<h1>Cultivating the Perfect Influencer for your Social Media Marketing Campaign</h1>
<p>Influencer marketing is a form of collaboration where a company works together with an influential person to promote their products or services. Originally, celebrities were used as the original influencers. In today’s world, however, companies use social content creators as they have more audiences and provide them with valuable information about brands.</p>
<p>This new form of influencers comes with dedicated audiences and followers on their social media platforms; thus, they are known as social media influencers. Millions of brands and consumers currently trust these people. It turns out that 86% of companies used influencer marketing in 2018. Read on to find out how to cultivate an influencer and how to optimise them to suit your social media campaign.</p>
<h2>Why Use an Influencer for your Social Media Marketing Campaign?</h2>
<p>Influencers for social media marketing can be found on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. To find them, you may conduct a hashtag search to see who is already posting your brand or something similar to that. You may also find them in their marketing platforms and blogger outreach program.</p>
<p>However, your search doesn’t end there. It would be best if you found who has a lot of followers and can engage them with quality and exciting content. It would also be in your best interest to find an influencer who has a reputable name lest you end up dragging your company’s name into the mud and lose both potential and regular customers.</p>
The following are ways in which you can find a reputable influencer for your business.
<h3>1. Find one who has Similar Values as your Brand</h3>
<p>The crucial part of preserving your brand’s reputation is finding an influencer who will uphold a good reputation about your business. In that, you need to choose one who shares your values and tone. As such, you need to determine if their ideas and how they portray them match with your brand’s value.</p>
<p>To do so, you may:</p>
<ul>
<li>Research the kind of content they create, promote and share on their channels</li>
<li>Look at their history and ensure that there’s nothing that can harm your brand’s reputation</li>
<li>Maintaining a relationship with an influencer will also allow you to freely share your values and morals with them, which will help you promote your brand’s task</li>
</ul>
<p>For instance, if you are looking to promote medicine, you ought to go with an influencer who only whose values include providing a suggestion of quality drugs to their audience. This means that by no means should they advise people to go for a particular type of medication for monetary purposes.</p>
<h3>2. Avoid Mismatched Relationship</h3>
<p>An influencer can be utterly useless if your business and audience appeal to have nothing in common. As such, you need to choose an influencer whose target audience can be influenced by your products and services.</p>
<p>To find an influencer who appeals to your target audience, you may:</p>
<ul>
<li>Determine your audience’s interest and needs</li>
<li>Find an influencer who has these elements</li>
</ul>
<p>For instance, if you are selling meat, your influencer’s audience should not be vegetarians. Likewise, you cannot work with an influencer whose target audience is seniors while looking to sell entertainment gadgets like play stations and video games.</p>
<h3>3. Determine the Important Metrics</h3>
<p>While one of the vital metrics you need to look for in an influencer includes his audience, don’t be fooled by large numbers. A following of hundreds of thousands of people doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is paying attention. What you should look for is how the influencer and the audience engage with each other.</p>
<p>A right way of measuring engagement between the audience and influencer include:</p>
<ul>
<li>You should measure click-throughs on the links included on their social posts</li>
<li>Read the comments and feedback that the audience provides and see if they are trying to contribute to the conversation</li>
</ul>
<p>You may come across a specific influencer with a large number of followers, but the significant number of these followers doesn’t know much about the site. Some may have been interested at first but lose interest when the website becomes boring.</p>
<h2>How to Cultivate the Perfect Influencer To Fit With Your Social Media Marketing Campaign</h2>
<p>Influencers for social media marketing are the key to increasing traffic to your websites, creating brand awareness and generating sales. However, this doesn’t mean that every influencer you come across is right for your business or will help you create sales. As such, if you want to succeed with your influencer marketing campaign, you need to pick one who will make your social media marketing campaign successful.</p>
<p>The following are ideas on how to find the perfect influencer for your social media campaign.</p>
<h3>1. Align your Goals</h3>
<p>The perfect influencer for your social media marketing campaigns can help you achieve your goals. Your goal must be clearly outlined in your marketing strategy if you want this form of marketing to work. Some of the common objectives include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Creating brand awareness </li>
<li>Increasing sales</li>
<li>Building brand identity</li>
<li>Generating customer loyalty</li>
<li>Building a large audience</li>
<li>Link building</li>
<li>Engagement</li>
<li>Lead generation</li>
</ul>
<p>After defining your marketing objective, you may look for an influencer who is more likely to help you achieve positive results. For instance, if you want to create brand awareness, look for an influencer who has a large following and knows how to engage their audience.</p>
<h3>2. Find the best Influence for the Type of Campaign you want to Run</h3>
<p>Cultivating the right influencer is the key to the success of your business. Influencers can be divided into five categories: mega, macro, micro, Nanos, and advocates. Each of this type provides several advantages over the other.</p>
<ul>
<li>Nano—this type of influencer is a professional but has up to 5000 followers who they engage.</li>
<li>Mega—think of notable celebrities in the music, sports, or movie industry. They are paid to post a brand’s product. They have a massive audience and can be very expensive.</li>
<li>Macro—these are just people with a massive audience; they may include bloggers or bloggers. They are quite like celebrities but don’t have an enormous reach.</li>
<li>Micro—these people have more than 5000 followers and may also be in the blogging or vlogging industry.</li>
<li>Advocates—this kind of influencers are people who speak positively about a brand. They are the most loyal customers or affiliates.</li>
</ul>
<p>To choose between these kinds of influencers, you should consider what kind of reach your brand needs. For instance, if you need to introduce a new product to the world, you may go for mega influencers. Likewise, if you want to reach a specific group of people like parents with newborns, you may go with Nano or micro-influencers.</p>
<h3>3. Working Criteria</h3>
<p>When choosing the perfect influencer for your social media marketing campaign, it’s imperative to pay attention to the industry they represent and ensure that it matches your brand’s sector. Those who are in the same niche as you are most likely going to pass your message to your target market effectively. For instance, if your company manufactures baby well, look for parenting influencers as they influence the best group of people for your quest.</p>
<p>To reach such an influencer, you should:</p>
<ul>
<li>Perform a target analysis to understand your audience, their interest, and needs.</li>
<li>Find out what sites target audience visits, which will help you identify non-industry related influencers that they follow. In doing so, you will understand more about them and help you create better connections.</li>
</ul>
<h3>4. Find those who Promote your Competitors</h3>
<p>Among the ideas of growing your business, is emulating what your competitors are doing to increase their sales. This idea also applies to choose the perfect influencer for your marketing campaign. In that, it means that you can browse industry-related hashtags and look for influencers who are working with brands similar to yours. These influencers are best as they have experience with products like yours and the right audience to target. They can share your content or products alongside some of the most sought after brands in the market.</p>
<h3>5. Understand their Authority</h3>
<p>An authentic influencer is one who provides relevant content on their pages. They also can engage a broad audience and cultivate a relationship. Such influencers can reach a broad audience and urge them to try your products or services. To find such an influencer, you need to perform an analysis and evaluate their authority.</p>
<p>Some of the ranking factors to check out include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Their number of followers</li>
<li>Engagement rate of their audience</li>
<li>The rank of their website</li>
<li>Quality of the content they post</li>
<li>The depth of niche coverage</li>
</ul>
<p>For instance, if you want to generate loyalty from your audience, you may end with an influencer who is well-versed with customer engagement techniques. On the other hand, you can create brand awareness by looking for influencers with many followers. Their authority here is to make your products known by thousands of people, which can increase conversion.</p>
<p>From speaking your audience language to choosing the right platforms to showcase your products and services can be challenging. This work is best left to influencers as they have the means to increase brand awareness and strategies to help market new products to the right group of people. Some of these professionals have vast knowledge on how to engage people, where to find them, and what to post to keep them interested.</p>