In part one we already told you what to expect and what not to demand from influencers when doing marketing through their profiles. Now in this new post of our series, we want to dive a little more into how to choose the right profiles to work with?
In the last post we mentioned that not every brand doing influencer activities can be considered a marketing strategy; there are also filters you need to apply when selecting the influencers you want to relate your brand with. Filter number one is common sense, but that should be default already so we’re not going to talk about that. (LOL)
Keeping up with our list of influencer marketing insights….
analyze influencer profiles and don’t fall for vanity metrics
Hundreds of thousands of ‘followers’ might sound like a BIG deal, even more when talking about millions of potential customers that can see your brand if an influencer posts about it, but have you ever taken the time to go through infuencer’s posts to see if people is actually interacting with their content or commenting something about the brands they promote? This is a very simple process you can do manually just to check the last couple weeks of content published.
It’s not secret to anyone that people can buy “followers” online just to raise their numbers, but these accounts tend to be either a bunch of bots with no interaction or added value, or fake accounts from the most random locations in places that your product would not even make sense. So a big number is not always a sign of quality.
As a company, when you hire someone you would usually do some sort of background check and would have at least one interview to check on your potential employee’s capabilities towards the position you are hiring for, right? Well, this same process applies to influencers as well. Before signing them into a campaign, you should be able to request an overview of their profile analytics that can prove they will have an impact on your campaign.
Rather than only focusing on the amount of followers they might have, the two key metrics you need to focus on are: engagement rate and followers demographics.
The Engagement Rate (meaning the amount of interactions related to the amount of followers) for an influencer this number should be at least a solid 10 to 20%.
Follower demographics like age ranges, location and gender is information that will give you a clear understanding of what to expect in terms of campaign impacts for your brand’s target audience.
It is ok to ask for these metrics and professional influencers should be open and ready to share those numbers with you. You wouldn’t trust working with someone that is hiding basic info from you. Right?
diversify your influencer selection using profiles with different levels of reach
Past experiences have taught us that you can achieve better results onboarding three or four micro influencers focused on a determined niche of market to do several posts about your brand, than hiring a big celebrity with a diverse audience that will cost you much more money to do one simple branded action.
Just to clarify, neither of these actions are wrong as long as you have a strategy and data that supports your influencer profile selection. Our recommendation would be to always have a diverse mix of influencers with different levels of reach and to set different goals for them within your strategy. The bigger profiles might help you build awareness but the niche profiles can be a better asset to drive users to a specific action towards your brand.
think strategically, divide and conquer!
When setting up a campaign flow, use macro influencers for the awareness phase and add one or two actions in the middle or end of the campaign. While your influencers and micro influencers should do the job of keeping the conversation going all across your campaign flow, with some heavy up’s on key moments depending on what your overall strategy is, helping you reach your conversion and loyalty goals.
It is not necessary to have all your influencers doing the same thing at the same time, sometimes what works better is to create two or three waves of conversation during a campaign. This might even give your audience the feeling that more people are talking about your product and will help raise its desirability. Every campaign is different and goals are variable too. But having a strategic approach to your influencer marketing actions will be the key for success.
Once again, we are bringing this all up because we want companies to have a better understanding of what influencer marketing really is (because just giving a gifted item to a influencer is not influencer marketing).
We as part of the marketing industry have to set up standards for ourselves and our clients. We want you to be able to work with influencers, understanding their needs and them understanding yours.
In our next blog post, we will be sharing an example of how to work with some influencers in one setting.
