Nowadays, influencers and social media are indispensable when it comes to the marketing of your brand – you simply cannot live without them. Influencer marketing is particularly popular because it adds authenticity to the content you are delivering. Selecting influencers that naturally fit within your brand, while allowing them to hold onto their style means they’re able to create relatable content and in turn, this equates to better engagement.

But just how do you spot the right influencer for your brand? While the advantages of influencer marketing are clear, it can prove to be a wasted investment if you fail to spot the right influencers. It’s important to look beyond simple single-metric definitions such as web traffic and Twitter followers. Assess how influential potential candidates are offline…

Know your audience

Audiences are one of the main cornerstones of any influencer marketing strategy; you must ensure that your target audience is the one following a particular influencer. For instance, if you own a sportswear brand, you must sell products and to do so you decide work with a fitness blogger – you need to understand that not every ‘fitness inspo’ has the same kind of target audience. Some may target older women as their audience whilst others may target young males with different goals.

Reach

In regards to metrics, there are other important factors out there but reach is certainly something to consider. Avoid falling into the trap of just looking at unique visitors as a measure of reach; traffic and followers are only useful in regards to the influencer successfully reaching the chosen target audience of your brand.

If you’re a restaurant owner, a fitness inspo with a small reach is more influential than a photography blogger with 100,000 unique monthly visitors. You must note what other social platforms your customers visit – if you’re a car manufacturer, someone with a large following on Facebook or Instagram might prove more valuable than someone on Pinterest with a large fan base. It’s all well and good analysing their Twitter statistics or using an Instagram Influencer Agency but you must also understand the reason behind this.

Engagement

Now, this is paramount as this is an indicator of how interactive a blogger’s audience is with their content and will be a huge determining factor in the success of this collaboration. Do readers comment, respond and share content? Look at how many readers are regular visitors and how many are new. How much readers engage with influencers and how frequently they return are a huge indicator of how meaningful those relationships are.

Relevance

Of course, metrics are important but it’s also essential that you look at how much the potential influencer’s content would support your messaging – read through their archived posts for a sense of what kind of consumer they are. Just because a blogger posts workout routines, it doesn’t make them a guaranteed match for your sportswear brand. What are you looking for? It’s important to answer this question in detail as content and the audience of an influencer will always be more important than traffic generated.