With influencers located worldwide and backed by fans of all sizes, there is a wide breadth to choose from for your influencer campaign no matter what the product or service. Finding the perfect partners for your influencer campaign is more than just picking a niche and doing an in-feed “vibe check” of each creator. Once your criteria and niches are defined, you’ll want to dig deeper into the data.
Being overly thorough in the vetting process is well worth the hassle – not to mention absolutely crucial – for your brand in the long run. Take a look at our “Love At First Brush” influencer campaign for Wet Brush to see how it pays off.
Now, let’s focus on the four pieces that matter most:
When beginning an influencer campaign, it’s important to understand the size of the influencers you’re able to work with using the budget you have available, as well as the overarching goal of the campaign. Rates can be impacted by follower count along with what you are looking to contract them for, inclusive of usage rights, exclusivity, amount of content, and more! To gauge whether a potential partner is worth the investment, look at engagement rate, views, and any other metrics available to understand the impact they have on their audience.
Although an influencer may be located in the correct location and post content within the niche you are looking for, we must consider the demographics of the influencers’ audiences to make sure that you will reach your target customers. Asking influencers for screenshots of their platform insights will allow you to review their audience demographics, including location, gender, and ages. At Socialfly we use a third party tool which allows us to dive even deeper, taking a peek into the authenticity of followers, audience interests, languages and more!
As you continue to narrow down your top selects, exploring in-feed content will be essential. Aside from looking for high quality videos and imagery, using a third party tool can be extremely helpful for exploring content. We recommend looking back at content from at least the past 3 months, checking for mentions of competitors, profanity, and overly political or religious messaging, if that’s important to your brand. The goal here is to make sure the influencer has not created content that does not align with your company. Keyword searching can help your casting process by using keywords and hashtags to find influencers already posting about your brand or similar subjects!
Last but certainly not least, we must search the internet for further information on our potential influencer partners. We highly recommend Google searches of at least three pages back to ensure there have been no major controversies with each of the influencers you seek to contract. Casting responsible, likeminded and professional influencers from the start will help to avoid any backlash and controversy for your brand as well!
Whether working with influencers to drive awareness, generate ROI, or to create UGC, fully vetting each influencer and their audiences will keep your brand held at a high standard while reaching the right target market, making your campaigns most impactful.
If you’ve tested influencer marketing in the past and haven’t been impressed with the results, get in touch with us today. We pride ourselves on our thorough vetting process and finding the perfect influencer partners for our clients. Plus, if you want to learn more about what we can expect to see in the influencer space in 2023, sign up for our webinar on 2023 Digital Marketing Trends!
Written By: Cara Duffy, Influencer Marketing Account Supervisor
