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Marketing Match Making

Influencer Marketing local_offer

The digital space is now saturated with dating services. Services that are matching people based on interests, sex, location, religion…the list goes on and on. The need to find the perfect match isn’t exclusive to the dating industry though. The match making that I am talking about today is between brands and online influencers. Finding the right individual and personality to properly represent your brand can be overwhelming and intimidating but when done strategically it can have a major impact on the bottom line.

So how do you find the right match for your brand? Do you just look for the biggest influencer? What about their genre or audience target? In speaking with agency partners, it is clear that the process of selecting influencers is a blend of both, an art and a science.

“It’s a combination of their relevance and level of engagement. It’s important to find an influencer who aligns with your brand and overall message platform. Depending on your goals, it’s also important to identify influencers who drive engagement from their communities, whether that’s on a social platform or elsewhere.” – Abby S.

Before you begin searching for the perfect influencer, the first thing you need to do is determine the clear and focused goals of your campaign. This will help define the type, size and style of your influencer. Without this information, you can very easily go down the wrong path when selecting a creator.

Once you’ve clearly stated your goal for the influencer campaign, there are three main areas you will then need to focus on: Relevance, Activity, and Audience.

Relevance

Finding a relevant influencer may seem like child’s play but what does relevant mean to each brand? If someone has talked about cooking a few times in the past, is that enough to consider them influential in the cooking space? What about someone that does great recipes on their blog, but doesn’t have any content on their YouTube channel?

Determining relevance requires the match maker to prioritize the topics that are most important for the influencer to represent. Once the topics have been determined, the next thing is looking at the amount of relevant content that the influencer has created. You will want to look at the comments and engagement around the single post. Additionally, you will want to see how the viewership and engagement compares to other posts. This should give you a good idea of how experienced this influencer is.

Activity

When identifying the best influencer to work with, it is important to look at the activity and timeline the influencer works on. Where do they publish their content? Is it in more than one location? Do they publish content daily? Weekly? Monthly? This can be important for two reasons:

  1. When your post can be placed in their schedule.
  2. The frequency in which viewers are looking for content.

Scheduling is very important for all influencers. They often pride themselves on the schedule and value of their time. When identifying an influencer, be sure to discuss timing and location details up front so that they match with your needs.

Audience

The first thing brands typically look for is the size of the audience. Unfortunately, this is all wrong. Although a million followers are great, if they aren’t engaged or relevant to your business, they aren’t going to move the needle. All too often brands match up with influencers due to their size, but if the content isn’t relevant, the large audience will easily overlook it. As Abby S. from Text100 summarized above, a larger influencer may not be the answer. A smaller, more niche influencer may have a stronger more engaged audience. This is the true definition of an influencer.

So when becoming an influencer match maker, start with these three areas. From there you should have a great launch pad for finding your perfect mate.

How are you identifying influencers for your marketing campaign?