How to choose the right influencers for your brand 

Australia’s screen time is at an all-time high with Aussies spending more and more time on social media. With this in mind, social creators within those platforms have more influence over their audience than ever before. If you’re looking to engage and work with influencers for your next campaign, here’s a few tips to find the right influencers for your audience. 

Identify your target audience: Before you start looking for influencers, you need to identify your target audience. Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests? What social media platforms do they use? Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can start looking for influencers who have a similar audience. 

Begin the search: There are a few options to sourcing influencers. The most suitable depends on your budget and resources. 

• Search within your community: The first approach should be to start by searching within their own social networks and communities as they will be already familiar with your brand and more likely have a genuine interest in promoting it. Look at your own followers and identify those with a significant following or engagement rate. Even consider reactively putting the call out within your socials or database. One brilliant example of this is Sephora Squad. 

• Influencer platforms: Whilst these can be expensive, these platforms are ideal as they allow you to search for influencers within different categories along with identifying them by their location, audience demographics, and more. Some popular influencer marketing platforms include CreatorIQ, Tagger and Klear. You can see a full list here. 

• Search the social media platforms: Start by looking for popular accounts on your chosen platform by using relevant hashtags or keywords.When you come across an account that you feel is a good fit for your brand, all major platforms then allow you to search for similar accounts. TikTok themselves also have a creator marketplace. 

Build your criteria: Based on your brief and target audience you can evaluate each of the potential influencers. Whilst many marketers still consider following to be the key criteria it’s equally important to consider the following;

• Audience quality: Does their audience marry up to your target? Are they even based in your country? Are they real? Most influencer platforms can filter out suspicious accounts nowadays however check yourself for anything suspicious? Like do they receive a huge volume of likes but no comments, or if their audience is based in a market that is totally irrelevant. 

• Engagement: An influencer with a large following but low engagement is unlikely to have much influence over their followers. Look for influencers that receive a high number of not just likes but more importantly comments compared to their follower base to ensure they have a genuine connection with their audience. The smaller the influencer, the higher the engagement rate should be however a good engagement rate is between 2% to 5% on IG and 6% on TikTok however the smaller the influencer, the higher the engagement rate. Here’s a TikTok and Instagram calculator. 

• Look for authenticity: Look for influencers who genuinely use or would use and enjoy your product, rather than those who are just promoting it for the sake of it. Authentic influencers are more likely to have an impact on their followers’ opinions and decisions. Also consider if that influencer could authentically create the kind of content you want? 

Identifying the right influencers for your brand takes time and effort but without doubt it’s the most crucial part of the process. Good luck!