Are you interested in the world of influencer marketing? Maybe you’ve already used influencers to help launch your social media strategies. Or maybe your brand wants to find influencers for its first collaboration. Regardless of the situation, influencers can be powerful allies in your quest to build brand awareness, drive traffic to your site, or even increase your sales.  

But just like people in general, all influencers are different. They have diverse interests, styles and voices. And not every influencer is right for your campaign, so it’s important to find one who aligns with your message and values. Below we’ll walk through the things to look out for when looking for influencers.

Before you start searching, it’s important that you have your objectives clear. Decide what the purpose of your campaign is. In influencer campaigns, some of the common goals are brand awareness, social media engagement, web traffic, and sales.

Also, who are you trying to reach? Establishing your target audience will help you find an influencer who has those types of followers. Think about the age, gender, location, language and interests of the people you want your campaign message to affect. 

Finally, set up a tracking system so you can measure your results. You may want to use specific hashtags to brand your campaign. Or maybe you can generate influencer-specific coupon codes to track how many sales they bring in. And utms, a type of tracker for url links, help you see just how many clicks and impressions you get from each source.

Finding the right influencer is one of the most important steps in the whole campaign process. In addition to finding an influencer whose aesthetic style and audience matches up to your objectives, you want to find an influencer whose stats are for real. 

Did you know that 68% of marketers are worried about influencer fraud? Luckily, there are ways to look out for fake influencers while you conduct your search. And while you can extract these metrics from social media directly, using an influencer marketing platform is more efficient and can offer additional insight when it’s time to choose.

You obviously need to find an influencer interested in your industry. For example, a makeup company needs to find an influencer involved in beauty and cosmetics in order to make the collaboration authentic. 

But, when searching for influencers, don’t rule out related categories! A vegan influencer might also be categorized under food, lifestyle, or even health. Focus your goal, but broaden your search; the perfect influencer for you might not have described themself exactly the way you anticipated. 

The first thing we usually think about in connection with influencers is how many followers they have. Influencers can generally be separated into the following categories:

● Nano (1K-5K) - the newest influencers on the scene, who have the fewest followers but highest engagement

● Micro (5K-50K) - these influencers are valued voices in their niche markets, as they have bigger followings but still maintain good engagement

● Medium (50K-100K) - at this level, influencers start to get more professional, and may even hire a manager

● Macro (100K-1M) - these influencers are social media pros, but more followers means higher fees and lower engagement

● Mega (1M+) - the social media celebrities and famous athletes, actors and personalities

It’s important to know that you don’t need a top influencer in order to make an impact. Depending on your brand’s goals, micro influencers, or even nano influencers, may be the perfect people to share your message. They may have fewer followers, but the followers they do have are genuinely interested in what they have to say. 

Engagement rate shows how much an audience interacts with an influencer’s content. On Instagram, for example, engagement comes in the form of likes and comments. This metric is extremely important when collaborating with influencers, as it shows how interested the audience may be in your brand.

When analyzing engagement, take an average of the last dozen posts or so, as this metric can fluctuate with time. Further, extremely low or high engagement can be signs that the influencer has bought fake followers or fake likes/comments, respectively. When in doubt, check out the audience to see if they look like real people or bots.

 

How has an influencer performed on past collaborations? Taking a look at the engagement on some of the influencer’s branded posts can reveal valuable insight, especially if they’ve collaborated with brands in the same industry as yours. 

In order to find out if an influencer has faked their statistics, there are several metrics you can analyze. First, look at the influencer’s follower growth rate. Followers aren’t amassed overnight, and a healthy growth rate should be a steady climb over time. If you see a sudden spike in growth, it can be an indication of fake followers.

Also, there are two ratios that can help you assess authenticity. The followers/following ratio can reveal the use of the follow/unfollow strategy, which increases followers but not engagement. The comments/likes ratio is helpful because some influencers buy fake likes but not fake comments. If this ratio is low, it might mean the profile bought fake likes. 

Influencer marketing software can help you analyze these metrics easily and quickly. In addition, the software can analyze social media data to see what part of an influencer’s audience is authentic, and what part might be bots.

 

It’s not enough to know about the influencer’s gender, age and other demographics. You also need to know about their followers, as those are the people your campaign will hopefully impact! Before collaborating with any influencer, ask for their audience insights. Or, use an influencer marketing platform to help your analysis. 

To illustrate, let’s say you want to increase sales in a new market, for example, Denmark. So you choose a Copenhagen-based influencer to help you. But, you didn’t check out their audience, so you failed to learn that a majority of their followers live in Norway and Sweden, where your business isn’t yet operating. Therefore, you might boost brand awareness, but you won’t be able to drive the sales you’d planned to. Always check that the influencer’s audience lines up with your target. 

Metrics are important. They show how well a social media profile is working. But, as social media is a primarily visual world, it’s important that the influencer you choose also has a style that goes well with yours. You might want to republish their content later, in which case you’ll want it to fit in with the content you create yourself. And at the very least, you want to build a certain level of aesthetic consistency for your brand. 

Once you’ve narrowed down your search results and created a list of interesting influencers, it’s time to reach out. Contact them to see if they’re interested in a collaboration. Keep in mind, you don’t always have to pay influencers in money. Sometimes, especially with nano or micro influencers, offering them your product or service for free is enough to close the deal. 

In addition to helping you analyze metrics, influencer marketing software can also help you compile contact information and organize your influencer outreach. So what are you waiting for? It’s time to start your campaign!