How to get the Right Influencer for Your Small Online Business?
First thing understand first - ‘Who’ is an Influencer?
An influencer is a person, like you and me, but has the power to persuade people for purchasing your products via promoting that product using his or her fan-base, who consumes his/her social media contents as well as follow him/her recommendations may be due to their faith on the influencer’s knowledge or relationship with his or her audience.
Nowadays, almost every good looking guy thinks they are an influencer. That’s ok in general. But when it comes to ‘influencer marketing’ to promote your products and services and giving you a huge ROI. Then some analysis and facts check come into the mind. Today, we are going to reveal some top secrets you should keep in mind before hiring an influencer for your business. So that you can choose the right influencer to gain a huge ROI.
Now, the question may arise, if you are a small-scale business owner, would it mean to hire an influencer? The answer is a big YES. So, let’s dive into the following paragraphs to find out why and how should you choose an Influencer for your business. Irrespective of small-scale or large-scale, an influencer can bring a huge impact on your business.
Steps in Finding out the Influencers for Small-scale Businesses:
Set your goals:
Before you hit the target you must conceive it in your mind, just like a woman conceives a child before giving birth. The same is true when it comes to opting for the right influencer for your business. You have to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve from your campaign. It may be raising brand awareness, more leads, an increase in sales, or anything else that you want to achieve - first decide that. Your decided goal will help to choose the right influencer based on his experience and knowledge.
Start Research on Instagram
It’s just like short-listing in an interview process. When you know your goals you can easily find out some influencers who possess the potential to achieve your target result for marketing. Now start searching for influencers using relevant #hashtags to your brand. And you can make a list of the influencers who are performing well.
Analyze Your Instagram Post’s Comments:
This is the easiest method (but sometimes may not be the perfect method) to find out the best potential influencer. Someone who is engaged for months with your posts leaves some comments. Find out the person who regularly comments on your post or have shown interest in your newly launched product. Many influencers may already tag you with their posts etc. so they can become the best fit for your business as they are showing interest already.
Now once you choose the best influencer as per your opinion, it’s time to verify that influencer. So, follow the next steps.
Analyze the Demographics of your chosen Influencers:
Every marketing strategy has some target audience. If your influencer’s fan-base does not match the demographics (age, gender, etc.) you are targeting there is a very low chance to get the desired output. So, you must check it and then choose one who has the following base, you are targeting.
The success rate of any marketing campaign depends upon your influencer’s demographics. This includes- geographic distribution of the fan-base of the influencer, their age, gender, language as well as their social and economic background. You are not going to attract all his fan base, only show off your products and services to those people or demographic cohorts who may become your customers. What we are trying to mean is that having a million fan base of an influencer won’t give you results if they don’t need your product and services. So choose the influencer who has the demographics you are targeting.
Check the Authenticity of an Influencer:
Yes, it is about finding out whether the fan-base of the influencer is genuine or not? It is very common these days for influencers to buy followers and likes to attract businesses to hire them.
So huge tools have emerged there, like Fohr Card - determine whether or not an influencer has an authentic following on Instagram; Follower Health - Tool provides a breakdown of an influencer’s, username, bio, and then calculates an overall “score” based on the influencer’s followers-to-following ratio, number of posts, and bio, etc. We think, People Map is the best tool to find relevant influencers in your niche, and review their average engagement rate and likes per post, etc. These tools will save time and help you to approach the best influencer for your business.
Keep an Eye on the Influencer’s Engagement Rate:
We think this is the best parameter to choose an influencer. Engagement Rate means the rate at which the followers of a particular influencer give attention to their posts and take actions from there. This is more important than having a huge follower base or million likes on their posts. Engagement rates can be categorized as follows: 2-3% is general, 4-6% is excellent, and posts in the high ten to twenties are “viral.” Thus, Engagement Rate is a very good indicator of the style and quality of the content of an influencer.
Let’s analyze your Competitors:
Once your research is done, start to get some clues from the posts and comments from your competitors’ page. There you may get some verified and genuine influencers too, who may be interested in your products. As well, you will come to know what type of content you need to generate and how that should be presented in front of your audience by the influencer. More than that if your competitor can get success why not you? First, follow your competitor, and as you grow try your strategies!
Things to avoid:
Don’t go with an influencer who does not possess a fan-base demographic you are targeting as your customers.
The geographic location plays a very important role in the followers of an influencer, so if your business is in India, a fan-base from America won’t give you success.
Don't forget to take screenshots of the audience location breakdown (from your influencer’s Instagram Analytics)!
Don’t collaborate without checking their followers' genuineness using some analyzer tool like People Map.
As well as don’t forget to check the quality of content by an influencer.