How to Choose the Right Influencers for Your Brand
With social media constantly evolving and growing more brands are turning to social media influencers, with the aim of introducing their brand with the influencers devoted followers.
Using carefully chosen influencers to endorse and mention products on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook through feed posts, stories/videos/reels, and TikToks videos ensures you will reach your target demographic. And affiliation with a influencer with similar interests, age bracket, demographic to that of your core target audience is highly desirable.
Influencer marketing has become mainstream and is now an important part of business marketing. While some top tier influencers are able to ask high fees for sponsored posts most influencers fees are affordable or potentially free if they are just starting off. Making them a great marketing tool for businesses and certainly something to value and explore the best ways to utilise.
To be considered a true influencer you normally will have thousands of loyal supporters A.K.A. followers. Depending on the individual influencers popularity these ‘followers’ are hanging on to their every post and update and as Instagram has just proven followers are even willing to pay subscriber fees for access to exclusive content.
So if you target the right influencer, when they share your brand you’ll essentially be reaching up thousands if not hundreds of thousands of consumers within your target market, it’s so simple!
How to find the best influencers for your brand?
There are many categories of influencers, from bloggers to social media personalities to thought leaders and celebrities. The real challenge is finding influencers who can help you achieve your marketing goals and who will speak to your brand’s desired audience.
Audience & Objective
To start the process, you will need to have a clear target audience and objective in mind:
- What are you trying to promote? A product, restaurant, event, a destination? Have this clearly identified before you start your influencer search
- What type of influencer demographic speaks to your marketing plan? (Age gender, location, family status, interests)
- What are your objectives? Are you looking for product endorsement or an influencer partnership/affiliation which could lead to your very own brand ambassador?
- RESEARCH – explore who similar brands or businesses are using for their social media campaigns and investigate who are the most popular influencers in your industry, and which influencers your direct competitors are using?
- Monitor the influencers you are interested in before you choose to use them for your brand, take note of whether they have an organic growth in followers and high engagement rate; and if the likes/comments/re-share on their posts are stable in volume.
- Be prepared to negotiate with influencers, you may be able to use some on a contra basis, but more high profile influencers with large groups of followers will come at a cost.
Why is influencer marketing so popular?
Influencer marketing is popular simply because it genuinely works. Since 2016 influencer marketing budgets have grown from $8 billion annually to a projected $15 billion annually by the end of 2022.
Influencer marketing is often a better and authentic way for brands to get noticed than through paid advertising. It doesn’t matter what size of business you own; influencer marketing can be a brilliant way to build your brand reach. Influencer partnerships can support all your marketing objectives, often at a low cost, including building brand awareness, growing your own social media following, boosting sales and driving website or foot traffic for your brand.
We highly recommend influencer marketing within the food and beverage industry. For our client Pitango, we have engaged influencers through several PR campaigns. Most recently we managed an influencer campaign to generate awareness around Pitango’s three new soup flavours. We chose 30 influencers who we felt would appreciate the brands as a simple and easy meal solution, so we targeted busy mums and everyday people with busy and active lifestyles. People who would appreciate a simple yet tasty pre-prepared meal for dinner or to take to work for lunch. For a small cost of $1000 we reached a total audience of 563,836 people. See below an example of an unpaid influencer post with a 56.5k following.
How to achieve your marketing objectives with influencers:
Our client The Castlereagh by Fassnidge launched two new activations on Thursday and Friday nights. We ran an influencer campaign to drive awareness and promote the new activities. We enlisted both micro and larger scale lifestyle and food influencers that we established were well suited to the brand, and well known in the food and beverage space.
Each influencer was offered a complimentary meal at the venue with friends, in exchange for social media content to showcase their fabulous experience. See below an example post from an influencer @jimmywongeats (ex MasterChef contestant) who left the kitchen equipment at home to enjoy a yummy meal.
The different types of influencers for your marketing plan
There are a variety of influencer categories to choose from dependant on your marketing sector, if you are in the food and beverage space you can find a number of foodie, wine and cocktail bloggers and even more premium style influencer options depending on your product or the venue that you are marketing. Examples of types of influencers:
- Premium
- Foodie
- Wine/drink bloggers
- Fitness
- Mummy bloggers
- Lifestyle/fashion
Need help with an influencer campaign? Be sure to get in touch with the team at Papaya.