Influencers are known to be ‘an effective tool’ to make your brand become known by many people in a shorter period. That is why the use of influencer marketing gets increasing these days, aside from marketing the product through a traditional way. If you want to hire an influencer so you can popularize your product, you need to know how to evaluate and how to partner up with them. This article will show you the way how.
Evaluating an Influencer: Aspects to Do before Partnering with an Influencer
While choosing your influencer to promote your business, you need to evaluate the quality of your ‘chosen’ influencer. This should be done before you call the influencer and partnering up with them.
However, what evaluations do we need to do? In a simple way, you can call this evaluation as a way to measure the quality of the person you want to hire to promote your product.
What aspects do you need to check? Since influencers are mainly working through social media, their social media’s performance is what you should know. Aside from that, you need to make sure that the influencer has the matching contents with that you are offering. These two are the main aspects of what you need to check in an influencer before hiring them.
- Content relevance
Let’s say you have a brand of cooking utensils. If you want to promote your products, then it would not be a good match if you hire a fitness influencer. It can help, but not as effective as if you partner with an influencer with cooking as their niche.
You need to define your target audience first before finally deciding whether you can hire the person or not. Let’s say, influencer A is a YouTube star. You will need to sift through their contents shared with the audiences.
Also, you need to do a background check. You need to know whether what brands that have been partnered up with this influencer. If your rival has already partnered up with the influencer, then better you choose someone else who is similar in terms of their ‘influence’.
- The social media performance
For this aspect, you need to learn about the influencer’s social media performance. What aspects make a good influencer, if you wonder?
You may start with knowing the total number of followers/subscribers the influencer has. Then, you can start learning about more facts about their social media. You can use an online tool to dig deeper these aspects below:
- How much interaction per follower your potential influencer is making.
- How active the influencer to make posts.
- How well the posts are reaching the audiences.
- How frequent the influencer is engaging with the account through the contents.
- Most importantly, you should know whether the conversations are truly real or just robots.
It doesn’t mean that someone with a bigger number of followers will have better outcome for their performance. Sometimes, what you can get from micro-influencers may outshine the result of that from macro-influencers or even celebrities.
According to a resource, it is said that an account with less than 30k subscriber/follower performs better than influencers’ account with a bigger number of followers. This also leads you to better engagement value and is said that hiring such influencers will be more cost-efficient if compared to macro-influencers.
Once you’re done with that evaluation, you will come into a decision about which influencer you are going to hire. Then, contact the influencer. You may not directly calling/emailing the influencer themselves, as typically influencers have their own managers. You can talk about the business further with them first before finally get into contract signing with the influencer.