Influencer marketing can be an incredibly effective and rewarding way for brands to find customers, make sales, increase brand loyalty, and build trust. In fact, 63 percent of customers trust influencers’ thoughts about brands more than they trust the brands themselves. To make influencer marketing work at scale and to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with your influencers, you need to determine how to find and partner with influencers, how to track their success, and how to efficiently and effectively pay them.
Which types of influencers meet your needs?
First, determine your needs. What are your goals for influencer marketing? What do you need these social media experts to do? What actions do you want their audiences to take? Some possibilities for influencer outcomes may be:
- Creating awareness about your brand
- Increasing sales of a certain product or service
- Generating new leads
- Engaging the audience to sign up for a newsletter or mailing list
- Increasing your followers on Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms where you reach your customers
- Creating brand content
Once you know what actions you want your influencers to drive, you’ll need to search for the right influencers for the job.
How to find influencers for your brand
Now that you know what you want, who are the influencers that help you accomplish your goals? As you assess and recruit social media influencers, determine the right fit for your brand by asking:
- How many followers do they have?
- What platforms do they use?
- Who’s their audience?
- Is their audience your audience?
- Does their content inspire and resonate with your target audience?
- Are they leaders in their field, industry experts, or credible peers?
Cast a wide net for influencers and search for those who fit your niche, use relevant social platforms, and have audiences that match yours. Manually searching and scrolling for influencers can be tedious and time-consuming, so consider using automated influencer marketing tools as you conduct your research.
You can also use an opt-in creator network (discover more in the Ultimate guide to influencer marketing). With this type of network, you can discover new influencers who meet your target criteria by browsing connected social media account data points like hashtags, geography, preferred retailers, audience size and quality, brand mentions, and more.
Platforms such as Activate by impact.com allow marketers to more efficiently find influencers at scale. This means you’ll waste less time vetting and pursuing creators and have greater confidence in the partnerships you choose to establish.
Hire social media influencers with the two Rs: reach and relevance
When picturing your ideal influencer, reach and relevance are the key factors to consider. It’s optimal to hire social media influencers who have a broad enough reach so that their voices will be heard. You also want to find influencers who are relevant to your brand, your message, and your audience. As you assess fit, keep in mind the two Rs.
Some dos and don’ts on how to recruit social media influencers
Do:
- Contact them via email — unless you’re using an influencer automation tool
- Spell their name correctly and use their first name (not their handle)
- Check out their content before you contact them
- Have a budget in mind
- Be open-minded about influencers with smaller audiences
Don’t:
- Assume that just because an influencer is a celebrity they’re right for your brand
- Use “Dear Sir or Madam” when you send an email
- Contact an influencer via commenting or messaging on social media
Measuring return on investment (ROI) for influencer marketing
Once you’ve found influencers for your brand and have connected with them, it’s time to measure the success of your partnership. Without any tracking, measurement, or reporting mechanisms in place, you won’t have a way to make clear, informed decisions about how to allocate and optimize future spend.
Access to trustworthy performance data around clicks, conversions, and web traffic will allow you to accurately track how much of an impact each influencer activation generates. You’ll then be able to track success at scale and compensate your partners fairly when working with a large roster of influencers.
Give your influencer relationships a little TLC
Like any relationship, influencer relationships need time, patience, and communication. With the right set of tools you can discover and recruit influencers for your brand, track their contributions, pay them fairly, and communicate with them transparently and often.
It’s important to find a solution that enhances the partnership experience for both the brand and the influencer. Having a tool with bespoke flexibility allows more efficient work for your influencers, saving them time on manual workflows and making interacting with your brand more attractive.
To get a better understanding of the full influencer marketing landscape, read the Ultimate guide to influencer marketing.
Now that you’ve learned about recruiting influencer marketing at scale, schedule a demo to learn how the impact.com platform can help your brand strategically manage influencer campaigns, and how it connects influencers and creators with the world’s leading brands.
