The Power of an Influencer: 7 Tips to Identify the Right Match for your Brand.

“Influencer Marketing” — talk about a buzzword! If you’re part of a marketing team, chances are you’ve been hearing this term non-stop for the last few months. That’s because more and more brands are discovering this one simple fact — millennials don’t want to be advertised to. We want to engage with great content, we want to connect with our favorite personalities online, but above all else we don’t want to feel that we’re being sold to.

According to a recent study by Tapfluence and Influitive, 92% of consumers turn to people they know for referrals above any other source. And yet, a recentSchlesinger stat revealed that 75% of marketers say their biggest challenge is identifying which influencer is the best fit.

I’m no stranger to those statistics. For the past few years I’ve been a huge follower of online influencers — my personal pleasure is fashion and food. Professionally, I serve as the Director of Communications for an e-commerce company and have previously managed the marketing efforts for many B2C startups in a variety of industries. I’ve spent the last year on the hunt for the best influencers to help communicate our brand story and reach potential customers. Here are 7 tips that I’ve picked up along the way to help identify the right influencers for your brand:

1. Define Who You’re Speaking To

Deciding on an influencer is as much about you as it is about them. Before you do anything else, it’s important that you have a clear grasp of the audience you’re trying to reach. Everything stems from here — selecting the right influencer, shaping the content, and measuring success.

Your target audience profile should encompass both demographic information like gender, age, and location as well as psychographic information such as their interests, values and behaviors. This sets you up with a full picture and makes it easier to understand who your audience listens to, who shapes their purchase decisions and whose content they interact with on a regular basis.

2. Choose a Platform

Once you’ve decided who you’re trying to reach, you need to understandwhere to reach them. Do they follow their favorite fashion bloggers across Instagram and Snapchat? Are they religiously checking YouTube each morning?

When choosing a platform, consider:

• Ease of measurement post-campaign: I’ve initiated many collaborations with Instagram influencers this past year — it’s a popular choice — but one drawback is that it can often be difficult to track due to it’s lack of links and the fact that it redirects on mobile. I try to combat that by using personalized coupon codes and keeping an eye on follower counts before and after the collaboration goes live.
• Where you want to increase your own followers: It’s important that you have a strong base within your own channel — you don’t want to direct people to an empty account — but also consider where you want to improve.
• Where the influencer is most influential: Most influencers have clear strengths and weaknesses when it comes to platforms. It’s not often that you’ll find someone who has a large following and unique and relevant content across every platform. Find where the influencer excels and go there.

Although Instagram is tricky to track, it’s been a clear winner for me, providing great content and allowing us to tap into new audience groups easily. I’ve also seen success with blogs, although that’s highly dependent on their level of unique monthly visitors and a synergy in content. More recently, I’ve initiated collaborations with YouTube influencers that have proven extremely successful with high levels of engagement and low bounce rates.

3. Consider the Intent of the Audience

Let’s say you’re a brand going after millennials (as so many of us are…) and you determine that a specific fitness influencer on YouTube has the attention of this population. Awesome! Right? Maybe.

Photo Credit: Cara Loren

While an influencer can be a great match for your brand based solely on the audience that they capture, consider their content and the mindset of the people who come to interact with that content. A fitness influencer may have a lot of millennial subscribers, but those millennials are grabbing their water bottle, setting up a yoga mat, and pressing play. Unless your content centers around those actions, they may not be prepared to stop their workout to start learning more about your brand.

4. Analyze their Level of Influence

It’s very easy to get caught up in follower counts, and while those are important and can guide you both in terms of who to select and how much to pay them, there’s certainly a world beyond this number.

Photo Credit: Chiara Ferragni / The Blonde Salad

Oftentimes marketers assume that they should only be working with the top-tier bloggers — those with millions of followers. However, that’s not necessarily the case. With large influence comes large price tags, and I’ve found it’s best not to put all of your eggs in one basket before you’ve had a chance to test and learn on a smaller scale.

On top of that, mid-tier bloggers often have a stronger relationship with their audience and can be more influential in the purchase process. A television personality may be able to reach 10 million followers, but their audience may not take their brand recommendations seriously. On the other hand, a fashion blogger on Instagram with 500K followers may not give you as many eyeballs, but those followers are connected to that blogger on a personal level — they know their likes and dislikes, their significant other, their hobbies — and they respect their recommendations. It’s those recommendations that oftentimes lead to a purchase.

5. Let One Lead to Another

You know what all bloggers have? Blogger friends! True story: I recently initiated a collaboration with a male YouTube influencer. His channel is all about lifestyle advice for the modern man. As I browsed through his content, I came across a video that he had done with another YouTube influencer who’s channel had a similar vibe. I immediately sent off an email to that influencer and am now finalizing a collaboration for later this month.

Looking through an influencer's social channels is a great way to find other like-minded influencers who may be hitting a similar audience and be a great fit for your brand.

Photo Credit: Julia Engel / Gal Meets Glam

6. Follow Industry Accounts

Another resource for identifying influencers is following industry accounts such as LIKEtoKNOW.it and CreateCultivate. They aren’t influencers themselves, but they interact with influencers on a daily basis and their channels are chock full of potential partners for your brand. I also use these accounts as a way to monitor other brands that the influencers are working with.

Photo Credit: LIKEtoKNOW.it

7. Consider Working with an Influencer Platform

My final tip for identifying influencers is a more automated approach — using influencer marketing platforms such as HYPR, FameBit or TapInfluence. These platforms all differ slightly in their approach, but essentially what it boils down to is a service that helps identify the right influencers for your brand and connects you to those influencers to set up campaigns.

The pros? They handle the leg work of finding influencers to work with and oftentimes they can manage the partnerships for you as well.

The cons? These agencies live and die by their ability to curate a relevant list of influencers. I’ve spoken to many of these companies and tested partnerships with a few of them, and haven’t found success thus far. The influencers that were curated were either not relevant for my brand or required me to invest a lot of time filtering through low-level influencers to identify a handful of quality ones (who I had typically already found through my manual searches). That being said, this is highly dependent on your industry and how niche your audience is. I recommend starting with a manual process if you can afford to spend the time, and from there evaluating how effective your search is.

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I hope this article helped you as you search for the right influencers for your brand — if it did, please like below and share.

Have other influencer marketing questions or other topics you’d like me to cover? Send them my way at shannondelany@gmail.com!