Influencers can provide a lot of credibility to a marketing program and a brand. Utilizing an Influencer in your marketing strategy can give your brand a face or even revamp your brand voice. Influencer marketing can help you connect better with a target audience and get your message out without sounding “gimmicky”. This isn’t a new concept and in fact, has been around for centuries! But using influencer marketing in the ever-changing landscape of social media can be tricky.

Identifying your influencers is the first step – but where do we begin?

Let’s start by defining what an influencer is:

An influencer is someone in the target audience you are trying to reach who has a strong following and in today’s world, an active and engaging social media presence.

Influencers write about brands they have an affinity for, protect their personal brand (meaning they will be picky about who they want to represent) and work for compensation often in the form of money or product exchange. They are different from fans and should not be confused!

Now, let’s look at identifying influencers:

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do they already post relevant information to your brand? For example, if you are in the technology industry and looking at a potential influencer, are they already posting and engaging around topics related to your industry?
• What is their following? Is the audience valuable to your business goals and objective?
• Are they engaging actively with their followers?

Something to note is just because someone is influential on one topic or industry does not mean that they will be influential in another!

As far as choosing where to identify your influencers, I suggest looking where you want them to be. Because Twitter has positioned itself as such a central channel, look here. Set up keywords and then identify influencers based on how frequently you are seeing their posts being pulled into that feed. I like to say this is their “degree of relevance” on a topic. From there you can see how engaged they are with their followers after further evaluation of their social presence.

There isn’t a clear formula for identifying your influencer but if you look at their profiles, posts, and engagement, you can tell if they would be a good fit. Some brands will go off of Klout. Klout is a website that scores users according to online influence via the “Klout Score”. The more influential you are, the higher the score. The score is out of 100.

Time to build a strategy around social media and influencers:

• Before you reach out to the influencers you identified, think through a campaign and identify your goals as well as a measurement strategy. Doing this will ensure you don’t waste resources or damage a relationship with a powerful resource.
• Give your influencers something unique such as a new or limited edition product to talk about.
• Focus on the experience the product provides.
• Provide influencers with some high-quality images they are free to use in addition to photos they take themselves. Allow them to create something visually appealing for Instagram but casual and fun for Snapchat.
• Create a strategy that identifies influencers that lift your brand!
• Make your goals measurable. Are you hoping to see increased sales? Overall brand engagement? Maybe you just want to increase exposure for your brand. Whatever the goal, make sure you make it measurable.

A trusted recommendation affects every part of the purchase funnel. Choosing the right influencers paired with the right strategy will help your campaign go off without a hitch!

Do you have any experience with Influencer marketing?