A successful influencer campaign with a well-matched influencer can result in a strong ROI, boost brand awareness, increase engagements with your product, and bring in conversions.
Like wine and cheese, the trick is the perfect pairing. When you connect with an ideal influencer who is a strong audience match and connects with your brand values, that’s when you have the strongest chance of meeting your campaign objectives.
But where do you start? Should you hire someone with a lot of followers? Or do you go for the micros for deeper connections? Let’s dive in and help choose the right influencers to match your goals.
Win at influencer marketing: Pick the right influencers
Just because someone appears to be a surface-level match for your niche, doesn’t mean they’re a good match for your campaign. One of the most successful approaches to influencer marketing is to leverage more than one influencer that can help you achieve your goals.
Tiers of social media influencers
Content creators and social media influencers are largely categorized based on the number of followers they have. Even though we already know followers aren’t the only metric to consider, it’s how they’re commonly sorted.
You might be surprised to learn that a lower follower count has no bearing on effectiveness. Each tier of influencer brings something different to the marketing landscape and has its place in this channel.
There are four different categories for influencers with - depending on who you ask - variations in how they’re benchmarked:
- have more than 1 million followers
- have more than 100k but less than 1 million
- accounts have between 10k and 100k followers
- will have less than 10k but more than 1k
What is the goal of your campaign?
What do you hope to achieve with your influencer marketing campaign? This must be a clearly defined objective that can be reasonably accomplished. The most common campaign objectives include:
- Brand awareness
- Increased engagement
- Sales or conversions
- Capturing user-generated content
Are you targeting a cold audience at the top of your sales funnel? Or are these users potentially warm and closer to a buying decision? You must answer these questions before the search for an influencer partnership begins.
Match your campaign goals to an influencer tier
A mega influencer is a good match for a top-of-funnel campaign to enhance brand awareness. A macro influencer campaign works wonders to achieve a slightly lower level of brand awareness but more engagement than a mega tier. These influencers will also provide high-quality user-generated content.
If you’re looking to drive engagements and start a conversation around your brand, a micro-influencer may be the best fit. Here you will also see a higher conversion rate than with a macro or mega influencer.
Nano influencers are a good match for highly-niched campaigns and will work best across multiple influencers and platforms as they have quite limited reach.
Conduct hashtag research
What hashtags are relevant to your niche? What is your target audience looking for on the chosen platform? Hashtag research is a great way to “go down the rabbit hole” of social media and find influencers who are already showing up in your niche in front of your target audience.
Check posted content quality
When was the date of their latest post? Is their content consistent in style and message? How well do they manage other sponsored post engagements?
You want to look for an influencer that shares a good mix of organic versus curated content. They should also share a variety of content styles. For Instagram, you want to see feed posts, carousels, and Stories, as well as Reels.
Determine how well they communicate as a source of authority on topics related to your product. Check to see if they have content on other platforms as well and how it measures up.
Look for an audience match
In order for your campaign to work, you have to get in front of the right amount of the right people. If you’re a household cleaning brand, you’re not likely to find a good match with the fitness junkie crowd. But you may have a great shot with the stay-at-home dad blogger.
Verify audience quality
Once the follower count starts to climb, the potential for fake followers can climb. It’s fairly easy to pick out fake engagement and misleading numbers if you know what to look for:
- Poor quality content but high follower count
- Rare posting but high engagement
- Engagement is disproportionate to the number of followers
- Following too many other people (follow trains)
- Brand new accounts with lots of followers
- Low comment quality
Verify engagement rates
Did you know that likes and followers are really just vanity metrics? They only tell a tiny chapter of the story.
The engagement rate is what indicates how deeply the audience connects with this influencer’s content. Are they on the same page? Do they care about what is being shared?
Remember to consider all metrics including views, likes, impressions, shares, and comments in order to truly see your potential impact.
For post engagement, combine the total of likes and comments and divide this number by the total follower count. This will reveal the average engagement per post. To get the average engagement for the whole account, use the same math but across the last twelve posts and determine the average.
Do they reply to comments? Are they building into their followers? Or is it a “post and ghost” type of account? A good influencer regularly weeds out irrelevant followers and follows up on important community engagement.
Review for shared values
The principle of influencer marketing is primarily focused on the concept of borrowing someone else’s influence or market credibility. Content creators on social media are using their digital influence to connect with their followers around shared ideas and common interests. They haven’t just “amassed followers,” they’ve built a community.
In the process, they’ve established a certain level of trust that a brand on its own could never achieve. These ideals and values should dovetail nicely with the influencer and the expectations of their audience.
Do they have previous partnership experience?
Review existing influencer content for the last several months or a year. Have they partnered with other brands and products? Do they post affiliate links? Do they share any other partnerships that don’t align with your brand?
Nano and micro-influencers may not have a significant amount of experience to pull from, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t make a good brand partner as they’ll be eager and inexpensive.
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What happens when you pick the wrong influencer
The ramifications of picking the wrong influencer can be catastrophic for them and for your brand.
Off-brand and confusing messaging
Matching with an influencer that shares your brand’s message and values is directly connected to the success of your marketing campaign. The ball is in the influencer’s court to choose who they partner with but sometimes the numbers are too tempting. Stick to common interests, shared values, and a positive brand image.
Painful ethical controversies
We’ve all seen those posts that start with “Ok {influencer}, post something like this. ‘This face cream has changed my life!” These social media faux pas are damaging to the influencer as well as the brand. Some influencers never recover from a fall from grace.
Consumers love to buy from people they trust. They don’t like being reminded that they’re being sold to, either subtly or otherwise, and can be fairly brutal when issues like these crop up.
Costly audience mismatch
An audience match goes beyond simple demographics, though that is part of the equation. It’s so tempting to choose an influencer with followers in the six and seven figures, thinking that will automatically translate into high conversions.
It won’t. In order for your campaign to have the best chance at success, you must get your brand in front of the right people, not just a lot of people.
For example, if you’re a health food brand, health means different things to different audiences. Some may see healthy as whole grains and home-grown vegetables. Others define this as low-carb and high protein diets or being strictly vegan.
The right audience returns your investment in a myriad of ways. The wrong audience will cost you time and money.
Influencer marketing success: Pick the right influencer!
Influencer marketing focuses on relationships and community. If you approach your campaign with the purpose of mutual success, for you, the influencer, as well as their audience, you’re on your way to creating a long-term influencer marketing relationship.
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Chris Jacks
Chris Jacks is the Director of Growth Strategy at HireInfluence. As Director of Growth Strategy, Chris is tasked with analyzing and adapting to the ever-changing influencer marketing industry to ensure HireInfluence is positioned for long-term success and remains at the forefront of innovation.
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