How to pick the perfect social media influencer for your brand

Influencers are here to stay for the long haul and are an indispensable part of digital marketing. There are, at the moment, more than a billion users who are active on Instagram on a monthly basis. People have grown so dependent on social media as well as digital marketing campaigns. From their news, entertainment to their form of communication, these forms communication practically gave way to the birth of influencers. These people exist to satisfy the existing demand of brands to be given attention on these platforms.

Everything has its pros and cons, and influencer marketing is no exception. Influencers come in all shapes and sizes. With the digital possibilities snowballing, this branch of native advertising is getting more and more popular among both business-to-consumer and business-to-business brands. In this such a large market of digital influencers, huge mistakes are waiting to happen. An inappropriate message sent to 1 million followers can possibly do a lot more harm as opposed to good. Therefore, selecting a person in order to tell your story requires thorough selection as well as research.

Who are these ‘new’ influencers?

These new, socially savvy people are often more in the know, about social media as well as engaging with digital content, a supposed to brands and agencies. What results in these new influencers being even more powerful is the niche-based content that they produce.

This material is often in a very specialised area. There are millions upon billions of bloggers out there who publish content in popular areas such as parenting, food, fitness, fashion as well as entertainment. These influencers can be further segmented in order to reach specific consumers like parents of teens, pet lovers, marathon runners, tech fanatics as well as organic cooks.

What is influencer marketing?

The notion of partnering with bloggers as well as other active social media users is called “influencer marketing”. This type of marketing is founded on the premise of finding influencers in your niche to create as well as distribute relevant content. After they have produced this content, they share it in an authentic and transparent way.

Influencer marketing is a hybrid of old as well as new marketing tools. It takes the idea of the celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day, content-driven marketing campaign. The principal differentiator in the case of influencer marketing is that the outcomes of the campaign are collaborations between brands as well as influencers.

Influencers, as opposed to celebrities, can be anywhere. These people can be anyone. What ensures that they are influential is their significant followings on the Internet and social media. An influencer can be anyone from a popular fashion photographer on Instagram to a well-read cybersecurity blogger who tweets. Besides, an influencer can be a respected marketing executive on LinkedIn. Within any trade, there are influential people — it is just necessary for you to find them. They are easily recognised by their hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of followers. That’s the target audience you’re after.

How to choose the right influencer

When you start looking for the right influencer for your brand, determine what your objectives are for this particular campaign. Are these, for example:

• To get more exposure for your company?
• To publicise your website?
• To get the word about your new product or service?

Once you’ve decided what you want to achieve, you can start looking for the right influencer is to get your brand’s message across. (You need to do this preliminary strategising so that when you find who you’re looking for, you can give them a proper brief.)

Do your research carefully. Just because an individual has millions of followers, doesn’t mean that they’re the right fit for your company. For example, don’t approach a fashion blogger to be an influencer for your hotel as their audiences aren’t the people who you want to be speaking to.

Influencer marketing is just one of the many tools that you can employ on social media to get your brand out there.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

To learn more about how social media marketing can help you in your organisation, check out our Social Media Marketing Course here.