How to choose influencers? 7 best practices for successful influencer marketing campaigns
How do you find the right influencers for a marketing campaign? This is the question our influencer agency asks itself for each brand or company it works with. Choosing influencers shouldn't be based solely on their fame or simply your gut feeling. Selecting influencers requires considerable experience and real expertise. Our influencer marketing experts give you 7 key tips for casting the right ambassadors and ensuring the success of your influencer campaigns.
1. Clearly identify the objectives of each influence campaign
Before launching an influencer marketing campaign, you must first define SMART objectives. In other words, you need to clearly state the reason why you are launching this particular campaign. This technique will help you choose your influencers.
For example, if you want to acquire new customers, it would make sense to choose influencers you've never worked with before. This will increase the likelihood that your posts will reach people who haven't seen any of your previous marketing campaigns.
If you want to change how people perceive your products or services (brand awareness), the context can also influence your choice of influencers. For example, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many brands turned to ethical influencers to project a gentler, more human side.
2. Personalize the emails sent to your influencers
Influencers are very busy and in high demand. If you want to build an effective collaboration with them, you absolutely must personalize every letter or message you send them. The goal: to encourage them to take an interest in your project and join your network of influencers.
3. Select influencers who are experts in the target field
This is probably one of the most important rules in influencer marketing. Rather than stars or celebrities, aim to work with influencers whose communities match the profiles of people you are trying to convert into customers (leads).
For example, if you sell video games, you need to work with popular gamers on Twitch, YouTube, or TikTok whose fans are very likely to be interested in buying or recommending your products.
4. Cast influencers with the same culture and values as your brand
To succeed with an influencer campaign, you also need to find influencers who share your brand or company's values. If there's a mismatch between your ambassadors' personalities and your products, your campaign is unlikely to succeed.
5. Focus on engagement (reach)
In influencer marketing, the classic mistake is to seek out influencers with the largest number of followers. However, besides the fact that mega and macro-influencers will cost you a fortune, they will also have many followers who will be of no value to your campaign.
To maximize your return on investment, focus first on engagement. Many successful influencer marketing campaigns are run by micro-influencers (fewer than 10,000 followers). Their secret? They post regularly, comment on and rate their followers' posts, share content—in short, they actively engage with their communities.
6. Trust your influencers
To succeed in influencer marketing, you need to give your influencers enough freedom to post messages in their usual style. That's what their followers appreciate and want, so why change it?
Any attempt to manage an influencer is unlikely to succeed and can seriously damage your collaboration. Of course, this doesn't mean you should let an influencer do whatever they want. Simply provide them with the project guidelines (the brief), but don't write the content for them. Also, specify the number of posts they need to publish within a given timeframe, the hashtags to use to mention your brand, and so on. All of this should be handled contractually.
7. Measure your ROI
To determine if your influencers are a perfect fit for each campaign, you need to measure your return on investment. This is the famous "M" in your SMART goals. Your success indicators also depend on the objectives you set for yourself.
For example, you might set a campaign objective to increase the number of visitors to your website. Therefore, throughout your campaign, you would monitor your website's audience to see if there has been a change in the number of visitors, particularly visits from social media.
Casting the right influencers is a skill that requires expertise. At So Bang, for example, our influencer agency draws from its platform of 30,000 ambassadors , applying very specific selection criteria. Our goal: to find the opinion leaders best suited to each client and each campaign, as well as those who will build a lasting partnership with our agency. Need influencers for your next marketing campaign? Ask So Bang!