A social media influencer is someone who influences others through their social platforms. Influencers can make or break your brand’s influencer marketing campaign. Adding to this, brands often struggle to find influencers who are in sync with their brand goals and values.

This provides your business with a unique opportunity to identify, pursue, and leverage these social media influencers to grow your sales, lead flow, and ultimately your revenue stream.

social media influencers can help you…

• Builder a larger brand following
• Increase your company’s credibility
• Bring in more sales and new leads and conversions

Working with the right influencers is key to any successful influencer marketing campaign. Influencers who are relevant, authentic, engaging, and well-matched to your brand values and image will contribute greatly to your campaigns.

However, finding the perfect influencer is hard, because it requires time and research. There are many factors you’ll need to keep in mind during your search. Here are 9 criteria you should keep in mind when searching for right influencers for your brand.

1.  Find Influencers Based On Your Brand Objectives

You need to first clearly outline your goals before searching for influencers or setting up your campaign. There can be a variety of goals you want to achieve with your campaign, some of which may include:

• Brand awareness
• Content creation
• Sales or app downloads
• Newsletter subscribers or followers on social media

Depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, you can choose how you want to collaborate with influencers. They’ll be able to contribute in different ways. For instance, if your goal is to create content, you’ll want to collaborate with influencers who have photography skills, rather than influencers who may have reach, but average content.

By setting your campaign goals before selecting influencers, you’ll be able to choose influencers you know are likely to help you reach your goals, rather than working with influencers who may or may not contribute to them.

Having a clear idea of your influencer campaign goals is necessary to find an influencer that closely reflects your brand. The influencer needs to align with your brand’s identity or at least the products you want to sell. If there is no brand alignment, your campaigns will generate low ROI.

At GVT, we will help you to map out your influencer marketing plans, designs and executes comprehensive, scalable campaigns, also consider what type of campaign will best help you connect with the type of influencers you want to work with.

2.  Analyze Engagement Rate

Engagement is one of the critical metrics of Instagram influencer marketing. The engagement rate goes down as the number of followers increases. However, sometimes this metric can be misleading as popularity does not always result in conversions. You must first determine how authentic the engagement is. It indicates how well an audience resonates with and responds to the influencers’ content. Good engagement shows that the audience actually cares about what the influencers publish.

In addition to calculating engagement rates, check whether the influencers are taking the time to respond to their followers. Influencers who react quickly to comments develop great relationships with their followers. In turn, their followers are likely more invested in the content that’s shared with them.

Real followers ask questions, make personal statements, and also tag their friends in comments. These are word-of-mouth reactions by genuine followers. Likes, comments, and shares on content help marketers determine how active an audience is and how it reacts to different types of content. Marketers are looking for audiences that are engaged and invested in the content and the community surrounding it and we makes sure you get the best influencer for your brand.

Our proprietary technology enables us to classify & identify the right influencers on basis of their reach, relevance & resonance. This rich data, along with smart analytics, helps us make the influencer loop measurable & deliver best ROI.

3.  Check Whether Their Content Quality Is a Fit For Your Brand Image

Another uncommon but effective way to spot interesting Influencers is to start your search from actual content pieces. You can analyze posts that mention a product or a brand and select only those in line with your brand style or with a strong creativity.

There are dozens of different types of influencers, and they all approach the work of content creation differently. For marketing purposes, brands will want to look closely at an influencer’s body of work to identify key factors like visual and audio quality, substance, tone, category, and consistency.

For each creator, you can analyze real performances, audience demographic information, brands mentioned, most engaging content and much more.

When you work with influencers, you’re giving them creative freedom to create sponsored content for your brand. Because their content will be representing you, it’s important to check whether their content quality is a fit for your brand image. When you look at the influencers’ profiles, you should look closely for content that’s clear, well-composed, creative, consistent, and optimized for with brand goals and image.

We bring your brand story to life through harnessing the power of authentic connections.

Global Vision Technology helps brands engage and activate audiences worldwide through top influencers. We develop and execute creative influencer marketing strategies to amplify your brand story at scale and reach millions of people.

4.  Gauge Authenticity

Authentic influencers are more likely to have a dedicated following. They’re able to build up audience loyalty and trust by becoming experts in their niche, such as food & drink or fashion. They show their expertise by sharing genuine, personal stories, tips, and advice along with their posts.

Whatever your niche, you can engage with bloggers to create the quality, authentic content their audience expects while associating your brand with that content.

To gauge authenticity, you can scroll through the influencers’ Instagram captions on both normal and sponsored posts. Look for well-thought-out captions that convey a story. For sponsored posts, the influencers’ captions should be helpful to their audience. The influencers may highlight why they’re promoting the brand’s products or services, how they can be used, or why they love the brand.

Global Vision Technology, we know exactly how to find the right influencers to help you achieve your goals and objectives, to make the best match possible. We’ve worked with thousands of best-in-class social influencers, digital storytellers, vloggers, and content creators across a wide variety of segments through our open network.

You can also look through your unique brand hashtags or mentions to find influencers who are already fans of your brand. Because they love your products or services, your collaborations with them will be more authentic, and they’ll be great ambassadors for you.

5.  Frequency Of Post

For many verticals, there is a direct correlation between how often an influencer posts and their traffic and rate of return visitors. As with marketing any website, it often takes multiple exposures to get a visitor to click and check out your site, and you want to make sure they come back.

When an influencer is consistently posting high quality content on a regular basis, readers are more likely to return, bookmark, and share. Influencers who don’t post as frequently tend to have a higher rate of turnover, fewer return visitors, and less loyalty.

When you explore influencers’ Instagram profiles, be sure to look at how often the influencers publish content. In order for influencers to build a loyal audience, they need to engage their followers by posting high-quality content on their Instagram regularly. Active Instagram profiles should ideally publish content once every 1-3 days.

You should also check how often the influencers publish sponsored content. You should be looking for a good balance of sponsored and normal content. If you notice that influencers have published 3 or more sponsored posts in a row, their credibility may be at risk.

You should then read through some of the comments their followers have left on their sponsored posts. Negative comments indicate that the influencer may be promoting too many brands.

We track, measure, and optimize to deliver results with exceptional, tangible impact. Our influencer marketing agency guarantees real influence.

6.  Affinity For Brand

Many influencers — from those who cover makeup to those who make YouTube videos about building robots — already talk about the products that they use frequently. Marketers should research whether or not there are any influencers who are already talking about their products organically. Working with those influencers to become a part of their content and audience messaging is a move that feels genuine and authentic to audiences.

It isn’t just influencers who speak positively about a brand’s products that might make for a beneficial partnership, though. Even influencers who talk about a product’s flaws or cover a competitor’s products may be prime candidates. Partnering with these influencers allows brands to become part of a focused, relevant conversation.

Our matching engine & dedicated team takes over to support you with shortlisting the right influencers and activating the campaign. Influencers apply by accepting the campaign brief, or by sending bids on how best they can contribute.

Our GVT influencer marketing tool will help you discover top influencers across social media channels and for a variety of budgets. We have access to a growing network of India’s best established and emerging Youtubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers, Bloggers,  Campus Ambassadors – you name it!

7.  Reliability

To ensure your collaborations run smoothly and effectively, the influencers you choose to work with must be reliable. If an influencer is, for instance, a slow communicator, it can prevent you from completing collaborations in a timely manner.

Reliable influencers are proactive, and they should typically reply to all of your messages promptly and professionally. If influencers take over a week to answer your messages, it may be a sign that they’ll be slow at communication when you start collaborating!

At GVT, we create the most authentic connection between a brand and an influencer using our unique and longstanding expertise. We then develop and execute these strategies to amplify your brand story at scale.

We’re a bunch of experienced entrepreneurs, marketeers & tech geeks who believe that we can help better the way marketing is done on the biggest social media platforms.

We manage campaigns from A to Z. From tailor-made strategies, hands-on campaign execution, underpinned by in-depth reporting.

Conclusion

Once you partner with your ideal influencer, you’re going to need a way to maintain your relationship. How are you supposed to know if they are holding up their end of the deal? It’s not like you have the time to monitor all of their individual social media channels to see how they are representing your brand. Don’t worry, at Global Vision Technology we can help you with that. Imagine being able to monitor each of your individual partner’s activity of representing your brand from a central technology platform. Find out more by visiting our website.