How do you know who are the right influencers for your campaign?

03 Sep How do you know who are the right influencers for your campaign?

Influencer marketing is a fairly new buzzword that’s garnering a lot of attention in the industry. By definition it’s essentially leveraging someone else’s influence to connect with customers. This can be incredibly powerful for smaller brands who have trouble building an audience from scratch, and helpful to more established brands who need mouthpieces other than corporates to spread the message.

A stat recently showed that 61% of brands admit to having trouble identifying the right influencers for campaigns.

Why? Because the tools that currently exist don’t seem to inspire much trust in their ability to accurately assess influence. Companies like Klout and Peerindex assign a social score to individuals but a mere 9% see Klout as being a valid criteria for defining influence exerted by people over the internet.

And celebrities or A-listers? Only 23% see a well-known celebrity as being an influencer.

So what are some metrics you can keep an eye on to identify the right influencers for you?

– Social sharing

– Likes

– Comments

– Domain expertise

– Page views

– Reach

Notice where reach falls on that list: last.

If questions about scale comes up then it requires upping the number of influencers on any given initiative. Aim for 10, 25, 50 or more. Sure, this all takes time to properly vet, or, you can work with companies who have already done it (self disclosure – Influencer Connect has over 1,100 pre-vetted bloggers and social influencers in our platform) which makes your life easier.

But reach in and of itself won’t work here.

Just because an A-lister or celebrity has a massive following, it doesn’t mean that they know anything about your particular area of business. Or that they can influence their followers just because they promote your message. In fact, many are skeptical of A-listers and don’t see them as experts on many topics.

Where they can help is by being good for awareness, but it’ll cost a lot more to get that visibility than it would have through working with the right influencers which can also influence.

Your focus now needs to be on finding the right “ambassadors” to mobilize conversations around your product, service or brand, and the right influencers who are viewed as experts on a given topic. This engenders trust, and studies have shown that smaller communities carry the greatest amount of influence.

My advice for how to locate the right influencer is to look at the blogger or social influencer and ask yourself these questions:

– Do they appear to know what they are talking about?

– Would you trust their opinion on a given topic?

– Does their posts earn a lot of social shares?

– Do they receive comments?

– Do past sponsored posts sound authentic rather than reading like an ad?

If the answer is yes to all of these, the next step is building a connection. If no, keep looking.

Influencers tend to be viewed as highly strategic in the following areas: product launches, content promotion and distribution, events, crisis management (never hurts to have a trusted source avert a crisis) and corporate communications.

As the world goes mobile and social – two areas where influencers excel, the time is ripe to make sure they’re a part of your strategy.