How to find the right influencer for your marketing campaign?
What was once a strategy for a few now has become a necessity. We are talking about influencing marketing in our campaigns and that in sectors such as fashion or gastronomy, it is practically necessary to rely on it. Knowing how to choose the influencers is fundamental and constitutes one of the main steps of the success of the actions.
Types of Influencers:
There are different types and characteristics of influencers. We have famous people outside the Internet, opinion makers, experts or bloggers. We can also divide them by impact number and followers in micro-influencers, macro influencers, or conversational influencers.
Brands search for influencer profiles that can enhance social networks to the best of their products, seeking to create a direct impact on their subscribers to turn them into customers.
Sometimes we have the idea of campaigning with influencers, but we do not know where to start. We think that the most followed profile is the one that will work for us or that we should work on all social networks. This is not true, therefore, it is essential to plan properly to succeed in these online marketing actions.
Steps to select influencers
The choice of influencers is a custom task that takes into account the type of target you are targeting. The task may be more difficult than you’ve thought since the influencer market has grown and more and more people are influencing the digital sector.
This is one of the reasons why influencer agencies or marketing agencies are developed. In addition, some offer not only an intermediary service, but also a solution for monitoring and analyzing the campaigns to be conducted.
Here are the main steps to choosing the right influencers for your brand.
1. Clear objectives for actions
Why do you need an influential person in the digital domain? How long do you want to collaborate? Are we talking about a specific campaign? Three main questions that you must mark at the beginning of your selection. You must be clear about what you want to achieve with the actions of the influencers.
2. Know and segment your audience
It is very important that you know exactly the characteristics of your audience and your customers. We recommend that you create an ideal customer profile with demographics, habits, interests, information consumption, and more.
It is possible that you have variations of the ideal customer profile based on this information to segment your audience and define the customer card with which you will work. The ideal customer profile helps you formalize the personality criteria that influencers must have and that you must choose. These features will also have followers or fans of the influential profile.
3. Preliminary list of influencers
Search, search, and rank profiles that meet the criteria of your target audience. Create a table to analyze each profile and evaluate the behavior of each one. For example, follow the number of publications, writing style, images, etc.
4. Type of interaction of followers
In your list, you should pay attention to the comments and interactions of the followers of the profiles. Many times, there are prescribers among the followers of your influencers. People who, in themselves, have a direct impact on the rest of the subscribers and who have a faithful and lasting relationship with the influencers. Different tools help you in this process of searching profiles.
5. Brand and product related to interests
This is essential and you may encounter it if you have done a good segmentation of the audience. Similarly, it is important that you ask yourself: would this influence be a customer of my brand?
An action of this type must be the most credible and the most natural, so that the person must feel an affinity for the brand. Do you like our products? Often, our best influencers are part of our subscribers and we do not always need the most influential influencer to promote our product.
6. Quality of the content
Visual content and written content must be in harmony with the influencer himself. In other words, the quality of the prescribers’ creations speaks volumes about the type of community they influence.
Take the time to check if the wording is correct or if the photos, videos or graphics correspond to your brand.
7. Sustainable business relations
We recommend that you establish close and personal relationships with the prescribers. Remember that they work on their own brand and that has a lot to do with their personality. Therefore, it is more effective to cultivate a lasting relationship and to be able to participate in the various phases of the campaign until becoming a brand ambassador.
8. Plan B and crisis management
If you make a first approach to your list of influencers, they may reject you. Either because they already work with the competition or by tastes. Prepare for rejection and keep an ace in your sleeve.
Follow our recommendation with these eight steps and you can build your campaign successfully. Knowing how to choose influencers is one of the most important steps in your campaign and will increase your online presence and sales of your business.