Nowadays, it’s undeniable that influencer marketing has become a must in any brand’s marketing strategy. However, the impact of influencer marketing goes beyond working with macro-influencers with a huge number of followers. At its core, the power of influencer marketing is about finding the perfect match to achieve your expectations and objectives. In fact, the right match with an influencer is all about striking a balance between quantitative and qualitative factors such as audience, performance, persona, story and cost. Let’s look at how each of these factors impacts the value of the output of your influencer collaboration.
When it comes to the audience, it’s about both quantity and quality; the right amount of engagement and viewership with the right type of people is key to a valuable audience. The goal is to work with influencers whose audience is made out of potential customers interested in what you have to offer. In fact, the right audience depends less on the demographics of influencers’ followers and more on the community they’ve built. The hierarchy of factors to consider goes as follows: interests first, location second and gender and age round out the bottom. This hierarchy needs to be built on a homogeneous foundation. If the audience is heterogeneous and fragmented then your message will fail to translate in any significant conversions, that’s why you need to assess audience affinity when filtering through influencers.
Performance is vital. You need to assess influencers’ performance to make sure your collaboration will perform to the needed level. Ensuring that the influencer has an engaged audience and is appropriately ranked compared to other influencers is a prerequisite for the successful selection of influencers. This is where the iScore comes in. It is based on two metrics: engagement score and viewership score. It benchmarks influencers of similar size against each other. The end result is a score over 10. The iScore saves you time in analyzing the different metrics and it also emphasizes the right format to follow for a fruitful collaboration: Is the influencer better at generating views or engagement? Does image or video do best? It’s central to align your choice of influencer with your business goals; engagement drives traffic and so it should be the main focus of your search if your objective is conversions while viewership is more significant for awareness-based objectives.
The influencer’s persona is an important indicator to take into consideration when assessing how well they fit with your brand. Does the persona they portray on social media platforms align with your brand persona? Do their interests match the services or products you’re offering? These are important questions to ask yourselves. Influencers should appear to be a natural extension of your brand and your partnership as a natural extension of their social presence. Most importantly, they need to embody your brand and they need to represent your ideal customer.
Another element to consider is the story. You need to uncover the psychological triggers that made their most engaging and viewed content so successful in order to replicate them within your collaboration and mimic this success. These are important to take into consideration to develop the needed amount of audience stickiness to make sure the content resonates with the audience and sparks their interest and actions.
The final element is cost. You’ve shortlisted the influencers whose profile and performance align with your expectations, but do they align with your campaign budget? Are you paying the right amount for what you’re getting? These are key questions to answer before committing to any influencer because at the end of the day, you want to maximize results with the budget you have.
These five factors are necessary but not sufficient to finding the perfect match between your brand and influencers. Other elements should also stay top of mind; this includes brand safety which is a prerequisite for the selection process. Overall, this process will save you from wasting your efforts and budgets when planning your campaigns.
