At The Blogger Programme, we’re all experts on influencer marketing and know exactly which influencers to pick for specific brands and campaigns. We’ve seen many mistakes made when brands use influencers who aren’t right for them, so to help you avoid these mistakes we’ve put together a list of the most important questions to consider before working with an influencer to represent your brand.
1. Are you a fan of my brand?
It’s important to remember, in order to maximise on the benefits of influencer marketing, you need to ensure you are working with influencers who are already a fan of your products or services. If the influencer is already using your products there are several benefits. They may have already posted about your brand and products and therefore the partnership appears more natural and genuine to their followers and the product placement won’t look out of place in their feed. In addition to this, if the influencer loves your products already they are more likely to produce high quality content as well as allow more room for negotiation of fees (perhaps in exchange for additional products). A quick way to determine whether the influencer is a fan is using The Blogger Programme’s platform to check the Brand Affinity of an influencer you’re interested in working with, you can check whether your brand appears on the list of brands associated with the influencer and their audience, or those similar which would indicate a good fit.
2. What kind of content do you produce?
Influencers create content based on their own brand and generally stick to a theme. They have a specific image which they want to convey to their followers. You need to compare this with the image of your brand and the image you want your audience to associate with your brand. If these are not aligned then the influencer may not be right for you. It’s important to ensure your brand fits in organically with the influencers’ brand and there is alignment in order to appeal to the influencers audience.
3. Who is your audience?
It’s imperative to not only consider the influencer themselves but also their audience. While a male model with chiselled cheekbones may be the ideal look for your latest electric shaver you want to promote, his audience may not be the ones you want to target (i.e. hundreds of young girls). Key things to consider are gender, age and location. The Blogger Programme’s platform allows you to view audience demographics to ensure you are targeting the right audience.
4. How engaged are your audience?
An influencers engagement rate is key. We’d always recommend to look at an influencers latest post to see how their audience are responding to their posts. While an influencer may have hundreds of thousands of followers, if only a small percentage are actually responding to their posts then this may indicate a large percentage of inactive followers who you won’t be able to reach. The Blogger Programme allows you to view an influencers engagement rate on their profile page, which will save hours of going through previous posts to calculate this percentage.
5. Do you work with any of our competitors?
If you think you’ve found the perfect influencer for your brand, there may be the possibility that your competitors have also worked with them. In this case, you need to consider if there is anything you can leverage and analyse how the audience responded to these posts. On the other hand, you may want to avoid working with influencers who have already promoted products from your direct competitors.
6. What were your most successful brand partnerships?
Looking at examples of branded partnerships which the influencer has worked on will enable you to get an idea of how their platform allows for brand integrations and links back to question 5, how their audience responded to these.
7. How often do you work on paid partnerships?
You are looking for content that appears organic and genuine. Look at whether the influencer is consistently working on paid posts to ascertain if your posts will appear as just another paid post. The higher the percentage of paid posts vs unpaid posts is worth considering to ensure your product appears as a genuine endorsement rather than a post in exchange for payment.
8. Are you able to report your analytics?
Once you think you’ve found the perfect influencer for your brand, it’s important to ensure you are able to get the data you need. This data is essential in order to measure engagement and success of your influencer campaign as well as calculating ROI. The influencer should be willing to provide you with the statistics you need to make these calculations.
The above questions will provide you with a great starting point to begin your first influencer marketing campaign. You can make use of The Blogger Programme’s platform to help you answer the above questions. If you’re looking to work with experts to ensure you get the most out of your influencer marketing campaigns then feel free to contact us to create a free proposal along with suggested influencers for your brand.
