Last editedMar 20223 min read
Influencer marketing can be a great way to grow your brand, with 89% of marketers  saying return on investment is comparable — or even superior to — other marketing channels. However, working with the right influencer for your brand is crucial for marketing efficacy. That’s why we’ve provided a guide below on how to select the right influencer to work with to ensure optimal sales.
How to select the right influencer: top tips
Reach or niche
You have two options when choosing an influencer to work with: influencers with huge mass followings known as ‘reach influencers’, or influencers with smaller, more dedicated following within a specific community, known as ‘niche influencers’.
The advantage of opting for a reach influencer is that you will reach a large audience and attain high visibility for your brand. However, huge influencers will be very expensive to work with, and their feed is often already saturated with sponsored content. This tends to make their audience view each sponsored brand post as less authentic and trustworthy. On the whole, their followers tend to be more passive viewers of content and less likely to engage with a sponsored brand.
Niche influencers, or micro-influencers as they’re sometimes known, tend to attract a following within a specific community. While they have fewer followers, they’re audiences tend to be engaged and highly invested in the content the influencer posts. This means that a recommendation from a niche influencer to their loyal fanbase can have a real impact, especially if your product fits in with their niche content.
Find a good fit
Whether or not you opt for a reach or niche influencer, ensure that whoever you choose reflects the values and aesthetic of your brand. For example, if your brand sells health products, you will see a much bigger return if you use an influencer who is a trusted voice within the health community. Using influencers with a certain amount of authority in a subject, like health, will lead to far more engagement from their following than an influencer with more general, non-specific content.
It can also be useful to check out the tone and aesthetic of an influencer’s posts to check that it will be harmonious with your own brand.
Know your customers
Before you can go about choosing the right influencer, it’s important that you know your own audience and customer base. Ask yourself questions such as: What are the age ranges of your customers? What kind of lives do they lead? What kind of content would they most likely be drawn to? Knowing your audience inside out will help you choose an influencer that they’re more likely to respond to.
For example, take an ethical, environmentally-friendly clothing brand. Their audience is typically women aged between 28-48 years with a high disposable income and an interest in health, wellness and environmental and humanitarian issues. Having all this analysis in mind in turn makes it far easier for the company to choose an influencer that shares all of these values, falls into a similar age range and socio-economic group — ultimately resulting in more sales.
Look at an influencer’s following
It’s not all about the influencer themselves, but the audience they attract. Ideally, there will be a lot of crossover between the kind of customers you want to attract, and the kind of viewers or followers the influence has. For instance, if you sell fitness wear, it makes far more sense to opt for an influencer that promotes exercise and has an audience actively interested in fitness. This way, the sponsored content will result in more sales and the influencer themselves benefits from remaining ‘on-brand’ and not dissenting from their typical content.
Look at engagement and conversion rates
When using influencer marketing, you need to analyze certain metrics, such as traffic, audience engagement and conversion rates in order to assess the likely success of your partnership with an influencer. All these will depend on an influencer’s delivery and commitment to pushing the product, so ensure you work with an influencer with a good track record of putting in effort into their sponsored content. At the end of the day, in order to see return on your investment, you depend on the influencer’s audience following through and purchasing the product. If views are high but engagement levels low, you can expect fewer sales.
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