5 things you need to know before partnering with an influencer

Brands are expected to spend a huge amount $15 billion about influencer marketing in 2022. Influencer marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing techniques to help brands connect with their audience. Why? Because people tend to trust influencers and their content about the product more than companies.

According to this study63% of their participants between the ages of 18 and 34 trust what influencers say about brands more than what brands say about themselves.

Working with an influencer to scale your business is a smart move, but there are a few things you need to know. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices for better collaboration between influencers and brands.

First choose the right platform that suits your product or service

As we know, selecting the right platform is an important part of your social media strategy. Selecting the right platform depends on a number of factors:

• Your goals: Do you want to drive more traffic to your website, boost sales or encourage more engagement from your audience? Some social platforms encourage engagement and conversation, while others encourage opinions. This can help you determine which platform to focus on when looking for an influencer. For example, if your goal is to encourage engagement, I recommend: TikTok where the average engagement rate per post reaches 5.9% while it is only 0.83% on Instagram and 0.13% on Facebook. Suppose you sell B2B products or services, LinkedIn will be the most suitable platform to build brand awareness, drive website traffic and generate leads.
• Your target audience: You should also consider demographics such as age, gender and location when choosing a platform. Adults between 24 – 34 years oldfor example, accounting for 31% of the Instagram audience, while 24% of TikTok’s global audience were women between the ages of 18 and 24 are more likely to be on TikTok. Facebook is the most visited social media platform in the USwhile Twitter’s . is most popular social media in Japan if we exclude LINE, a messaging app founded in South Korea. Do your research before selecting the platform. Support your decisions with demographics, rather than being guided by current trends.
• Where are the competitors: It can save you time to see how the competitors are performing, what things they did well, what things they dropped the ball on, and learn from their mistakes.
• Determine if the influencer is known on the platform: You may find an influencer with over a million followers on TikTok while having little or no presence on YouTube. So validate that the influencer has a very captivating audience on the selected social media channels.

Related: How To Succeed Using Influencer Marketing And Brand Collaboration?

1. Choose a relevant influencer

It is essential to choose an influencer who appeals to the same audience as you. For example, when marketing a fitness product, a suitable influencer could be someone who shares educational content about health and fitness or training videos. Relevance is a critical component in selecting who to work with to build trust with your audience and provide advice and recommendations from experts with authority in the field.

Also keep in mind that there are different types of influencers and you can expect different results from each. There are four main types of influencers when it comes to their follower base:

• Nano-influencers: 10,000 followers or less.
• Micro-influencers: between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.
• Macro influencers: between 100,000 and 1 million followers.
• Mega-influencers: 1 million or more followers.

If you want to increase brand awareness, relevant mega and macro influencers fit nevertheless. While micro and nano influencers reach fewer people, they are more likely to trigger action. Micro-influencers can have a greater impact on followers’ actions than celebrities. A study suggests that the reason for this is that the public usually finds them more trustworthy and recognizable than celebrities.

2. Validate the followers

To know whether an influencer is a perfect fit for you, you first have to pay close attention to their followers. If you have a business account on a social media platform, chances are you have come across accounts pretending to be real ones by collecting fake followers and engagements. A simple yet effective test to see if the influencer you want to work with has fake followers or not is to randomly select some of their followers and see how they interact with that account.

Check their profiles to confirm that they are not fake and that they resemble your customer profile. A fake account can be easily detected, a typical account normally contains zero or very few messages. The fake follower would most likely follow thousands of accounts while having a significantly lower number of followers. Sometimes the account doesn’t have a profile picture or a vague profile description. All of these criteria are red flags that they are fake accounts.

You can also view the influencer’s previous posts. If you only find a few engagements (likes, comments, shares), don’t let the high follower count fool you. This influencer most likely bought fake followers. A good practice is to talk to the influencer about previous successful campaigns they have worked on.

Related: What ‘authenticity’ actually looks like in a collaboration that impacts marketing

3. Give influencers room for creativity

The content delivered to the public must be authentic. The best way to do this is to analyze the influencer’s previous posts as a reference point and work together on what the content will look like, the limitations you have and the things you expect to achieve without dictating them and let them speak.

4. Monitor engagement and track campaign results and results

One of the most important pillars of social media marketing is listening and engagement. Social media listening is identifying and assessing what customers are saying about the brand, brand mentions and the trends around a company. It allows the company to measure campaign success, know what worked well and avoid future mistakes.

It is very important to track the impact of influencer marketing by leveraging social media listening tools and not relying solely on data provided by the influencer. There are many social media listening tools, such as: fire watchthat helps marketers understand their audience, track conversions, and check brand mentions.

If influencers generate website traffic, you need to set Google Analytics to measure campaign performance KPIs, such as your website traffic, pages per session, and bounce rate. Ultimately, if you’re selling a product online, you need to track sales in real time. An easy way is to give each influencer a coupon to share with their followers so that you can easily find out the source of each transaction.

Are you ready to collaborate with an influencer? If in doubt, consult these directions before committing.