Our advice on finding the Right Social Influencers for Your Brand
When consumers spend online, engaging content and social conversations have a huge impact on how and what people choose to buy. As digital marketers, we create content in order to persuade and engage with customers. But modern consumers are often skeptical and very savvy when it comes to responding to certain marketing ploys. For example, the moment something hints of an “ad,” or ‘‘Promoted post’’ they lose interest immediately and scroll past.
So how can brands reach out to customers effectively without it feeling like your pushing an offer or promotion down their throats? The answer is influencers.
Influencers are extremely influential and powerful on social platforms due to the fact that their content is niche-based, which is often in a very specialized area. There are millions of bloggers publishing content in popular areas such as food, fitness and fashion. These influencers can therefore be segmented to reach specific audiences like marathon runners, fashionistas and foodie enthusiasts. With their often huge followings and high engagement rates, brands should look to collaborate with influencers regularly in order to push their product/service in a new and inventive way.
Despite the clear upside and long list of advantages, influencer marketing is a waste of time if you are not working with the right ones. While it’s easy and tempting to use vanity metrics like unique visitors or Instagram followers as a measure of influence, it’s important to look deeper to determine if your chosen influencer is the real deal.
To make it easy for you, the team at CUO have listed the top categories you should consider when choosing an influencer:
Authenticity – Influencers who have a smaller ratio of sponsored content tend to be more trusted and appear more authentic in the eyes of the consumer. Personal stories that include genuine use or mention of a product, service, or brand are more trusted than straight product reviews.
Engagement – Engagement is an indicator of how interactive a blogger’s audience is with the content they produce. Do those readers respond, comment, and share? If they don’t, then why collaborate with them?
Reach – While it’s not the most important metric, reach is certainly a factor to consider. However, marketers should resist the temptation to only look at visitors as a measure of reach. Traffic and followers are only effective to the extent that the influencer is reaching your brand’s target audience. For instance, if you are a hotel chain or car seat manufacturer, a travel blogger with a small reach is more influential than a food blogger with 100,000 unique monthly visitors. The reach must be specific to your brand or service. We recommend staying away from influencers who operate in multiple niches as their audience is diluted. A great place to start is micro-influencers, these are influencers with smaller followings but they are often the ones with the best engagement and highest ROI’s. They are also a joy to deal with as they are keen to grow their network and increase their exposure through collaborations.
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