an influencer with 10,000 engaged followers that matches your target audience is more likely to generate better results than an influencer with 100,000 unengaged followers.
Further reading: How to quality assure influencers
Choose influencers based on your goal
If your goal is to increase conversions, do not look for an influencer who primarily performs well in a branding purpose – it often gives the wrong results. The influencer can, however, be perfect for your brand, have the right followers as well as given great results earlier – but if the influencer primarily is good at creating inspiratory content, he or she might have difficulty driving people to your e-commerce. Different types of influencers are also great for different reasons – for example, if you want higher engagement rates, micro-influencer marketing is often the way to go.
To make sure that your influencer marketing activation will succeed, you must define the goals, ensure you reach the right target audience and, not least, analyse previous results. This may be difficult to do by yourself, consider hiring an influencer marketing agency that has direct access to data, analysis tools and an experience in which influencer can perform well for your brand – they’ll ensure that you work with the right influencers.
Never choose influencers based on personal opinions
If you rely on personal opinions when looking for influencers, it often goes wrong. A common scenario is that you’ve already made up your mind about which influencers to collaborate with for an activation. The mistake is that you’re not looking at your target audience as a first step towards finding the right influencers. You may have heard friends’ recommendations or have your own personal opinions, e.g. influencers you (or your children) follows. Who says your target audience thinks exactly the same way as you do? Think one extra time about the audience you want to reach with your campaign – because defining the target audience is the first step for you to be able to choose the right influencer.
Find new influencers using lookalike audiences
Did you know that with the help of AI, you can identify important touch points of followers of the influencer accounts that have performed best? Based on this information, you can then create and use so-called lookalike audiences – that is, target groups similar to those you know have performed well before. This way, you can reach more and new consumers, and at the same time keep retain quality and relevance.
Having plans to start working with influencer marketing – but is still unsure of the results it can give? Download our guide “The Keys To Profitable Influencer Marketing” to get our best advice for your investment.
