How-To Find The Perfect Influencer To Partner With Your Brand

Finding the perfect online influencer to partner with your brand might seem like a daunting task with hundreds of thousands of bloggers in your industry to choose from. It is becoming more popular than ever to enlist a group of influential online personalities to share your brand’s story through sponsored blog posts, product trials or guest blog opportunities on your website.

Reach is certainly a powerful thing, but you also have to take into consideration how influential a person really is. To get started on what might seem like an impossible task (and hours of endless research) take a look at my top blogger outreach tips on how to identify the perfect influencer for your brand.

Compatibility

Compatibility is one of the most important items to consider when creating your list of potential brand advocates. You need to understand your brand’s target audience before beginning research of any kind. Why? What’s the point of pinpointing five random influencers with 100K or more Twitter followers if their audience doesn’t align with yours? It’s meaningless. Influencers can only be influential about the topics their audience cares about. A vegan brand would never enlist a meat-loving Twitter user to share their brand’s message to other meat-loving followers. No one would listen.

Define your ideal customer and compare them to your influencer’s audience to determine if this advocate will be a great representation of your brand. Ask yourself a few questions:

Would you want this potential influencer speaking about your product?

Does your influencer align with your brand’s personality?

Does their social presence align with the platforms your audience is most active on?

 Quality of Content

After you’ve determined compatibility between your brand and the influencer, another important factor is the reviewing quality of the influencer’s content. It’s important to analyze the writing style, main topics covered, and the organization of the content on their website or blog. More often than not you’ll find a potential influencer that has a great following and aligns with your brand’s personality, but isn’t the best copywriter or content creator. This is especially important when enlisting a guest blogger or ghostwriter.

Another point to keep in mind are earned certifications and experience in the topics most important to your brand. Any endorsement or reinforcement on why this person is an expert will only make them more influential.

Analyzing visual content including photos, videos and infographics will also give you a good idea if an influencer will be a great fit with your brand. Having a database of great visual content to publish across your social networks will encourage sharing, and thus, expand reach.

Influence and Engagement

Although a significant social following is important, an even more critical factor is the engagement. Look for indicators that your potential influencer’s social community is active. Indicators include comments and shares on blog posts, retweets and replies on Twitter, and likes and comments on Instagram. If activity is low, the likelihood of your brand’s message spreading decreases.

Influence is the number one way to sway opinions of others. If your potential influencer has high engagement, their audience will more likely be persuaded into trying out what the influencer is sharing.

Keep these blogger outreach tips in mind the next time you are out hunting for your next advocate and you will be on the right path to securing a brand ambassador who will be best for you.

“Influencers can only be influential about the topics their audience cares about.” ~ @HeatherPimentel http://t.co/hUtxF9qgTO

— Fandom Marketing (@FandomMarketing) January 20, 2015