How Does a Brand Choose the Right Influencer? A Strategic Breakdown

However, finding the right influencer who will promote a brand successfully requires time, effort, and strategic thinking. Once done properly, an influencer marketing campaign has all chances to bring the expected results, increase brand awareness and generate leads, and even earn the consumers’ trust. But the lack of proper preparation may lead to the opposite result and become a significant waste of money. Make things easy with a KOL agency!

What is the way brands choose the best influencers for their campaigns? Here is the algorithm.

Everything Begins With Understanding Your Brand

The brand has to think within itself and get some idea about its goals before taking up any activity on social media or searching for an influencer. It should start by defining its objectives, target customers, and other important factors associated with the brand.

Here are some points which require attention. For instance, if you want to promote a luxurious beauty product among people aged about 30 years, it makes no sense to choose an influencer who could attract such consumers but instead market a colorful beverage to the college crowd.

The brand image is another point of concern. If your brand is elegant and ambitious, there is no way that you can work with influencers who are capable of generating irrelevant content for your brand.

More Important than Following Is Audience Demographics

This is the major mistake many brands make in influencer marketing campaigns.

A potential influencer who has 2 million followers might seem very attractive. However, if 60 percent of these followers have nothing to do with the product or the demographic that the brand represents, then it becomes an issue.

More: What does an influencer do?

According to the 2023 report of Influencer Marketing Hub, engagement rate is said to be among the most important metric for brands when selecting the right influencers — even before reach. A good example of an influencer with more engaged followers would be someone with 50,000 followers than the one with 500,000.

Speaking particularly of Malaysia, there seems to have been a shift in focus for brands, moving to micro-influencers (10,000-100,000 followers).

Content Quality and Consistency Counts

It is important to always perform an audit on the content before approaching the influencer. This should involve examining the influencer’s content within the last 30-60 days. Here are some questions to ask:

• Is the influencer visually consistent and do they have a visually appealing profile?
• Does the influencer communicate and react authentically in the comments section?
• Are the posts that involve sponsored products natural? Are the posts too forced?
• Are there consistent posting days?

It is better not to cooperate with influencers whose posts lack consistency either in the schedule or in content. Authenticity is the most valuable thing when developing social media marketing campaigns.

Relevance

Your product’s association with the niche of the influencer you are going to partner with is vital. For instance, when working with a fashion influencer who promotes a business software, the marketing campaign will be meaningless.

On the other hand, the relationship with the niche does not have to be significant and can even be irrelevant, while it may still work effectively. The relevance of lifestyle must also be kept in mind here. Therefore, working with the fitness influencer to advertise organic products will be highly relevant.

This is precisely the reason why brands collaborating with Kollysphere and others first have to find out who their audiences are. It is done not arbitrarily, but on the basis of informed decisions.

Finding the Right Platform: Where Do Our Audiences Live?

Not all platforms serve well for different brands equally. In the first place, we have to ask ourselves where do our audiences live?

– If we want to engage the youth generation (Gen Z and young millennials) in trying out new products, then TikTok is the right platform for us.
– Instagram is still valuable for fashion, lifestyle, beauty, and travel for millennials.
– YouTube is the platform for long-form videos, tutorials, and storytelling.
– Facebook is very popular with the Malaysian audience ranging between 30 and 50 years old.

Based on the recently released Malaysia 2024 Digital Report by DataReportal, the number of social media users in Malaysia stands at 29 million. Some of the most widely used social media sites include YouTube and TikTok. Both have shown steady yearly growth.

Top brands select an influencer and also choose a platform reaching their targeted audience.

Authenticity and Brand Values Fit

Today’s audiences are very smart. Consumers know how to detect the superficial nature of collaborations a mile away. For this reason, more and more brands are moving away from numbers and looking at their own personal values.

Is the influencer actually using your product? Are his/her lifestyle decisions, viewpoints, and advocacy aligned with your brand’s values? If you’re promoting sustainability, it would be contradictory to collaborate with an influencer who often talks about the negative effects of fast fashion and wasting money.

Such an approach is also important to help brands avoid any future scandals. It is necessary to conduct research concerning past collaborations, social media activity, and even comments before reaching out to an influencer.

Past Collaboration Experience

One can glean much information from examining previous collaboration experience. In case the influencer has always collaborated with competing brands in the past, there might be exclusivity or credibility issues to consider. Conversely, if the influencer previously collaborated with other influencers or brands from a complimentary business sector, then it is a good indicator.

It is also important for the brand to evaluate how successful these campaigns have been. This includes measuring the number of likes, whether the engagement with comments was positive, whether followers asked any further questions regarding the product. Such influencers can be said to be influential and impactful.

Well-established agencies such as the Kollysphere agency keep databases of past influencer performance in various industries, and this allows for quick research for the purposes of collaboration.

Budget and Return on Investment

Firstly, I am going to talk about budget, which is going to be an important topic. Here comes the crux of the matter: budget will definitely be a concern. But here is something that most businesses overlook while considering influencer marketing: budget isn’t everything, and you need to see other parameters too to decide whether your marketing strategy is worth it or not. Costs may vary depending on various factors, including but not limited to platform, number of followers, engagement, content, and exclusivity.

A celebrity influencer may charge a huge fee, ranging between five-figure and six-figure numbers, per post. Macro-influencers may demand a few thousand dollars per collaboration, while micro-influencers may demand anywhere from a hundred dollars to nothing at all, considering only product collaboration.

In short, it depends on budget and how it should be spent in light of goals set for the marketing campaign. If it is brand awareness, the budget will go high. But if it is sales, micro-influencers are preferable.

Influencer Relationships vs. One-Time Campaigns

Brands have now realised that forming long-term relations with their chosen influencers works best than one-off posts. This way, whenever people see the influencers post about that specific brand, it becomes more of a natural association than something that feels like an advertisement.

This also allows enough time for the influencer to learn all about the brand, from its values to its products. The content will be of higher quality, since the influencer will genuinely appreciate everything about the brand.

There are many ways in which brands can develop long-term relationships with influencers; such relationships can include ambassador roles, exclusive collaborations, and more. These are things that the people working on events-based marketing services already know how to do.

Take Kollysphere events, for example. They help create unique experiences that allow the influencers to form genuine relationships with the brand.

Using an Agency Streamlines the Whole Process

For brands who don’t have their own influencer marketing team, which is true of most of the brands, working with an influencer marketing agency is the best way to go.

The agencies always have their influencers at hand, along with other resources such as knowledge, experience, and negotiation capabilities.

The brands will only have to think about creating while the agency does all the necessary work.

Choosing the Right Influencer Partner Is No Child’s Play

All things considered, choosing the right influencer cannot simply be one of many steps you should take in your marketing plan. This person will become part of a strategic alliance and any material produced by him/her under your brand’s name will represent your brand’s image.

Do your research. Don’t just go by numbers. Know your market, know your influencer’s content, know what they stand for, and know their track record. If you need advice, seek out people whose expertise lies in such matters. Because a good influencer partnership can really make a difference.