Finding the Right Influencers for Your Brand

Influencer marketing is a growing billion-dollar industry, and you don’t want to miss out! By utilizing influencer marketing, your brand can get ahead of the curve and avoid using saturated marketing strategies. Influencer marketing is ideal to use if your brand is looking to increase brand awareness and target a specific niche and/or demographic. To maximize your influencer marketing efforts, it is important to work with influencers that have a highly engaged following, create content that is similar to your brand’s aesthetic, and have high-quality content. This blog will focus on how to find the right influencers for your brand.

Who is your ideal influencer?

Specify Your End Goal

Selecting the most appropriate influencers is highly dependent on the type of campaign your brand is looking to run, and what the outcomes of that campaign are. Are you attempting to market your brand as a whole, or rather are you trying to promote a particular product or service that you have? Choosing a varied selection of influencers to represent your brand is essential to effectively launch an influencer marketing campaign.

For example, if Apple wanted to employ influencers to push purchases across all product lines – iPhone’s, AirPods, MacBook’s, etc. – they would likely choose to cast a wider net when selecting influencers. This is because they can use students, business-people, families, and many other demographics with these products. If Apple wanted to use influencers to specifically promote the launch of a new iPad, they may choose influencers who are students and/or artists as this is their main target audience for the product. If your brand is looking to promote a specific product or service, it is essential to carefully select the right influencers to showcase those campaign objectives.

Identify Your Target Market

After analyzing what product your brand is planning to market and creating a campaign for, it is time to analyze who your target markets are. When identifying your target market, consider the demographic's age, gender, geographical location, and marital status; all these factors will assist you in narrowing down your demographic's needs. Additionally, while determining your target market, evaluate who is most likely to be interested in the values your product or service delivers. For each product or service you are wanting to sell, make a list of the essential values it embodies and then draw a line (or lines) to the demographic groups who place a premium on these values. Finally, selecting relevant markets requires infusing judgements with objective information. Collecting data might be intimidating, but some suggestions to follow while researching for your product include focusing on newer data collection through surveys, which can involve sending out emails or newsletters. Additionally, consider utilizing prior market research completed by reputable sources.

Selecting What Platforms to Market Your Brand or Product On

Once you've determined who your target demographic is, you can use the information and data you've gathered to make an informed decision on which influencers and platforms to leverage.

Using social media networks that cater to an older demographic would be your best bet if you want to target an older demographic. For example, Instagram's most active demographic is roughly in the 25 to 40 age range, but TikTok's most active audience is between the ages of 12 and 25. Choosing the most appropriate platform for your campaign is the most effective technique for landing on the for you page of your target demographic.

How to Find Influencers

Manual Search

Advertisers can look to reach out to influencers on their own and manage influencers internally. This means that everything from finding the influencer, to managing the influencer, is done by your team internally. However, choosing to fully manage an influencer in-house has its challenges:

• Low response rates. When searching for influencers on your own, and without the necessary tools, it often leads to low response rates from influencers. Influencers are often unlikely to respond when reached out to directly through email or through their social media. With an increase in spam emails and dm’s, it is becoming increasingly difficult to reach out to influencers via these channels. Although it is not impossible to reach influencers without using any external tools, it is not the most effective method and is often extremely time-consuming.
• No access to audience data. Having access to audience data before starting a campaign with an influencer, and during the campaign, is crucial in measuring the projected success of a campaign. When fully managing campaigns and influencers in-house, it is extremely difficult to gain access to this audience data. This information would need to be requested from the influencers prior to working with thm, and may result in a lot of back-and-forth if the relevant data is not provided from the start. Eventually, this can result in a lot of frustration between your brand and the influencer, and may even result in the influencer no longer wanting to work with your brand. The importance of having this information before the campaign is to know the level of engagement an influencer has on their posts, so that you are able to estimate the type of engagement your advertisements are likely to receive. During the campaign, it is especially crucial to have access to this information so that you are able to track each day’s progress for your campaign, and see if there are any necessary adjustments that need to be made.
• Negotiating terms and pay is hard. Not having access to information such as audience data makes it difficult to effectively pay influencers. Knowing the amount of engagement influencers receive per post, as well as the number of followers they have, is helpful in determining fair pay for influencers. By not having a clear understanding of the value of an influencer’s posts, it can be difficult to negotiate with them. Another difficulty lies in communicating terms and conditions with influencers when doing it over email. This can feel impersonal and often results in miscommunication.

Using an Agency

Agencies are a very common method for brands to use when looking for influencers to represent their brand. When working with an agency, they have a large roster of individuals to choose from, however agencies are not always an effective source for small to medium size businesses. Here are a couple of reasons why:

• They often have high budget commitments. Influencer agencies typically work with companies looking to target a large audience. Due to the larger target markets agencies are used to working with, their budget commitments are higher. This is not ideal for small to medium-sized businesses who are looking to target more niche and localized audiences.
• Influencer agencies work with macro-influencers. Since agencies are used to working with larger companies, their influencers reflect this. Large companies are looking for influencers with a general audience, and thus use larger-scale influencers such as macro influencers. Businesses looking to reach a niche or local market should be using micro-influencers instead. These types of influencers are often very difficult to find when using an agency.

Use an Influencer Marketing Platform Like Embold

Using a platform like Embold is a great way to ensure that you are getting the perfect influencer to represent your brand. At Embold, we work to make things easy for brands to find, manage, and collaborate with influencers. Here are a few reasons why Embold is the best choice:

• A filtered roster of Canadian influencers. At Embold, our roster of over 9,000 influencers exclusively includes Canadian influencers. This is perfect for businesses looking to target local markets. You have the opportunity to choose which influencer to collaborate with and can filter based on regions to make sure your influencer is getting the most engagement for your brand.
• Access to audience data and analytics. By using the Embold platform, you have access to all of the audience data and analytics needed to monitor your campaign. You will have access to analytics before choosing an influencer and have continued access to all reporting after the campaign launch. As a result, you are able to see the level of engagement each influencer receives on posts, and choose the right influencer. During the campaign, you will have real tome access to reporting and analytics in order to continually monitor the progress of your campaign. This allows you to make any necessary changes through the duration of the campaign. At the end of the campaign, your team will also be provided will a full and comprehensive digest that shows the overall performance of the campaign, as well as an individual breakdown on an influencer-to-influencer basis.
• Influencer payouts have never been easier. Understanding how much an influencer should be compensated for a campaign can be difficult. At Embold, we do the heavy lifting for you. Depending on your campaign type, length of the campaign, and influencer analytics, we calculate the suggested compensation each influencer should receive. After the campaign is over, paying the influencers is as easy as a few clicks. All our influencers have either their PayPal or bank information directly linked to their profiles, making payouts an easy task.
• Influencers are fully managed. While our influencers are given the creative freedom to publish unique and never seen before advertisements, at Embold we monitor and approve all messaging to ensure influencers are positively promoting your brand. Through every step of the campaign process, an Embold Influencer Coordinator relays all necessary messaging to influencers and provides them with support to ensure a seamless campaign launch.

Finding the right influencer to represent your brand can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be! Your team is now equipped with the foundational steps to find and work with an influencer that best suits your campaign needs. But why bother with the hassle of finding and communicating with influencers? At Embold, we do the heavy lifting for you! Book a call with a member from our team to see how we can help your brand launch the influencer marketing campaign of your dreams! To book a call, click here.

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