4 Must Dos When Vetting & Selecting Influencers For Your Next Campaign
As influencer marketing becomes a more mainstream tactic in the overall marketing mix, brands have come a long way in the vetting and selecting process. Though no standardized approach exists, marketers are starting to create more repurposable guidelines to simplify the once non-systematic process.
Not all big brands are using influencer marketing technologies such as ivvi to streamline efforts and save time. So with this in mind, in this article, we will look at different methods of vetting and selecting influencers with and without the assistance of technology.
Without further ado, here are 4 ways to vet and select influencers for your next campaign:
1. Look beyond an influencer’s numbers
By this we mean, get to know everything you can about the influencers before resorting to just the number of subscribers or engagements on their content. Like all people, influencers are more than just a number.
Review Content
Read their caption copy and watch their videos. Will their personal brand match or at least compliment the brand or more specifically the campaign? If your answer here is no, you might want to quit the vetting process on this given influencer so you don’t waste precious time.
Audience Demographics
If the influencer does fit the bill, start looking into their audience demographic. Though we’re not ones to judge, when it comes to marketing age, income, language and location is an important factor.
If your branded campaign is only accessible to individuals living in the United States of America, then ensuring the influencer’s audience isn’t mainly from the UK is curial.
Past Brand Campaigns
Lastly, browse their social accounts to find previous branded campaigns they have worked on. As a brand marketer, would you/your team be thrilled with the content they produced? Do you spot any brand conflicts or direct competitors?
2. Look into an influencer’s numbers
Now that you have a better idea that the influencers you’re interested in are brand and campaign aligned, it’s time to dig into their numbers.
Categorize Influencers
At this point the vetting process, you’ll be able to tier influencers by their followers/subscribers. Are these individuals macro or micro influencers? As a general industry benchmark, micro influencers land in and between 10,000 to 90,000 follower mark, however, this rule is flexible depending on the social platform being vetted. Macro influencers have more of an internet fame status or could literally be traditional type celebrities.
Record Their Engagement Numbers
After you’ve categorized the influencers, it’s time to have a closer look at their engagement rate.
If you’re using a predictive technology such as ivvi, the software will do all the heavy lifting for you. You can select the influencers of interest and create a full detailed report. The influencer report will highlight all engagements of individual influencers as well as compare the influencer engagements against each other.
If you’re not using a software, we suggest building yourself a strong, easy to read spreadsheet. If you’re focusing on multiple social media channels, make sure to separate their engagement numbers/rates by channel.
Main social engagements you should be collecting are followers, likes, comments, shares. Basically anything readily available from the influencers account(s).
You can take this one step further by calculating each individuals engagement rate (see below for a simple formula).
Engagement rate = Total Engagements (likes, comments, shares) / Total Fans
3. Try Our Freemium Influencer Discovery Tool
Interested in trying a new way of finding influencers that are directly aligned with your brand and/or campaign by completely 5 simple steps?
We have developed a freemium tool to help you discover influencers with just a few clicks.
Simply provide us with a few topics pertaining to your next campaign and we’ll deliver a list of influencers directly to your inbox.
Click the image below to try it out now!
4. Outreaching before Preaching
Yes – outreach is a big part of the vetting and selection process. Why? Because even though you may have “handpicked” a group of quality influencers, it doesn’t mean they’re available to partner with your brand.
You must think of influencers as small (even large) business owners. They are busy humans – especially quality influencers that are developing consistent creative content. Because of this, your outreach email must be well crafted to spark their immediate attention. If you want to get a response, make sure to customize your outreach to each individual influencer.
Don’t overload them with all the campaign details all at once. Just give them enough information so they click reply.