Top Influencer Selection Criteria: Find the Right Influencer

With brands pursuing influencer marketing aggressively, it isn’t surprising that the global influencer market is estimated to reach US $21.1 billion in 2023. 

Influencers are the face of a brand and are responsible for building trust in it, boosting its visibility, and engaging its targeted customers. Since they play an essential role in how customers perceive your brand, choosing an influencer perfect for marketing your products and services is vital.

After all, you wouldn’t want to partner with a vegan influencer to endorse your meat products, making it necessary to master the subtle art of influencer selection.

Brands have been dedicating a sizable portion of their marketing budget to building brand recognition, establishing touchpoints with their target customers, and pushing the geographical envelope on digital channels. 

While social media and video marketing remain important digital venues, more and more brands are pivoting to influencer marketing to get the best of both worlds. Consequently, nearly 77% of businesses are involved in influencer marketing, and at least 68% of them intend to increase their budget to drive maximum results.

But only a few brands understand that influencer marketing is more than just roping someone in with a good follower base and paying them the top dollar to market your products and services. 

Though overlooked, the reason why influencer marketing is fuelling growth for some businesses is that they focus on establishing genuine human connections with the brand’s target demographic.

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Simply put, if your customer base trusts your chosen influencer implicitly, they’ll take their word for it and buy your products and services without a second thought. 

So it’s essential to partner with an influencer who’d be the right fit for your brand image and products, and can connect with your audience. But to do that, you must be familiar with the types of influencers you can engage with.

Types of influencers you can engage with

The types of influencers brands can partner with to market their products and services are:

• Celebrity influencers: think Michael Jordan for Nike. They’re known for more than their social media presence and enjoy a following of over 5 million users. Consequently, they’re expensive, and it’s difficult to partner with them.
• Mega influencers: second only to celebrity influencers; this type of influencers have a massive social media following—in the range of 500,000 to 5 million—and hold some power over the buying decisions of their followers.
• Macro influencers: they have between 100,000 to 500,000 followers and are well-known in their communities.
• Micro influencers: with a following in the range of 5,000 to 100,000, these followers have a higher engagement rate than macro, mega, and celebrity influencers. As a result, more than 90% of marketers prefer partnering with them to market their products and services.

• Nano influencers: the newest addition to the group, these influencers have up to 5,000 followers.

While you might think that a celebrity or mega influencer will give you the highest ROI (return on investment), the truth is that individuals don’t trust them much. This is because they know these influencers are paid a hefty sum to endorse brands and seldom actually believe in the endorsed product or service.

So you’d be better off partnering with a macro or micro influencer who’s respected in their community, truly believes in the product they endorse, and fits in with your brand image and voice. But how can you choose the perfect fit for your brand from the thousands of macro and micro influencers available? Let’s find out.

4 Effective tips you can employ to choose the perfect influencer for your brand

Selecting an influencer for your brand is no easy task. Their image must align with your brand, enthrall your audience, and help you tick off your marketing checklist. 

Before you embark on your journey to find the perfect influencer for your brand, it’s important to ensure that your marketing team is working on content marketing to generate quality content that’s helpful for your audience. This will allow you to take advantage of your digital marketing efforts and:

• improve your brand’s visibility, 
• aid you in building trust with your target customers, 
• position you as a thought leader in your industry, and
• help you gain an edge over your competitors.

Moreover, improved SEO will boost your traffic and conversion numbers, laying down the groundwork for the successful launch of your influencer marketing campaign. 

But if you don’t have the bandwidth to handle content marketing in-house, you can choose one of the best UK-based B2B content agencies based on your budget, content requirements, and the agency’s expertise, reliability, communication, and services.

Once you’re locked and loaded, it’s time to employ the following tips to snag the right influencer for your brand:

1. Determine your influencer selection criteria.

This is the most important step in finding the right influencer for your brand. As such, it must be undertaken immediately after you define your influencer marketing campaign goals.

While your campaign goals can serve as a blueprint, your brand value and image will also play an important role. Get answers to the following questions to help you scrutinize each candidate thoroughly and determine who you’d like to partner with:

• What is the engagement rate of the influencer: this question will help you look past an influencer’s follower base and note vital metrics, like post impressions and the engagement level of the followers.
• Do the influencers engage with their audience: determine the quality of engagement of the influencer’s posts. Further, check whether they reply to the comments and get non-follower engagement.
• Is the influencer a good match for your brand: you might love an influencer’s content, and their engagement level might be great too, but they wouldn’t work for your brand unless they speak your brand’s language. Check their credibility and see how their voice, tone, follower age group, and personality will align with your brand image.

These questions will serve as a starting point and help you analyze each candidate with fresh eyes. Since it'll be a huge commitment for your brand, don’t shy away from adding more questions to find the right fit. 

While formulating a strategy to onboard the right influencer, don’t forget to have some plans to tap into their online community to get a headstart.

Tap into an influencer’s community to grow your email list

The most effective method is to get them to urge their followers to subscribe to your newsletters or just opt in to receive brand-related emails. To sweeten the pot, you can entice them with the promise of special offers, BTS (behind-the-scenes) glimpses, and exclusive news.

Nurture your email subscribers to form genuine bonds with them, drive higher levels of engagement, and get accurate analysis about your email marketing campaign. Daunting as it sounds, following some of the best strategies for successful email list management will take a load off your plate and help you customize your emails.

2. Begin your influencer search.

To begin your influencer search, discover the factors that impact an influencer’s rates to determine how an influencer would affect your marketing budget.

Once you’re comfortable with the numbers, use one of the best influencer marketing software platforms or take a hands-on approach and look for influencers on social media platforms using influencer-related hashtags. You can also check out your social media mentions to look for existing advocates of your product or service. 

4. Reach out to the influencer.

After shortlisting a few influencers, you can engage with them on one of their posts and take the conversation from there. Or you can send them a direct message introducing yourself, your brand’s product or service, its goals, and what you hope to gain from this collaboration. 

Be respectful and authentic, but don’t bombard them with too much information. Wait for their reply, and if they fit your set criteria, set up a video call to get to know them better.

4. Onboard the influencer and kick off your marketing campaign,

When you find an influencer who checks all your boxes, run a trial campaign with them to better understand their creative process, work ethic, communication prowess, and faith in your brand. 

Remember, the goal here is to find someone who clicks with your brand and is genuinely interested in partnering with you. If all goes well, you can onboard them and begin your campaign in earnest.

Master the art of influencer selection to boost your brand’s image

Selecting the right influencer can take time, but don’t rush the process. Get to know the chosen influencer personally and determine if they can help you connect with your audience. Find someone who can positively influence your customer’s buying decisions and paint their perception of your brand.

Be open to their suggestions and feedback, and leave some room for minor tweaks in your marketing campaign. Encourage the influencer to share their creative ideas and experiment with new methods to reach your target audience. Further, have some metrics in place to gauge the performance of your influencer marketing campaign.