This new digital age that we are living in has sparked a need for brands to rethink their marketing strategies. It’s not that traditional advertising methods don’t work anymore, but that more efforts are being directed towards digital marketing, and we can understand why. Social media is no longer a phenomenon. For years, we have been spending increasing amounts of time behind a screen, with more and more hours of our day being dedicated to social media.
It comes as no surprise that we now turn to social media influencers when on the hunt for a new product or service. But, why is it so important for brands to be fully analysing influencer profiles? Keep reading to find out why you shouldn’t overlook influencer analysis.
Why influencer marketing?
It’s pretty simple to understand why influencer marketing has become so popular. With so much time being spent on social media, it’s the perfect way to get your brand in front of consumers. In fact, as many as 90% of marketers said that they find influencer marketing to be effective, with the industry expected to grow to be worth $15 billion by 2022.
Other than the clear opportunity for visibility of brands and the incredible return on investment achieved too, influencer marketing has proved to help brands meet a whole variety of goals. It is a low-cost strategy that can reach a whole range of consumers, depending on your target audience.
Think about a newspaper advert, you can’t direct this to a certain group of consumers, right? Well, with influencer marketing, you can make sure that your promotional content is being placed right in front of the correct consumer group for your brand.
When we talk about the ‘right consumers’, this means a niche community, for example. Say your brand sells gardening equipment. With influencer marketing, you can hire influencers within the gardening community that will promote your products to their group of followers within this niche, therefore those most likely to be interested in it.
For some more benefits, take a read of this blog post on how a long term influencer collaboration can help your brand.
Finding influencers
So, before we look at the elements of an influencer profile that are necessary to analyse, let’s briefly go over the step before, that is finding influencers. We keep mentioning the ‘right influencers’ or the ‘right consumers’. Well, essentially we are talking about those that are a perfect match for your brand. With consumers, it’s those that will be interested in your product the most. With influencers, it’s those that align well with your brand or product type, values, and goals.
You can search for influencers through two different methods. One way is to do this directly on the social media platform. For example, you could look for Instagram influencers by manually looking through your business account tags, mentions, and comments, to see if there are any potential influencers. This method is fairly time-consuming, but it’s a great way to see if there’s any influencers that are already a fan of your brand.
Alternatively, you could work with an influencer marketing platform, like Heepsy. By doing so, you can use dedicated search filters to find the exact type of influencer that you are looking for. This is the most effective search method as it is time-efficient and specific to you.
There are search filters like location, size, category, engagement, etc. For example, if you were searching for a micro influencer within the beauty category, from Spain, this is how it would look:
Importance of analysing profiles
Analysing influencer profiles is the most important stage of the process. From an initial glance at an influencer, they may seem like the right fit for your brand. However, there are many elements that tend to be overlooked, which can often result in an unsuccessful campaign. So, let’s look into these a bit further.
Follower growth rate
A misconception within influencer marketing is that reach is the most important thing. However, an influencer could have a large number of followers and a great reach, but these followers may be totally uninterested in their content, or even worse, they could be bots.
By using an influencer marketing platform, you can look at an influencer’s follower growth rate over time. It should look like a steady climb, with no obvious jumps or dips. If there are, then this could indicate purchased followers, or a follow/unfollow technique being used.
Engagement rate
Unarguably, engagement rates are the most important thing to assess with an influencer. This displays the interaction between an influencer and their followers, which will show how interested the audience is in the content. You’re looking for a high engagement rate to ensure that the audience will pay attention to your promotional content.
This is why we say that engagement is far more important than a large following. You could find an influencer with 100K followers, but their followers are totally uninterested in their content. Or instead, find an influencer with 10K followers that are from a niche community with involved followers. This is far more likely to encourage sales and traffic.
Likes and comments
Watch out for a profile’s likes and comments. Here, you can get a better understanding of the authenticity of an audience. An influencer platform will be able to give likes and comments ratios, which will impact the quality score of a profile.
However, without an influencer platform, you should try to spot any unnatural comments, varying likes and comments across posts, or an unexplainable difference between the number of likes and the number of comments. These characteristics can indicate purchased likes or comments from a fake influencer.
Audience insights
One of the greatest benefits of an influencer marketing platform is being able to assess an influencer’s audience insights. This cannot fully be done manually but is such a crucial step to running a successful campaign. It’s easy enough to assume that by finding an influencer that fits with your brand demographic, then their audience will too. But, this is not always the case. Frequently, an influencer will have an audience within an entirely different demographic.
For example, an influencer could be from the US, but their audience is based majorly in the UK. What if your brand doesn’t operate in the UK? Then working with this influencer would lead to your brand being promoted to consumers that can’t actually purchase your product.
Assess audience insights such as location, age, gender, language, and interests, to make sure that an influencer’s followers are a perfect match for your target audience.
Audience authenticity
Finally, you’ll want to understand the authenticity of an influencer. As social media usage is constantly on the rise, and we become more and more dependent on influencer marketing, it’s no surprise that influencer fraud has increased too. It’s difficult to overcome this obstacle, with many marketers facing it on a regular basis.
As noted above, without the use of an influencer platform, you should assess a profile’s likes, comments, and general publishing behaviour. Although, with an influencer platform, artificial intelligence works to understand these suspicious behaviours and provides data to inform us of an estimated percentage of fake or suspicious followers.
Conclusion
Don’t be put off by the amount of influencer fraud that exists these days. As with any marketing strategy, it’s about learning the best techniques to ensure success. Although working with an influencer marketing platform is undeniably the most effective method, it may not be feasible for your brand. If that’s the case, then be certain to not dismiss the importance of analysing influencer profiles manually, using these helpful tips that we have covered.
