Social influencers have played important role in the development of many modern businesses. By definition, social influencers are key industry leaders who have the potential to drive brand message and awareness to a specific market of consumers. Essentially, influencers can help you to raise brand awareness and reach out to audiences that are loyal to their opinions.
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Social influencers rely primarily on the power of word of mouth marketing, which is one of the most credible promotional mechanisms of the digital era. However, it is not easy to find a suitable person to represent your company, brand, or a project among thousands of influential individuals. In this article, we will show you 4 tips to successfully reach a social influencer.
4 Steps to Finding a Perfect Influencer
Finding an ideal social influencer to support your marketing activities is a complex process with dozens of variables that you have to take into account. This is why you need to make things simpler and design a strategy which can increase the odds of reaching the right person. In that regard, we decided to present you a 4-step guideline for finding a perfect influencer. Let’s take a closer look!
Define your goals
Before you start searching for a social media influencer, you need to dedicate some time to business analysis and define your goals in this project. Each goal has its own peculiarities and determining the right one will give you a starting point in your mission to reach a perfect influencer. There is a number of possible objectives and they can even overlap on some occasions, but here is the list of the most common social influencer marketing goals:
- Raise brand awareness: Your aim is to make the brand more credible among target audiences. To achieve this, you will need a renowned influencer with a lot of social media followers.
- Product launch: In case of a product launch, you want to present new items from the portfolio to as many people as possible. In such circumstances, your best option is to hire an influencer who can guarantee a huge outreach. This way, it will be easier for you to continue advertising products through other channels of promotion.
- Content promotion: Sometimes you just want to make your digital content authoritative and more popular, increasing the level of user engagement. It demands a well-respected influencer who has the potential to add credibility to your posts or multimedia content.
- Crisis management: If you find yourself in the middle of the reputation crisis but don’t know how to convince buyers that your products are not losing quality, you should look for the influencer who can calm down the audience and explain that there is nothing wrong with the brand. For instance, if you notice LeBron James playing an official match in Nike sneakers, you probably won’t believe rumors that their soles fall apart easily.
Regardless of the objective that you want to achieve, you need to determine precise key performance indicators (KPI). This is the only way to monitor the progress of a social influencer campaign and make sure that you actually fulfilled the desired plans.
Define an Ideal Influencer
Almost 70% of marketers consider finding relevant influencers their largest influencer marketing challenge. This fact proves how difficult it is to pick the right person for your campaign. But it is not a mission impossible. First of all, you need to ask yourself a few questions: What does he do? Who is his audience? How does he correlate with my values?
In order to answer all these questions, you need to understand the target audience. There are several features of an average buyer persona that you must analyze:
- Age: Target audience can only relate to persons who resemble them, so you don’t want to hire a 17-year old school kid to promote your brand online.
- Gender: The same principle goes for gender because an average IT geek will not pay attention to the words of an average housewife.
- Location: The most productive influencers often come from targeted locations. This way, your customers will consider this person to be one of their own.
- Average income: If you are addressing low-level income groups, avoid hiring a super-rich influencer.
- Education: Well-educated people expect an eloquent influencer, while simple and everyday language generates the best results with less educated audiences.
- Values: Average customers respect certain values and beliefs. Now, if your influencer candidate is widely known for his partying affinities, you shouldn’t let him represent your brand in a highly professional industry. You need to make sure that you all share the same kind of values before making any kind of arrangement.
Now that you’ve determined a precise profile of the target consumer, you also need to set some basic demands regarding social influencers. We will explain the most important traits here:
- Audience size: Each marketer would like to appoint an extremely popular social influencer. It will enable you to present the brand, products, or services to a large number of users. However, this doesn’t have to be productive in all cases because mere size is not a guarantee of influence. Namely, if you are promoting services to the group of college professors, you don’t need a guy who has thousands of followers. On the contrary, you need social influencer who has the authority to approach a small group of industry experts.
- Relevancy: Always bear in mind core values of an average buyer persona and try to find someone who shares the same beliefs. Almost half of the consumers rely on influencer recommendations but they tend to trust like-minded people.
- Authenticity: It would be perfect to reach an influencer who actually stands out from the crowd of similar competitors. In case you can find one, an authentic social influencer can give your campaign a real boost.
- Frequent posts: Some influencers are amusing, smart, and popular but they just don’t share enough posts. On the other hand, you probably want to see a lot of brand mentions in their posts, so try to reach a person who posts frequently.
- Mind the style: If you are selling expensive watches, you need a serious brand ambassador to pass your messages to the premium audience. Social influence is useless without the corresponding style.
Find and contact an influencer
By now, you should be perfectly clear about the qualities of an ideal fit for a social influencer. At this stage of the process, it is necessary to find and contact your candidate. The first thing you should do is conduct a hashtag research on Twitter and keyword analysis on other social media channels. A standard Google search is also mandatory but you could also ask friends or colleagues to recommend someone. Once the research is over, you will get a lot of results and your job is to make an initial list of 20 or 30 most promising candidates.
The next task is to follow these guys and analyze their topics, style of writing, user engagement, and all other details relevant to your marketing strategy. Soon enough, you should be able to notice several influencers who really stand out with their knowledge and skills. Try to engage with their content by making relevant comments and sharing posts. Some of them will probably respond and you’ll get the chance to reach them easily.
However, you need to be prepared for sending an official message to potential influencers. Email is usually the best and most professional option in that regard. We asked Antonio Tooley, a marketing specialist at EduGeeksClub, to tell us how to design a good introductory email.
Here’s what Antonio told us: “An email pitch must respect basic principles of business communication. For one, it has to be well-written and free of typing and grammar mistakes. You need to introduce yourself and be straightforward about the purpose of your message. Just be honest and not too formal. Add a few data to prove that you conducted a research prior to addressing the candidate. Express your needs and don’t forget to mention that you expect an answer within a certain timeframe. This way, you’ll know when to expect the answer from a social influencer.”
After all that you’ve done so far, you should just sit back, relax, and wait for their feedback. But not for too long – there is still some work left to do.
Reward a Social Influencer
Social influencers don’t work for free. Regardless of their professional motives, you will have to offer these guys compensations one way or another. But don’t let that disturb you as a recent study proved that businesses are making $6.5 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing. The way you reward a social influencer depends on your budget and his own needs. There are several solutions in that regard:
- Financial compensation: This is the most common means of compensation but you need to avoid influencer marketing overspending. Try to assess how many benefits you can get from your influencer and will he fulfill all KPIs you had in mind. If yes, pay an influencer according to his skills, social media reach, and the number of realized activities.
- Image boost: If this social influencer wants to boost personal image through your campaign, it’s a win-win situation for both parties.
- Perks: Some influencers only want to receive free products or shopping discounts. This solution is close to cost-free and you don’t want to let it slip away.
- Experiences: There are social influencers who just feel like experiencing new adventures in life. For instance, you can reward this type of professional with free travel arrangements, which is perfect if you are running a tourist campaign or a related business.
Conclusion
Social influencers can skyrocket your business in case you find a person who shares the same values and corresponds to the overall brand image. In this article, we showed you 4 tips to successfully reach a social influencer for your project. Following our suggestions, you will definitely be on the right path towards finding an ideal influencer. We hope you will make use of our guidelines very soon and of course – don’t hesitate to let us know in comments about your experience in this field.
Author Bio: Warren’s lifestyle is full of hiking adventures. When he’s not busy with his guitar or enjoying the sunny day outside, he excels at blogging skills at EduGeeksClub and leaps through social media. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.
