How to select the right influencer for your brand

Influencers are always a deep subject to discuss when it comes to marketing. That style of marketing has risen over the years. Using influencers comes with many questions, from picking the right ones to fees to how long to work with them. Within this blog, we will look at the beginning of working with influencers: how to select the right ones for your brand and whether it is through social listening or your marketing strategy. 

What is social listening?

Over the years, influencer marketing has continued to thrive as the number one choice. Social listening is tracking social media platforms and social conversations for a specific brand using the data for insights. 

Olly, Strategy Director at Influencer, works with agency and brand partners to understand what they need for influencer campaigns. How do you take the brand aims and make that something relevant to make some creative content? 

At influencer, social listening is used ‘to benchmark against competitors. It can be a very insular tool as well to steer our strategy. For clients, it has huge impacts; we use it in the pre-sale campaign architecture to understand how a brand is perceived in the market,’ Olly says. By doing social listening, you can see the differences from channel to channel and analyse how the competitor is perceived. 

ROI vs Social Listening 

Social listening is an integral part of the measurements like ROI. ROI is one of the measurement tools for seeing how a brand is going.

For social listening, it is essential to do social listening before and after a campaign as ROI is purely monetary; therefore, it misses out on some softer aspects such as the brand identity and what the brand is about. ‘At Influencer, one of our mantras is that we like to make waves. Our content that we create creates impacts, and that creates waves. We measure those waves. You can't measure those waves without a socialistic tool,’ Olly explains. 

As opposed to ROI, where you want to see the data that shows how many clicks and likes, social listening measures how we have impacted the brand identity and awareness of the brand. ‘ROI is usually bucketed as clicks, impressions, and engagements, which are not returns on investment they are KPIs. They are indicators of performance; it's in the name. On the other side, it goes to the endpoint, to bottom line sales. While we always want to impact that and measure, it isn't always possible,’ Olly says. In some industries, it is difficult to track how campaigns are affected, for example, in the automotive and holiday industry. 

For campaigns, it is essential to get across to brands that you are shifting the narrative around the brand. By working with influencers, you are borrowing social currency. ‘You can't necessarily measure the impacts of that without knowing the shift in how your brand is perceived,’ Olly says. As marketers, we have to leverage this with brands to show them that this may not directly be measured monetarily; the shift in narrative is still affecting their campaigns. 

Brands and Influencers 

Typically when brands are working with an influencer, they are looking for a set number of products to be sold through the link. There are a lot of softer metrics that should be measured to help determine the success of a campaign. ‘Either top of the funnel, I can get reach and audience. Something that is very hugely soft. Or for some that are in the mobile gaming space or anyone that is very accustomed to performance marketing, it becomes very focused on sales conversion and tracking of uptake codes. Those are two very different extremes, and it's the piece in the middle that is often missing,’ Olly says. Brands must take consumers on the entire journey, from awareness to conversion. 

As we do more experiential marketing and work with influencers more frequently, we must guide brands to understand that it isn't about picking one metric over another. It's about taking the metrics and having them work together. This will provide a more holistic view of the campaign. 

With influencer marketing, it is difficult to get the exact metrics right between what the brand is looking for to determine the ROI and what is right with the influencer. Influencers are a ‘wild card’ as such. You are introducing another factor into the equation, which can be complicated. 

At Influencer, they have an exciting system for determining the best influencer to work with a specific brand. Their system is Science, Synergy, and Style. Olly explains that Science is the audience and demographics, the Synergy is researching to see if the influencer is the right fit for the brand's message. The Style evaluates that the content produced is within the brand's guidelines. 

‘The best campaigns are true collaborations where you set parameters around the campaign and yet give the influencer freedom to create,’ Olly says. At GottaBe! marketing, we regularly work with influencers and keep a database of ones to find the right one to work with your brand efficiently.