How to find the right influencers for your brand

Influencer marketing can be a daunting task to a marketing team with already several plates spinning. It’s just one more activity you have to keep going to continue to grow your brand, traffic, and sales. The difference is influencer marketing actually lives up to the hype - numbers wise. Brands can expect an average 520% return in earned media value for what they invest in influencer marketing. This is far above what you can expect from paid ads, print media, or other marketing methods. So it’s worth a shot! Especially for consumer products as influencer marketing essentially provides you with an authentic way to reach your target consumers where they are browsing and actually listening.

You gain brand ambassadors who have already established their own style that works and a trusted voice. What could be better?

So how do you find the right influencers that match your brand image and speak to your target audience?

Here’s how we do it at Embello:

Pick your target personas:

First things first, you want to figure out who you want to engage with on social media. When we speak with clients, this is one of our first questions. We do a deep dive to understand who their current buyers are and who they want to target additionally. Most of our clients want to target more of their current customers, reach new target market segments, or a combination of the two. We ask a series of questions to better build a profile of who their target audiences are as personas online. By “Persona”, we mean a complete profile of a target customer’s demographics, activities, interests, etc. that we can use to take the next steps. Think of it as clicking on your target customer’s Instagram profile and the information you would find there: their gender, age, location, economic status, family or single, and of course, who they follow. 76% of customers say they’ve purchased products they’ve discovered on their social media feeds. Creating personas around these qualifications helps determine the influencers that would appear in your ideal customers’ “Following” list.

Identify keywords and phrases that relate or are of interest to your personas:

Once you’ve identified your key personas, it’s easier to dive in the “space” they are interested in online and figure out what keywords, hashtags, and phrases get you there. A lot of this is done through brainstorming after taking a look at your target personas online and their activity. For example, if you know you target persona is a middle aged woman with kids, an upper-middle class economic status and an interest in home decor, the phrases and words like “design ideas”, “home decor”, “interior design ideas” “interior design”, “living room inspo”, so on and so forth are applicable. Make a solid list of 10-20 to explore as related to your target personas.

Use hashtag searches:

Once you’ve identified some relatable words and phrases, you can use hashtag tools like Ritetag to better identify top followed hashtags and their demographics. Identify the most active hashtags and go to “top posts” to explore what users who follow or interact with those hashtags like the best. This will give you an idea of both the content and content creators that are most popular with your target audiences. You can click through top posts pages and see who the top influencers are within those hashtags. From here you can start to identify who is a good match for your brand and create a list of your top prospects. If you find there is someone that is a great fit for your brand and want to find others, you can take a look at which influences the influencers are following.

Explore follower count, engagement, posting frequency, and content style:

To qualify influencers you’re looking at in your search process, you can go through a few things on their profile. Take a look at their follower count and determine whether you want more of a macro or micro influencer. Read more about the differences between influencers here. (link) In addition to their follower count, take a look at the engagement in comparison to the number of followers they have. If influencers have a lot of followers but not very high engagement, they may not be impactful for a campaign. Look at how often they post and ensure it’s consistent enough to work in content from your brand into their schedule. Next, look at their content style and decide whether this is someone who you think will be able to present your product well. Many of our clients also like to use influencer user generated content for their own social media or websites, so it’s important to ensure the influencer is going to create content our clients are happy using and match their brand.

Check to see other brands they’ve collaborated with:

Often times, influencers at a certain level will have already collaborated with brands. Exploring what they’ve done previously will let you in on whether they are working with competitors, have worked on campaigns similar to what you’re looking to do, and can deliver the kind of engagement on a sponsored post you want. It can also give you some ideas as to how to work with them and what their collaborative style is. We always put together campaign briefs and set deliverables for our clients when we manage influencer relations but it’s always nice to have influencers weigh in on what works for them as well; it’s their audience!

Determine the most lucrative deliverables:

Once you’ve taken a look at the influencers’ style, past collaborations, and the types of content that get engagement, you should decide on the deliverables you want out of your campaign. From here, you can determine which influencers are the best match for your brand and timeline after some discussion with influencers. For our clients, especially for time sensitive campaigns like holiday campaigns, we have conversations with influencers to determine who is willing to deliver the requested deliverables and on the right schedule so our campaigns run smoothly.

With this process of strategic discovery, we find the best influencer matches for our brands and work with influencers on their behalf to launch successful campaigns.

Looking for professional help? Launch a campaign with us. Get a free personalized quote.