What’s the Best Way to Find the Right Influencers for Your Brand?

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that involves focusing on key individuals, or influencers, who can reach a large number of people with their message. This form of marketing has been growing in popularity in recent years, partly due to the rise of social media. With influencer marketing, businesses can target a specific audience and get their message out to a large number of people quickly and easily.

According to recent studies, influencer marketing is estimated to exceed $16 billion in 2022. Although some predicted it would decrease due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it only increased. More than half of brands have a standalone budget for content marketing, and most invest in influencer marketing. In order to be an up-to-date marketer, you should be aware of the scale of this phenomenon.

In this article, I have a few tips for finding the right social media influencers to do influencer marketing for your brand. But first, let's examine why influencer marketing is taking over our marketing strategies.

What's The Best Way to Find the Right Influencers for Your Brand:

Why is Influencer Marketing So Powerful?

Influencer marketing has become one of the most popular marketing strategies in recent years. There are several reasons for this:

1. Influencers have a large following of engaged fans. It allows companies to target a specific audience with laser precision.
2. They are often seen as experts in their field, which gives them the ability to build trust with their followers. Studies have shown that influencer-led campaigns often result in increased brand awareness and purchase intent.
3. Influencers are able to connect with their followers on a personal level, which helps to create a sense of loyalty and intimacy. 
4. Influencer marketing is cost-effective – especially when compared to other forms of advertising such as TV or print ads.
5. It creates credibility and social proof. 92% of consumers say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising. Having a large number of followers, likes, comments, and shares provide the impression of validation and trust by many people.

For these reasons, it's no wonder influencer marketing is trending now and plays a crucial role in marketing strategies. In the next part of the article, I’m going to share a two-part method to help you find out which influencer would be the best match for your brand. 

Find Influential Profiles That Are Active

You can track online mentions of your brand, product, or industry. This is important because you want to work with people who are vocal about topics that are super relevant to you. 

Source: pexels.com

So let's say you are a clothing brand selling jeans and are still relatively unknown. Maybe you just opened an online shop. In this case, you would monitor online mentions of jeans, denim, and your brand name. Media monitoring tools like Brand24 will pick up mentions of these phrases from all over the internet. Naturally, this will include web pages that cite these phrases because they're selling them too.

Source: brand24.com

So you need to clean up your data a little bit. Block those pages and get rid of irrelevant mentions. Having found all these mentions about jeans, you can now look at where they're coming from and discover potential influencers who are vocal and active in your niche. This is something that Brand24 can help you with just by analyzing your data.

If you go into the Analysis tab and scroll down, you'll see a section with the list of the most active social media authors. These are the people who are vocal about the phrases you are monitoring. Now you can check their Voice share (percentage of what part of the discussion was generated by this user) and the Influence (estimated number of generated views).

Source: brand24.com

Keep in mind that, although the people listed here are sorted by Influence, they're not necessarily the best options for you to work with (they only need to have mentioned your keyword at least once to be included). So they may not be the most active and vocal profiles in your niche.

And this is crucial – you want to cross-reference between the people on both lists, the most active social media authors, and the Influence of social media authors. This will help you identify the top choices for your influencer marketing efforts. 

Now that you've started monitoring phrases relevant to your brand or product and found some potential influencers to work with by comparing active and influential profiles, we can move on to part two.

Observe the Online Activities of Influencers

Part two is about observing the online activities of influencers. You want to start following them on social media and then take a good hard look at them. When you work with an influencer, your message will reach their audience and followers. So you need to look into their followers and see if they are your potential customers. If not, this won't be a good match for you. And then, you need to look at each influencer's communication style. See if it fits with your brand image.

The point is you want to make sure that the way they present themselves isn't wholly opposite from what your target audience expects unless you're going for a rebranding. Make sure they're not connected to any extreme political views you don't want to be associated with, or potentially scandalous events that could cause a brand crisis.

Here’s a list of questions to consider when choosing influencers:

After you look into all these things, your list will probably get much shorter. So many people would stop here and start reaching out to the influencers that made it to this point. I recommend going even more profound. It's an extra step to help you narrow down your options and find a good match.

So now, take your top choices for influencer marketing, the ones still left after your preliminary elimination, and set up individual media monitoring projects for each profile. It will allow you to know what exactly people are saying about them. Is it mostly positive or negative? Analyze the sentiment for mentions to find out what their brand reputation is like besides being relevant to your industry or niche. You probably want to work with people who have a more positive reputation and can inspire trust.

At this point, I suggest using Presence Score – Brand24’s original solution for calculating the brand, topic, or person's online popularity. You can use this metric to measure brand awareness, and it’s been proven to help evaluate marketing and PR efforts. It has been a deciding factor when selecting the influencers and their appearance order for the Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencers Report 2022 by Brand24. It allowed them to create a top-quality list of experts who not only provide quality knowledge in the broad marketing field but also brilliantly build their personal brand. 

What to Consider When Searching for Potential Influencers?

Influencer marketing has become one of the most popular and effective marketing strategies in recent years. However, as with any new industry, there are a few potential pitfalls that brands need to be aware of. One of the most common problems is fake influencers or influencers who use bots or other methods to inflate their engagement stats artificially. This can make it challenging to determine which influencers are genuinely influential and which are just churning out content without real engagement from their followers.

Another thing to watch out for is influencers who post a lot of sponsored content without clearly labeling it as such. This can create the false impression that an influencer is endorsing a product when they're just being paid to promote it. Brands need to be careful to vet potential influencers before partnering with them to avoid these and other potential problems.

How to Spot a Fake Influencer? 

Now that you understand what we mean by fake influencers and what kind of damage they can bring to your business, let’s get to the most crucial part. I will explain how to differentiate fake influencers from genuine ones. When spotting fake influencers, there are a few key indicators you can look out for. One of the most obvious is the engagement rate. Fake influencers will often have unnaturally high engagement rates, with a large proportion of their followers' liking, commenting, and sharing their content. Another red flag is massive follower growth. Fake influencers will often try to boost their numbers by buying fake followers, which can be easily spotted if you look closely at their follower count over time. 

Finally, fake influencers often post generic or irrelevant content to appeal to as many people as possible. By contrast, genuine influencers usually have more niche interests and produce content specific to their audience. Spotting fake influencers isn't always easy, but if you know what to look for, it becomes much more straightforward. By paying attention to these key indicators, you can avoid fake influencers and ensure you only work with genuine ones.

You Found the Perfect Influencer. Now What?

Now that you've found an influencer who shares your brand's values and has a receptive, engaged audience, you can do a few final things to ensure successful partnerships.

First, it's essential to set clear objectives and expectations. Influencer relationships are built on trust. It’s important to be clear about your expectations from the start. Be specific about what you’re looking for in terms of content, platform, timing, and deliverables. Draft a brief proposal or contract outlining these details and send it to your influencer for review. 

Secondly, consider how you can provide value to the influencer beyond financial compensation. Building relationships for the long-term makes for successful influencer marketing campaigns. Influencers are more likely to promote a brand they feel good about, so think about what you can do to make them feel appreciated. Lastly, don't forget to measure the results of your campaign so you can optimize and improve future efforts.

By following these simple tips, you can maximize the impact of your influencer partnerships and achieve your business goals.

Wrapping Things Ups

If you're looking to start influencer marketing for your brand, these tips will hopefully help get you started. Do you have any other ideas for finding social media influencers? Let us know in the comments! Thanks for reading!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alicja Mękarska

I'm a Partnership Manager at Brand24. I'm fascinated by the world of online marketing and branding. Outside work, I’m an avid traveler passionate about discovering new places and cultures. I'm also a plant lover and cooking aficionado constantly trying out new vegan recipes.

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