5 Ways to Find the Right Social Influencers for Your Business
The online world has grown to a considerable extent after the introduction of the Internet in our lives. Its requirement has increased even more in 2020 when Covid-19 hit. Most offline businesses have gone online, online customer spending has increased, and people have increased drastically their consuming of online content and social conversations.
Being marketers and business owners, we all started sharing more content online in order to engage with the target audience. However, we all have realized that modern customers are more skeptical, and only sharing content online, or running ads couldn’t be enough to fulfill the business goals.
Whether selling a health product or any social media optimization services online, a positive recommendation from a trusted source can work as a trump card for you. It can allow your target audience to trust and engage with you more. Here, a trusted source is an influencer who has loyal followers or a subscriber base.
This article will tell you five ways to find the right social influencers for your business. But before that, let’s talk about who is an influencer, what influencer marketing is, and why finding the right social influencer is essential.
What is a Social Media Influencer?
An influencer is a person or authority with a certain number of followers or subscribers who genuinely believe and listen to something they say.
Their followers are their family, are loyal, and consider what the influencer is saying before taking any action. The overall decision-making of the followers or subscribers depends on how the influencer thinks and believes.
An influencer could be a thought leader, blogger, YouTuber, celebrity, lifestyle brand, industry expert, or social media personality with the power to add on to social media optimization for business.
Moreover, influencers don’t need a more extensive audience base to be called the right influencer for your business; instead, they should have quality followers with the same interest. If influencers are able to engage with their followers, they could be the best for your business.
What is Influencer Marketing? What are its benefits?
Influencer marketing is a compelling way to optimize the digital marketing strategy of businesses. It is the marketing where a business takes the help of the influencer’s authority and reach to improve their visibility and build brand loyalty and awareness.
Through Influencer Marketing, businesses can engage influencers to spread the word about them, share content, become a spokesperson, write about the business, or simply become a partner. It could also help in:
- Building brand awareness,
- Reaching the potential audience,
- Building trust,
- Increasing social media following,
- Generating leads,
- Improving sales,
- Acquiring high-quality backlinks.
Now you know what influencer marketing is and how it is beneficial for your business. But do you think partnering up with any social media influencer could help? No! It is essential to find the right influencer. In the next section, I’ll discuss why the right social media influencers will contribute to your business’s growth.
Why are social influencers important for your business?
To explain the importance of finding social influencers for adding up to social media optimization for business, let’s take an example.
Suppose you are at a Christmas party, where you meet different people; some are new for you while some are already your friends.
So, let’s say a stranger comes to you and asks you to be his friend by showing off. Would you consider knowing him better? Wouldn’t you find it irritating? I guess your answer would be “No” and you wouldn’t prefer to be his friend.
Now, suppose your friend introduces you to the same person saying that he is a nice man. Do you prefer talking to him to get to know him better?
The chances of getting involved with someone are pretty high in this case. Do you know why? It is because you trust your friend and would consider your friend’s recommendation.
Influencer marketing works in the same way, and influencers work as mutual friends who focus on building a connection between you and your potential audience.
The influencer creates content supporting your business, recommends it to their followers, and involves him in the conversation about your brand. That’s why social media influencers are essential for your business.
Influencers are broadly divided into three categories
- Top Influencers: Top Influencers are the ones with more than 100k followers on their social media platforms. This group is highly involved in its niche and has a massive reach. They might have the presence of different platforms too, which gives you the option to reach a more extensive potential audience base through any platform of your choice.
- Micro-Influencers: Micro-Influencers are the ones with between 10k to 50k followers. Although their followers are minimal and they are new, their opinions and knowledge matter to their followers.
- Nano Influencers: Nano Influencers are newbies and generally have between 1k to 10k followers. Although their followers are the least, the content they share is generally impactful and can help a lot in a brand’s growth.
To build fruitful social media optimization strategies, finding the right social media influencers for your business is essential. Also, making a better choice is essential to save money, time and effort into running influencer campaigns as a part of your strategy.
However, finding the influencers manually could be challenging because various social media influencers deal with different niches and categories.
So, in the next section of this article, I will introduce some ways to find the right social influencers for your business.
5 Ways to Find the Right Social Influencers for Your Business
1. Know your Target Audience
The target audience is the potential customer of a brand. Whenever working on digital marketing for businesses, considering and knowing the target audience becomes essential to save time, money, and effort.
When focusing on influencer marketing, most businesses forget to consider the target audience and collaborate with the influencer with other focus points. If an influencer’s niche is different from your business, their target audience will never match yours.
Therefore, you have to ensure that the influencer and you have the same target audience base. Once you are sure, you should consider making them a partner.
For example, you are a travel service provider. To sell your services, you have to partner with travel influencers or bloggers/vloggers. Your business would be a perfect match for such followers, and they would like to travel with you.
2. Understand your business goal to get started
When you find the influencers for your business, always have a goal that you want to fulfill by partnering with them.
So, to get started, always build an influencer marketing campaign with the objective of brand awareness, brand identification, attracting the audience, engagement, lead generation, sales, or link building. Make these KPIs measurable and realistic.
After getting clear about your goal, you can connect with potential influencers, discuss what you want from them, and how to determine whether they will help you with achieving it or not.
3. Consider your influencer campaign
Even if you hire any social media agency or handle your work by yourself, you will always be required to plan things in advance. Here, knowing your influencer marketing plan is essential too. Most influencer campaigns include:
- Guest Posting
- Contests and Giveaways
- Affiliates
- Brand ambassadors
- Gifting
- Sponsored Content
- Influencer Takeover
- Discount codes
If any influencer with a similar target audience base agrees to contribute to your influencer campaign’s plan, you can choose them.
4. Understand the influencer’s authority
When selecting the best influencer for you to fit in your digital marketing strategy, understand their authority. It will help determine If they have enough reached to fulfill your business goal. You should perform proper influencer analysis to find the right influencer.
To understand the authority, always check the following:
- Followers
- Engagement rate
- Quality of the content
- Niche and in-depth knowledge of the niche.
5. Get an influencer using influencer marketing tools
Some influencer marketing tools could make the process of finding the right social influencer easier. These tools include a list of thousands of influencers who work on different platforms.
You can choose the niche or category, get the data from potential influencers, check their database and followers, and select the best one. It helps quicken the finding process.
Conclusion
Having a social media marketing strategy with a planned influencer marketing campaign makes the overall process of finding a social influencer smoother. You should know the platform you want to choose for the same, as not all influencers have a similar follower-base on every platform.
Additionally, you should consider your business’s goals, audience, and niche and how well all of that aligns with your potential influencer profile. Once you find the right influencer considering all of the above, you will be able to move ahead towards achieving your business goal.
I hope this article will make the work of finding the right influencer for your business more accessible for you.
