10 Things To Consider When Sourcing Influencers
We at Bee Influence know that identifying the right social media influencers is crucial for the success of your brand campaign.
If you’re unsure of where to start, we’ve devised 10 things to consider when you’re selecting, sourcing and approving content creators, using both soft and quantitate metrics…
Soft metrics
Brand relevance
A softer metric to consider is the influencer’s relevance to your brand. The influencer needs to feel like a natural fit, and promoting your brand needs to feel organic amongst their current content and feed. For example, we worked with SME’s for our client Vistaprint, and this proved to be a perfect target audience.
Content style
When looking at a creators platform, be sure to establish if their imagery and style is appropriate for your brand. If you’re a skincare company that wants to gather flat-lay content, don’t approach an influencer who only posts shots of themselves. The same is applied to video - every influencer will have a different production style, so ensure this would sit appropriately on your brand channels. See the video content we produced for client I Saw It First for reference. We also analyse at nuanced points such as tone of voice; how do they communicate, how do they talk to their audience. These are small, yet integral points that a platform alone cannot track.
Previous brand partnerships
Analysing an influencer’s previous collaborations is valuable for several reasons - firstly, you can identify if they’ve worked with similar brands in the past, this indicates that they’re audience are likely to be interested in your brand. Secondly, you can see how well the post performed for that brand, and thirdly you can eliminate any influencers that work regularly with any direct competitors.
Brand sentiment
Another soft metric we like to use at Bee Influence is brand sentiment - this is as straight forward as looking through the creators comments on their content. Are the audience engaged with the products they’re talking about? What’s the ratio of positive, neutral or negative sentiments on their posts? You can see the positive brand sentiments we received on our campaign with Pink Cloud Beauty here.
Quantitative metrics
Followers
Granted, other metrics are deemed more important than the influencer’s following - but this is undoubtedly key in defining the potential reach your campaign could have. Followers dictate the type of influencer for your campaign - whether this fits into nano, micro, mid-tier or mega.
Engagement rate
The engagement rate defines the percentage of followers that are actively engaging (liking, commenting, sharing, saving, viewing) with the content. The industry average engagement rate sits at around 3% - but this can vary dramatically depending on the amount of followers the creator has. Typically, nano and micro influencers boast stronger rates as they tend to have a more compact, loyal following.
Top countries
Looking into the top countries the influencer’s followers are from is vital - you might find that a UK based influencer has more of a US following, or a European influencer has a high UK following. This is also important for targeting specific cities or multiple countries at a time.
Audience gender
Similarly, the audience’s gender can massively sculpt your results, depending on your campaign objectives. Say you’re a women’s fashion brand, you’ll want to establish that the influencer has a high female following - otherwise you’re paying to target an irrelevant audience.
Audience age range
It might be that you’re targeting people of all ages - but in most cases it’s likely you’ll want to target an audience of a particular age demographic. Influencers have access to data that shows their most popular age ranges that they’ll be able to share with you.
Value for money
Last but certainly not least, you need to evaluate the influencers cost and their value for money. Typically, when reaching out for rates, you’ll be able to compare the influencer’s cost per views and cost per engagements against one another to get a stronger scope of how much bang for your buck you’re getting.
Bee Influence is a specialised influencer marketing agency based in Manchester. Contact us at hello@beeinfluence.co.uk.