If you’re anything like me, you’re now blind to traditional ads.
Oh, and what I wouldn’t do to get rid of them!
There’s one thing I don’t mind though – my favorite influencers promoting products.
Why?
Let’s say that it’s way easier to trust someone who you can put a face on and that you’ve been keeping up with daily than a company boasting about itself.
But how do you find the best influencer for your brand?
Here are all the answers to your questions!
Table of Contents
- What Is Influencer Marketing?
- How Does Influencer Marketing Work?
- How Do I Find the Best Influencer for my Brand?
- How Do I Connect with Influencers?
- Why Should I Use Influencer Marketing?
- What Should I Look Out for With Influencer Marketing?
- Key Takeaways
What Is Influencer Marketing?
An influencer is someone with a powerful social media presence and the ability to influence an audience.
This makes influencer marketing the collaboration between a company and an influencer to increase brand exposure.
Essentially, companies ask influencers to publish social media content and promote their products.
On a business’s point of view, it’s not just about promotion, it’s about finding the right influencer for the job.
How Does Influencer Marketing Work?
To use this increasingly popular marketing strategy, there are several steps to follow to make sure that you’re doing it properly.
1. Define Your Budget
As there are different influencers on different scales, your budget will help you determine which ones are right for you.
2. Define Your Goal
Your goal is what will determine which influencers you should approach!
For instance, if your goal is to expand your reach, you may want to choose influencers with who you have fewer common followers.
If your goal is to build influence and brand trust, you can go for someone with who you have a greater overlap.
This is why it is essential to find the best influencer for your brand!
3. Determine What Kind of Campaign You Want
There are several different kinds of campaigns, such as sponsored content, giveaways, mentions, and so many more!
Just choose what you want to do according to your goal!
4. Identify Potential Partners
Now that you have your budget, goals, and campaign type, you can start identifying who you would like to work with.
Fedica’s Real Influencers tool allows you to see who your most influential followers are because the algorithm finds influencers who are in your following and share the most followers with you.
If you want to find the perfect influencers on X (formerly Twitter) in moments, the search and explore feature makes it effortless.
On top of that, make sure that the ones you pick out share the same values as your brand.
Pro tip: Some influencers’ content varies across platforms, so make sure that you pick the one(s) where their content aligns the most with your company and values!
5. Manage Your Campaign
Provide influencers with guidelines and ask them if they prefer compensation, free products, or other alternatives, like affiliate links, in return for the campaign.
Even if you need to give them guidelines, let them be creative for the campaign to come out as authentic as possible!
The goal here is to keep your brand image on track, not to change the content they’re known for!
6. Track Your Results
By tracking your results, you can identify your mistakes and avoid them the next time!
Depending on your goal, the way you’re going to track your results will vary.
If your goal is to expand your reach and build your community, Fedica’s countless features can show how much your X (formerly Twitter) account has grown.
It offers you a follower history as a campaign effectiveness measure, which you can track all the up to city level!
You can also look at its engagement dashboard and tweet reach feature to measure your campaign’s effectiveness and impact!
How Do I Find the Best Influencer for my Brand?
Depending on your goal, you might want to work with influencers that already know your company.
This makes it easier for you to get connected with them!
The best way for you to find these people is with Fedica’s Real Influencers feature, which shows you influencers in your following who also share lots of the same followers as you.
If there’s one thing you need to remember here is that it’s essential for you to partner with people relevant to your niche.
Why?
Because their followers keep up with them regarding those topics!
Beauty influencers built their community around makeup, for example. That’s why people follow and love them!
It wouldn’t make sense to disturb their audience with promotional content for construction tools…
You’ll see that finding them is easy when you search & explore all of X in moments.
The feature will give you a list of all the influencers that are relevant to the topics that you’ve specified, whether it be in their bios, hashtags, and/or tweets.
You can also specify the number of followers, among other things, that you want them to have so that you can focus on your campaign!
See how Search & Explore works:
Now that you’ve found new partners relevant to you, Fedica also allows you to analyze any X account to see their followers’ demographics, interests, top content, and, most importantly, how their followers overlap with yours.
Audience overlap is the key to influencer marketing!
Depending on your goal, you may or may not want an overlap.
For instance, if your goal is to expand your reach into new groups, you may want little to none; however, if your goal is to increase your credibility among your niche, you may want an overlap:
Here’s an example:
@MarketingBully_ has a community of savvy marketers who have little overlap with us, @FedicaHQ (formerly Tweepsmap). Both our accounts share 73 common followers.
You can also see that @MarketingBully_’s followers are mostly female, between 24 and 64 years old, in the arts & culture field, management, and media:
@FedicaHQ, on the other hand, seems more popular among males in the science & technology field, but we also have lots of interest from the people in media, arts & culture, and management, too:
The key here is that both accounts’ followers have similar demographics but share few common followers.
This is why you need to look at more than just their demographics!
That said, the conclusion that we can draw from this is that @MarketingBully_ is the ideal influencer for @FedicaHQ (formerly Tweepsmap) to expand its reach among its niche because our communities share the same interests but barely overlap, resulting in expanding our reach into a new X group with people that would be interested in our content too!
How Do I Connect with Influencers?
1. Engage With Them on Social Media
Influencers LOVE having authentic relationships with brands!
That said, follow them on top of liking and commenting on their posts.
Bigger influencers may not notice your interactions, so you should look for ones with high engagement rates!
This can be done with Fedica’s analyze any account feature, which shows you detailed data on their engagement, such as their engagement timeline!
2. Show Your Intentions
When you directly contact them for a partnership, your message should give them the answers to the following questions:
- What is your brand?
- Why did you choose me?
- What are the compensation options?
- What are your expectations?
- What kind of partnership are you looking for?
Why Should I Use Influencer Marketing?
It might seem like THE thing to do, but you first need to see whether influencer marketing is right for you.
For so many businesses to opt for this strategy, there must be something good about it – right?
Let’s take a closer look at some of the pros.
1. Reach Your Target Audience More Easily
Most influencers grow their follower base in a specific field.
That said, if you are to promote your product, pick an influencer relevant to your niche and what you do!
You can reach them with Fedica’s search and explore tool by looking up keywords and see which accounts match them.
2. Build Your Credibility and Trust Among Your Niche
People are becoming increasingly iffy about companies’ marketing techniques – they now trust influencers way more.
They follow their favorite influencers daily and build trustworthy relationships with them.
That said, they are open to their favorite influencers’ recommendations.
However, it’s crucial to partner with genuine influencers.
3. Increase Your Company’s Reach and Sales
Even if your business has a social media presence, there are many people you won’t be able to reach yourself.
Influencer marketing allows your brand to be acknowledged by more people and gain more customers.
They don’t hold that title for nothing – they’re able to influence people into purchasing whatever it is they’re promoting.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that your sales will increase if everything is done right.
If you think that you can promote your social media posts and get the same results, I’m sorry to tell this, but you’re wrong…
To make sure that you’re choosing the right influencers, Fedica allows you to analyze any account and prepare and effective campaign!
4. Save on Marketing Expenses
Given the effectiveness of influencer marketing compared to traditional ads, it can be cheaper.
However, there’s a certain scale – not all influencers have millions of followers.
- Nano-influencers: 1 000+
- Micro-influencers: 10 000+
- Mid-tier influencers: 50 000+
- Macro-influencers: 500 000+
- Mega-influencers: 1 000 000+
Needless to say, nano-influencers won’t charge as much as mega-influencers.
That said, depending on your budget, there are different possibilities!
What Should I Look Out for With Influencer Marketing?
Every good thing has a flip side.
Let’s dive into things you need to consider before using influencer marketing.
1. Not Working With the Right Influencers
Remember that by collaborating with influencers, your company’s image is at risk.
That said, make sure that your motives match with their content and follower base.
Otherwise, you risk having the audience question your connection with the influencer.
Or even worse, picking the wrong influencers can result in ruining your brand image and losing credibility.
2. Beware of Inactive and Fake Followers
Unfortunately, it’s not because someone has a lot of followers that they’re all real.
If you want to become a pro X auditor and identify inactive/fake followers, we have a post just for you where we share all our secrets!
The same thing goes for engagement, which is even more important than one’s follower count.
It’s not because someone has a lot of followers that they have a lot of engagement!
Fedica allows you to analyze any account and see whether the influencer has a high engagement among everything else you’d need to know about them like their follower demographics, top topics, and more!
3. Prone to Changes in Public Opinion
An influencer may seem unproblematic and perfectly aligned with your company’s values, but they’re still human.
By that, I mean that they are unpredictable, and you can’t control what they’re going to do tomorrow.
Given their public role, they’re prone to a change in people’s perception of them.
As your company’s image is in their hands, it also puts your reputation at risk.
Key Takeaways
- Influencer marketing is the collaboration between a company and someone with a high social media presence to increase brand exposure.
- To use it, you need to determine your goals and budget, determine what kind of campaign you want, identify potential partners, manage your campaign, and track your results.
- To connect with influencers, you must engage with them on social media and show them your intentions when messaging them.
- It allows businesses to reach their target audience easily while building trust and credibility among its niche.
- It’s known to increase a brand’s reach and sales at a reasonable cost, depending on influencers’ follower count and engagement.
- However, some risks associated with influencer marketing include not working with the right people, inactive/fake followers, and switches in the public opinion.
- To attenuate the risks, Fedica allows you to analyze any account so that you get an overview of the influencer’s engagement, values, reach, and followers.