You have found an influencer who looks promising. What should you check next?
Before adding them to a campaign, there is more useful information to consider, from who they reach and how their content performs to what their involvement could mean for your budget.
Here are five factors brands can use to make a more informed influencer selection.
1. Audience and Brand Fit
Start with who the influencer actually reaches.
An influencer may have a large audience, but that audience is only useful if it overlaps with the people your campaign needs to reach. Consider factors such as audience demographics, location and interests alongside whether the influencer’s content makes sense for your brand or product.
The aim is not simply to find an influencer in the right category. It is to understand whether their audience and content suit the campaign you are planning.
2. Previous Campaign Performance
An influencer’s profile shows you what their content looks like today. Previous campaign performance can tell you more about what happened when they worked with brands before.
Historical reach, engagement and other campaign results can provide useful context when evaluating influencers, particularly when compared against the objective of your own campaign.
Past performance cannot guarantee what will happen next, but it gives marketers more information than follower count alone.
3. Engagement and Reach
Follower count represents potential audience size. Actual reach and engagement provide another view of how an influencer’s content performs.
Look at how many people typically see their content and how audiences respond to it rather than assuming those numbers from follower size.
These metrics should also be considered together. A high engagement rate, for example, does not automatically make someone the right influencer if the campaign requires substantially greater reach.
4. Cost Efficiency
Influencer selection also needs to make sense within the campaign budget.
Rather than looking at an influencer’s fee in isolation, consider what that spend is expected to deliver. A more expensive influencer may still represent good value if their expected performance supports the campaign objective, while a lower price does not automatically make someone more cost-efficient.
This becomes particularly important when marketers need to decide how to distribute a limited budget across several influencers.
5. Your Campaign Objective
The campaign itself should ultimately determine which factors carry the most weight.
A campaign focused on reaching a large audience may require a different mix of influencers from one focused on engagement or another with a stronger performance objective.
This is also why starting with a preferred nano, micro or macro tier can be limiting. There is no follower tier that is automatically right for every campaign.
Look at What an Influencer Can Contribute
There is no universal formula for choosing an influencer. What matters most will change with the audience you want to reach, the results you need and the budget available.
AtisfyReach puts this into practice by using campaign and performance data to allocate influencers based on what each campaign requires. Rather than starting with a preferred follower tier, the platform considers factors such as campaign fit, predicted performance and cost efficiency to determine which influencers should be allocated.
Ready to plan your next influencer campaign? Book a free demo with AtisfyReach.
