How To Find The Right Influencer For Your Brand

Companies know that influencer marketing is the 'hot' thing to do for online marketing and branding purposes, but are often at a loss as to how they can properly integrate it with their existing marketing strategy. 

There are a few questions to answer:

1. WHO SHOULD I LOOK FOR?

The first rule of thumb is to revisit your brand values and what your stand for. It doesn't matter if an influencer is popular and has hundreds of thousands of followers if they don't align with your brand. For example, if you are a baby furniture retailer, would you go for an extreme sport enthusiast to take part in your influencer campaign? More isn't better. Better is better.

2. HOW MUCH SHOULD I PAY?

You want to do your research into the prospective influencer you want to work with. Are they already represented by an agency? If so, you can contact their agency and pitch your idea and see how much they quote you. If the influencer you are looking at is not represented and seems to be doing their own thing, take a look at their following, the amount of engagement they drive in terms of likes, comments, shares and also check out profiles of people who follow them - are they the people you are trying to reach? 

3. HOW DO I WORK WITH AN INFLUENCER?

As you would with any marketing campaign, outline the campaign with a brief, so both parties are clear on what the expectations are in terms of the target audience, messaging, keywords, campaign hashtags, timeline, campaign duration and success metrics.

For something that's simpler, such as you are requesting that they take a photo of your product and post it onto their profile, you still want to specify details such as when you want them to post, if there is a direction for how they photo should be taken/staged, key messaging in the post copy, and how long you want them to keep the post up for (some influencers may delete or archive posts to clean up their feeds so it's best to specify).

4. HOW DO I KNOW IF IT WAS A SUCCESS?

This depends on your objective for engaging an influencer in the first place - were you trying to bring more awareness to a new product, drive traffic to your website, get more signups for your newsletter or get more people to buy your product? It's great you have a general objective, but what are the numbers you are trying to hit - 100 more sales? 200 more followers? 300 post shares? Map out the funnel in numbers to get the full picture and be clear with your goal-setting. In short, make sure to set SMART Goals. Goals should be specific, measurable (success metrics, KPI), attainable, realistic, and time-based (when will you get there?).

We are confident to say that we are one of the pioneers of influencer marketing, having integrated this into our online campaigns and content creation for Shoeme.ca when they first launched back in the mid-2000s. Influencer marketing has since gotten much more professional, and if you are looking to find an influencer that can give your brand or product the right brand associations, our marketing specialists are here to help. Contact us today on our website. We look forward to helping you solve your business issues!

To see our Cultural Marketer video on this topic, visit here.
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