Finding The Best Influencers To Boost Your Brand
As marketers, you might create content for persuading your customers and engage with them. However, modern customers are savvy and skeptical. If they find slightest hints of an advertisement, they move on. Hence, these customers must be influenced, and that influence must come from those like-minded people whom your customers know and believe. In the new paradigm, it is the bloggers and other content sources with a loyal following on the social networks who are the influencers. Though the advantages are obvious, influence marketing investments go wasted if it’s not working right. We list down five points you must look for while you’re finding online influencers.
• Relevance
Before you get into static metrics like unique visitors, it is vital that you realize how the content of a blogger is aligned with your message. Go through the archived posts of that blogger to realize what sort of a customer they are. If a blogger puts up recipes, it need not mean they are a pick for some organic brand. Relevance is what matters.
• Engagement
This indicates how the audience is interacting with a blogger’s content. Are these readers responding, commenting and sharing? How many readers are returning to the blogger? How many readers engage with a blogger or a publisher, and how frequently do they return to them are signs of the engagement that has been established.
• Reach
Though it is not the first essential metric, reach is definitely an apt consideration. But marketers must control the urge of considering a number of visitors as a measure of the blogger’s reach. Followers and traffic are valid to an extent to know that influencer is reaching the target audience of your brand. For example, if you’re a hotel chain, you can go with a travel blogger who has limited reach than a food blogger with hundred thousand visitors a month.
• Frequency
For a lot of verticals, there exists a straight correlation between the frequency of the posts from a blogger and the rate of return and traffic of visitors. It generally takes multiple exposures to get someone to click on your website and check on it. Besides, you also need them to return to you. If a publisher or a blogger is frequently putting up posts that are of high quality, readers will mostly return, subscribe and share.
• Authenticity
Bloggers with a lesser ratio of sponsored content are likely to be more trustworthy and also authentic. Personal experiences with a genuine mention or use of a service, brand or a product are more trustworthy than direct product reviews.
Regardless of your niche, you can collaborate with bloggers to generate some authentic, quality content which the audience expects when associating with your business through that content. And know that your influencers are more than mere bloggers. They include those with permanent audiences on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and many other social networks.
