Let’s start this out with a quiz. Imagine you’re a French food brand that’s launching a new line of fully vegan desserts in supermarkets around China. How to choose the right influencers to promote your new products on social media? What data metrics do you need to consider? To give you a hand, we’ve summarized 9 criteria you should keep in mind when cooperate with influencers. In this article I’ll start 5 tips first for you to have a better understanding.
First thing’s first: Set your campaign goals
You need to first clearly outline your goals before searching for influencers or setting up your campaign. There can be a variety of goals you want to achieve with your campaign, some of which may include:
- Brand awareness
- Content creation
- Sales or app downloads
- Newsletter subscribers or followers on social media
Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, you can choose how you want to collaborate with influencers. They’ll be able to contribute in different ways. For instance, if your goal is to create content, you’ll want to collaborate with influencers who have photography skills, rather than influencers who may have reach, but average content.
By setting your campaign goals before selecting influencers, you’ll be able to choose influencers you know are likely to help you reach your goals, rather than working with influencers who may or may not contribute to them.
Relevance
It’s important that you collaborate with influencers who are a good fit for your brand. When you’re looking through the influencers’ profiles, you should be able to imagine your products or services being advertised there. Promotions for a real estate company, for instance, would look out of place on a food & drink category.
Influencers who have profiles that are a good fit for your brand will have an audience that’s interested in your products or services. When you collaborate with them, their sponsored posts will resonate well with their audience.
Audience
To reach potential consumers, it’s crucial that you work with influencers who have a relevant audience for your brand. You can use audience demographic features, available on influencer marketing platforms, to identify influencers who have an audience in your target location, age, or gender. This gives you the opportunity to reach the right audience and communicate about your products and services.
Engagement rate
Engagement rates indicate how well an audience resonates with and responds to the influencers’ content. Good engagement shows that the audience actually cares about what the influencers publish.
To work out the engagement rate of a post, add the total number of likes and comments the influencers get on a post. You should divide the total with the influencers’ number of followers, then multiply the result by 100.
To find the average engagement rate, you should find the average engagement rate over a minimum of 10 posts.
Authenticity
Authentic influencers are more likely to have a dedicated following. They’re able to build up audience loyalty and trust by becoming experts in their niche.
To gauge authenticity, you can scroll through the influencers’ captions on both normal and sponsored posts. Look for well-thought-out captions that convey a story. For sponsored posts, the influencers’ captions should be helpful to their audience. The influencers may highlight why they’re promoting the brand’s products or services, how they can be used, or why they love the brand.
You can also look through your unique brand hashtags or mentions to find influencers who are already fans of your brand. Because they love your products or services, your collaborations with them will be more authentic, and they’ll be great ambassadors for you.
Values
Before partnering up with influencers, you should check to see if you and the influencers have matching values. After all, it would be out-of-place for influencers to endorse meat products as a vegan. To get a sense of their values, go through the influencer’s bio, photos & videos, and captions.
Got it? The right influencers can improve your brand value and boost the success of your marketing campaigns. Moreover, you can form long-term relationships with influencers that provide great results to make them invested in your brand. Want more tips, please pay attention to the next article!