One of the most common questions I get asked about and one of my strengths when it comes to creating an Influencer Marketing Strategy is choosing the right influencer. Here’s how to choose the right influencers for your brand in 6 simple steps.

1. Set an objective

One of the most common problems I see when executing campaigns for brands is that they want to achieve everything at once but that doesn’t work. You need to set a clear objective as it then defines what approach you’ll take to choosing influencers so ask yourself what am I trying to achieve from collaborating with influencers? Some examples could be product awareness, brand awareness, traffic to website or conversion/sales. Each tier of influencers serves a different purpose — in example, it’s recommended to use tier 1 influencers (influencers with a very high follower base) for a new product launch during the first phase of the launch and then move on to using tier 2 influencers afterwards.

2. Keep your opinion out of it as long as they fit into your brand

Ready for the ugly truth? Your opinion doesn’t matter, your customers won’t care about what you think of a certain influencer. Look at the end results — just because you don’t like the influencer personally doesn’t mean that they aren’t worthwhile and it certainly doesn’t mean that they won’t achieve results. As long as they fit into your brand and they have a similar target audience, work with them.

3. Analyize their follower base

Look at their followers. The best way to know if an influencer is going to get you the results you want is by ensuring that their followers are your target audience. If they aren’t then you should be working for them just for the heck of it. Make sure you have a certain TA set prior to even talking or engaging with any influencer.

4. Analyize their numbers

Take a look at their engagement rates. If an influencer has 100,000 followers with only a few hundred likes — something is fishy. At the same time keep in mind the nature of the platform for example, Instagram rolled out an algorithm a while ago and that has affected engagement rates. Take a look at the amount of likes vs amount of comments, etc. The best thing to do is to look at historical data and see the month on month follower growth or engagements to ensure an influencer has real followers and isn’t buying ‘likes or comments’. iconosquare.com is a good tool to use for such data.

5. Previous collaborations with other brands

What brands did they work with? How did that go? What results did they achieve from working with those brands? I know you’re not able to see all the results but you can get a sense of how their followers reacted to those collaborations. They’ll give you key insights especially if those brands are similar to yours. Look at the amount of engagement, quality of comments, interactions, etc.

6. What Do Others Say About Them?

This is the most underrated point in our industry. Brand Managers & Agency People, I BEG YOU — ask around before working with an influencer to avoid disappointments and nightmares. I’ve created my own database and algorithm on rating influencers based on various criteria such as their follower base, how easy they are to work with, their price vs ROI ratio, etc. Working with influencers who are considered celebrities in our modern day and influencers who are barely known, I’ve learned that some of them have been amazing while others have been a nightmare. They’ve allowed their ego to get to them and become quite a challenge to work with (to say the least!). Reality check — there’s so many influencers out there that I as a marketeer have constantly told influencers that this industry has become a competitive market to where they need to rely on word-of-mouth marketing themselves as no brand manager or agency guy wants to work with someone that adds stress to their lives.

Do you have any other tips on how to choose influencers or do you need help in running your next influencer marketing campaign? Tweet me @mikealnajiand let’s discuss!

Also published on Medium.

Written By

Raunak Datt

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