Your brand is doing well with its social media efforts. You’re finding a decent amount of success on a day-to-day basis with ad campaigns and promotions. But you’ve recently reached a stalemate and are struggling to get past a certain point.
If you can’t seem to gain enough traction to spike your social growth, then it may be time to hire a social media influencer. Check this site to know more about it.
Many may think the only influencers out there are those who are either famous singers or stars, but there are millions of other individuals with dynamic social followings that are just waiting for you to ask for their help. Although celebrities are a potential option for your influencer marketing strategy, there are many other possibilities out there.
These social influencers can help promote your brand via channels like Facebook and Instagram as part of their daily posting routine. While there may be many options available that could fill this role for you, we all know marketers rarely want any less than the best. Let’s take a look at five important aspects to look for when searching for the right influencer.
1. Relevant to Your Industry/Niche
How often do you see Nike sharing content about the best mattress currently on the market? Probably never. That’s because advertising about the most comfortable bed isn’t relevant to their athletic-focused brand.
The same concept goes for choosing the right influencer for your brand or product. You most likely wouldn’t want a gaming influencer, who has never left their hometown, promoting your travel brand. It is crucial to find an individual who has built their reputation in a similar niche to your own.
While some niches may be difficult to find an influencer right away, there are plenty of industries that complement each other. Fashion influencers can easily share about beauty products that go with their style. While a fitness influencer can promote your health product, as long as it fits their diet regimen.
As you search for someone to promote your brand, be certain they can relate their niche to your business.
2. Audience Data
Once you’ve found the right influencer for your industry, you still need to ensure they have the appropriate audience to fit your needs. It’s important to confirm their audience falls into the demographics you are looking for, with factors like interests, location, and age group coming into play.
Luckily, there are tools out there that can do this for you.
Resources like Social Bond, Deep Social, and Crimson Hexagon offer in-depth analytics tools for social media profiles. These sites and apps can take the details of your intended audience and find influencers that have a following with those criteria.
This audience data provides you with the necessary information to run successful marketing campaigns with your influencer at the helm.
3. Engagement with Audience
Now that you have verified the influencer has the proper audience that will be interested in your brand, it’s time to make sure that same influencer consistently engages with them. This process can be as simple as looking through the influencer’s posts and seeing how they communicate with others in the comments.
First, you want to ensure their following is interested enough in the content to comment or share. If an influencer has thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers and only a handful of comments per post, that can be a red flag for a couple of potential issues.
It has become easier than ever for Instagram profiles to buy followers for their accounts in order to make them look more official. The problem is that many of these followers can be fake, meaning once they follow the account, they won’t engage, like, or comment on posts. If you see a so-called influencer who has a ton of followers with minimal engagement, run away as fast as you can.
Real followers will often comment and reach out to the influencer regarding their content. A good influencer will answer as many of these comments as possible with heartfelt replies and genuine responses.
4. Frequent Social Media Posts
Instagram users share a combined average of more than 95 million images or videos per day. Between all of those posts, they accumulate more than 4.2 billion “likes” each day. Looking at these numbers can be intimidating, but there are ways to keep up.
One of the most important strategies for an influencer to be successful is to post often. As a marketer, it will be your job to find an influencer who stays consistent and is posting at least four or five times per week. Any less and they could potentially be lost in the shuffle with millions of other posts being shared the same day, leaving the promotion of your brand in the dust.
If you find an influencer who appears to have a strong account, but then realize they often go a week at a time without sharing any content, you may want to look elsewhere. These long pauses can negatively affect an account’s ability to be added to Instagram’s Explore page, making it much harder for them to be found by new followers.
Be sure to set a standard for your influencer to follow, so they are sharing often enough to remain relevant.
5. Quality Content
Odds are you’ve seen an Instagrammer who frequently shares nice pictures, but their caption rarely has anything more than an emoji or two. Unless you are a movie star or one of the Kardashians, this is not enough to hold the title of “influencer” for very long.
Followers enjoy quality photos and videos, but also need the added value of an engaging description to go with it. When searching for an influencer to promote your brand, you want to be certain they can formulate sentences well and endorse your product effectively. Your campaigns won’t be nearly as successful if all they do is share a picture of the merchandise with little more than a thumbs-up symbol.
Ideally, a quality post will include a brief description of your brand or product, how it can help their followers, and their personal review of it. If you have any hashtags you focus on, then you can always request they add those as well.
These key details will give viewers the basic information they need. Potential customers will learn how to find your brand and potentially become a paying customer.
Find the Right Influencer for Your Brand
A social media influencer can be a friendly face that connects your brand with your target audience. They bring personality and real-world use of your product to potential customers. Studies show that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from influencers over an ad or even a celebrity endorsement.
Television commercials and other outbound marketing tactics are falling on deaf ears, while peoples’ eyes are focused on their Instagram or Facebook feeds instead. There’s no better time to bring a personal touch to your brand with someone your customers trust.
Find the right influencer to promote your brand and help you raise your social media standing over the top.
By Logan Derrick
