7 Steps to choosing the right influencers for your Brand

In the world of advertising and influencer marketing, finding the right voice for your brand is both essential and crucial.

Essential in a way that you need to get your company’s name out there, and who better than a face that’s familiar to millions of people.

Crucial, especially in today’s age of social media, where almost all brands need a representative that consumers can lean on.

Influencers are people that around 49% of customers rely on, and it’s they who will bring in more success for your company. But with so many of them gaining in popularity nowadays, it’s become rather difficult to choose the best one to represent your brand.

So, how do you pick them?

In this blog post, I’ll share 7 steps to choosing the right influencers for your brand.

Already have a Strategy in Mind

Even before you choose a spokesperson, try to already have a strategy in mind. In fact, this might even help you settle on your final choices. You begin with specifying which market to go for then planning out a way in which you can advertise them through the voice of your brand. When you want a celebrity to star in a commercial, it’s best that you already envision what he/she will do and say in it before you begin actually choosing the star. If you want him/her to be prominently featured on your company website, start designing your webpages and work out how the spokesperson can fit into it.

While doing all these kinds of preparations, however, ensure that whatever advertising strategy that you’re imagining in your head will fit more than one voice. Don’t tailor fit your commercials, ad campaigns, and more for just one person because it’s still possible that he/she won’t agree to partner up with you. And if this happens, you’ll have to start from scratch again. Be as versatile as you can be with your strategies and choices. This a smart and efficient way to go forth with your visions without losing money and wasting time in the process. And what’s even worse is if your chosen influencer suddenly vanished from the instagram world just like what happened to Instagram Influencer Jessy Taylor whose instagram account got deleted accidentally. Good thing, she got her account back but what will your company do while your influencer goes absent in the social media world? So it’s really better to have multiple influencers and have your marketing campaign as flexible as possible.

Learn from your Competitors

Nowadays, it’s rare to see celebrities and influencers lending their voices to only one brand. Usually, the most prominent of such endorse multiple companies at a time, and some of them might be your competitors. In this regard, try to learn from how your competitors partnered up with someone you’re eyeing to be the voice of your company. There are loads of platforms you can use to reverse engineer how they made use of the person’s name, face, and voice online. From your findings, you can formulate a similar or different approach that can possibly emulate or even trample the positive results of your competitor’s.

Manually Research for Your Competitor’s Influencer:

1. Find the footprints. You can also do the research manually, for example, you want to look at the influencers for a certain brand, you can type the google keyword site:instagram.com “BRAND NAME”. It will help you find out those instagram posts for that brand.

2. Weed out the results. Not all of the google results above are posts from influencers. And some influencers will not 100 % tell their audience that they are paid influencers by a certain brand. Here’s what you should check out.

• The number of followers. If the followers are low, then it is not an influencer post. Here’s a sample:

Photo Credits: https://www.instagram.com/p/wliec4SkmD/

The post has only 6 likes and the account has only 14 followers so it is definitely not an influencer.

• The Number of Likes. The post below has 600 likes. It’s not that much but if you are a small cosmetic company looking for multiple influencers, this one might be a good candidate:

You can also google top lists of influencers. Hubspot has listed influencers on different niches.

Furthermore, try to get insight into what it’s like to partner up with a particular celebrity or influencer. Find out his/her price, his/her work ethic, how he/she treats your products, services, and employees, and so on. Although this is more ‘behind-the-scenes,’ all these are important in letting you know how lucrative a deal with this person will be. If he/she is too rude or difficult to work with, the outcome of such a partnership might not be what you had hoped for. Eventually, you’ll end up losing more money than you had anticipated.

Gauge their Social Media Presence

Social Media is very important when looking for the right voice of your brand. How much they post online, what they post online, and how they interact with their followers (and haters) are all vital factors to take into consideration when you’re looking to form a partnership with a celebrity or influencer. Firstly, if their social media profiles are more or less aligned with your brand philosophy, then you’d know this is a good voice to have for your business. How often he/she posts online can also make the difference, because this frequency will tell you how often your brand will be mentioned by them.

For example, If you are in the food industry, Jamie Oliver and Brad Lau are some of the top food influencers in instagram, the question is, how are you going to choose among the two of them? Let’s have a look:

1. Gauge them according to the number of followers.

Obviously, using this metric, Jamie has the most number of followers. So what else should you measure and gauge?

2. How often do they post?

Both of them post regularly at instagram, but Jamie has more likes and comments in his posts.

3. Do they respond to their followers?

It’s good that they both have good number of followers and posts on instagram, but it is much better if you’ll get an influencer who actually interacts with their followers. You should check how they respond. Or you can add in your contract with them that they should respond to comments in their “influencer” post for your product as well.

Tools like Inbassador.io can help too in gauging the “influence power” of social media influencers.

Choose the Most Relevant Influencer

Firstly, you have to choose among those who are most relevant, both professionally and in your field. Now, this might be a bit discriminatory because many people, no matter how big or small, can be great voices for certain brands. But to really stand out in this cut-throat advertising marketing game, you have to reach for the skies and get those who are really important to a lot of people. Your company’s spokesperson can have legions of fans and admirers, many of which are your potential customers. It’s a surefire way to get noticed and spread more awareness if the voice of your brand is the loudest in the room.

If you’re brand is about fashion and beauty, you might want to consider influencers such as Lele Pons:

But the selection process doesn’t end there, you must check if her values and beliefs are in line with the values of the company. Picking the right influencer for your brand is not just about the number of followers, it’s about the relevancy too.

Properly Negotiate a Deal

Investing in the voice of your brand is important. If your company is partnering up with a celebrity or influencer who’s lending his/her name and voice for your business, you should do whatever it takes to make them happy. However, there will and should be limits at times. A good partnership between a brand and their spokesperson is when an agreement is reached. There has to be equal contribution (and possibly retribution) from both parties for it to be an effective and lucrative deal. If not, you risk losing a lot of money in the process, which is never good for any business.

Photo Credit: marketoonist.com

Before closing in on such a deal, both the company and the spokesperson should negotiate in order to have a fair and equal partnership. Set forth the necessary terms of the deal—what does the influencer have to do in terms of advertising? How often will they have to post about your business? etc. And when that’s out of the way, it’s time to talk about compensation—how much will influencer get out of this? Will there be retribution if the influencer violates the terms and conditions? And so on. These conversations will ensure that no one will be financially harmed if things don’t go out as planned.

Here’s a sample of a non-disclosure agreement:

They Must be your Customers too

Nowadays, authenticity is doubly important, especially since it’s a lot easier now for people to expose you for being ingenuine and fake. So when you’re choosing a spokesperson for your brand, it helps if he/she is already your customer. Or, in the beginning, stages of your partnership, you turn him/her into one. It’s no longer enough that a prominent face is fronting your ad campaigns and starring in your commercials. The voice of your brand has to know what he/she is telling people to buy and it that can only happen when he/she is a customer of your business.

A good example is Jennifer Lawrence, who is currently the face of luxury fashion label, Dior. As a marketing strategy, the fashion house always dresses her for her many events, especially for the red carpet. But at the same time, Lawrence is an actual customer of the brand, often spotted sporting a Dior handbag when she going about her private life. This type of authenticity has resonated with customers, knowing full well that the voice of the brand actually understood and likes what he/she is endorsing.

Don’t be Afraid to Collaborate

Finally, don’t be afraid to collaborate with your potential spokesperson. When you’re choosing out of various celebrities and influencers, find out which ones might have their own ideas. The more the campaign has a little bit of both, the more authentic it will come out. Celebrities and influencers aren’t just mannequins or toys that will bend to your every whim. They have their own ideas on how they will sell your product or service to other people. And when their own ideas are incorporated, they’ll be more comfortable and confident singing praises for your brand.

Just take a look at Tommy Hilfiger’s brand when he teamed up with Gigi Hadid. supermodel and social media influencer. In 2016, Hilfiger started co-designing his seasonal collections with Hadid and had her walk on his runway during Fashion Week. As a result, the Hilfiger brand saw a 22% increase in revenue in 2017, becoming one of two major American fashion brands (the other being Calvin Kelin) to see a significant rise in business sales in that year.

Whoever will be the voice of your brand is sure to make an impact on your company. Choose wisely by following some of these tips in getting the right celebrity or influencer for the job!