Influencers can make or break your digital communication approach. By directly reviewing or recommending your products or services, an influencer has a similar effect as those generated by Word of Mouth – WOM, one of the most successful marketing forms. Social media posts or vlogs made by influencers are at the heart of it is known as EWOM – Electronic Word of Mouth. Unlike its traditional counterpart, the EWOM can reach a large number a people in a very short period. As a matter of fact, on Twitter, almost 40% of the users bought something because an influencer tweeted about it.
But who are the right influencers?
First thing’s first, you have to determine what are your needs. If you are a small business, or you don’t have the budget, maybe you should go with a micro-influencer, as its high engagement rate, and the lower fee will fit your business like a glove. However, if you decided to with a macro-influencer here some key things to look for in order to choose the right one:
Shared Values and interests
People often agree and deem more trustworthy those who are similar to them in terms of values, lifestyle, passions, and interests. This means that the first filter in process of selecting the right influencer is to compare them to your buyer’s persona as well as to the demographic data of your audience. If they match, then your company’s audience is the same, partially or totally to the one of the influencer’s. The compatibility is essential to ensuring a high high level of organic engagement and subsequently a high return on investment. On top of this, take a look at the type of content they post and check if it’s relevant to your business or not.
The size of the audience
The size of the influencer’s audience is an important factor that you to take into consideration when looking for the right influencer for your brand. The number of followers or fans the influencer has represents the potential audience that you might receive the message if you collaborate with him. So, obviously, the bigger, the better. However, this metric alone is not effective if taken into consideration alone, as it represents only the total number of people that could receive your message and not the number that actually receives it. As a consequence, you have to correlate this number with the engagement rate.
Engagement with their audiences
As I’ve earlier said, engagement rate plays a huge role in the process of choosing the right influencer. As its name suggests, the engagement rate shows how many people interact with the content posted by the influencer. Naturally, this is calculated from the potential audience which is the total number of followers or fans. Just like in the case of the audience size, the bigger the number, the better. But, this rate isn’t the only thing that you have to follow, when it comes to engagement, as you should also look at how the audience is interacting with the influencer’s posts. Are these interactions happening naturally and organically? Moreover, how does the audience responds to the influencer? Are their conversations genuine? All of these questions will provide you with keen insights on how the audience could respond to a message that promotes your products or services, and also if the influencer is right for you or not.
Conclusion
Working with an influencer can be one of the best ways of revamping your digital communication. With keen similarities to Word of mouth, there’s no doubt that that influencer marketing is here to stay, and is a great opportunity for your brand to cut through the social media noise and clutter and reach your audience in an effective way. The key thing, however, is to find the one that’s right for your brand and its needs.
