Choosing the right influencer for your business to partner with can lead to excellent results, connecting your brand with new customers and increasing sales. However, if their platform or fan base isn’t a great fit for your brand, this can have detrimental effects on your reputation and business.
You can make sure that you enlist the help of a trustworthy, reliable and relevant influencer who enhances your brand image by using the following tips from Forbes Agency Council members. Their strategies will help you learn more about potential influencer partnerships before entering into contracts with them.
Forbes Agency Council members share ways to vet potential influencer partnerships.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Know Your Brand’s Target Audience
First, understand who your audience is. Being thorough in your upfront audience profiling will help to ensure that you choose influencers who will resonate with your audience and brand. Treat the search as you would a job interview: Review influencers’ archived content and study their metrics. There are also companies that specialize in finding brand influencers. It may be worth it to hire them for their expertise. – Megan Devine, d.trio marketing group
2. Perform A Social Media Audit
Brands should do a social media audit on each potential influencer, analyzing their content to see if it is of good quality and cohesive with the brand’s voice. As well as diving deep into their social media engagement, I also evaluate how active they are on their social channels and look at how loyal their community is and whether that community is the target audience of the brand. – Tony Pec, Y Not You Media
3. Review The Comments On Their Posts
In addition to checking their content and audience, look at the comments they receive on their posts. If an influencer is posting about a coffee brand, but her followers are only talking about her hair and makeup, there may be a disconnect. A small group of highly relevant, active followers who will engage with sponsoring (or earned) brands is always better than millions of followers who won’t! – Ilana Zalika, Resound Marketing LLC
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4. Examine Their Interaction With The Audience
Reach isn’t the same as influence. There are many resources out there with superficial follow counts. I would want to know more about their actual interaction with their audience, their level of contact and previous influencer engagements that generated business results. – Douglas Karr, DK New Media
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5. Use Software To Evaluate Engagement
We vet influencers by looking at the authenticity of their engagement and the quality of their posts. There is software available to gauge the rate of engagement and demographics to see if the influencer is relevant to the brand you’re looking to hire them for. We also look for influencers who have quality equipment and informative posts that don’t sound too much like sales pitches. – Logan Rae, Argon Agency
6. Review Websites That Rate Influencers
As the CEO of a global marketing firm, I know what it takes to make an influencer partnership a success. Before partnering with influencers, a good first step is to look at websites that rate influencers. Sites such as Klear.com are great places where brands can check out how trustworthy an influencer is. – Stefan Katanic, Veza Digital
7. Ensure Influencer Values Align With Brand Values
Don’t just do surface research. It’s important to ensure the influencers you partner with have a consistent point of view that is synergistic with your brand values. In other words, they are “walking the walk.” If they say they’re vegan (and you represent a vegan brand), but they have photos of meat on their feed, step away. Also, ensure the people commenting on their activity are aligned with your brand. – April Margulies, Trust Relations
8. Be Mindful Of Positive Reviews Based On Payment
Before partnering with any influencer, companies should first do their research to ensure that their core values align. If your company values honest reviews, for example, you may not want to work with an influencer whose positive review is determined by the payment they receive. This helps set the stage for a mutually beneficial professional relationship based on a common foundation. – Adam Binder, Creative Click Media
9. Discuss Expectations Of Quality And Authenticity
Aside from the common steps of requesting analytics or reviewing them via software, my team takes the time to look into a few different things. We always look to see if the influencer worked with competing brands in the last six months. We also have a conversation about the expectations of quality content and authenticity. Additionally, we discuss everyone’s willingness to create a mutually beneficial relationship for the brand versus a peer-to-peer post. – Olivia Ormos, OO & CO
10. Keep The Lines Of Communication Open
Simply put, communicate with them! Of course, you should also perform due diligence by reviewing their posts and previous campaign work, requesting their stats and average engagement rates on sponsored content and ensuring that their audience is a match with your own, which is not always a given. Still, it’s the ongoing brand-influencer or agency-influencer dialogue that leads to the strongest partnerships. – Danielle Wiley, Sway Group
11. Use A Third-Party Tool And Direct Conversations To Vet
There are many third-party tools out there that will help you not only vet the audience of an influencer, but also give you some rough guidelines on what their rates should be. Does that mean that you can use those tools only? No. You need to use a multi-pronged approach to vet them, including having conversations via email and/or direct message. There is no easy solution; this does take sleuthing! – Christopher Tompkins, The Go! Agency
12. Partner With Someone To Monitor Your Chosen Influencers
It’s important to partner with someone who will monitor your chosen influencers 24/7 during the campaign period. You can run the most extensive background checks with highly sophisticated “filters,” but at the end of the day, influencers are human. Lapses in judgement can happen in a split second, and the blowback for the brand and the harm done to the campaign can be enormous. – Christoph Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
