Influencer marketing focuses on partnering with 3rd party individuals to reinforce your brand message to a larger audience. Rather than spamming your customers and prospects with direct marketing, influencers provide a more subtle way to get in front of new audiences.
These users typically have a high level of engagement with their followers, and they are considered to be experts in their field. As a result, they carry a lot of weight with various audiences and can have a significant impact and influence on the purchase journey.
The traditional way of identifying influencers
There are a number of ways to identify influencers. One common method is to use influencer marketing software to automate the process. Most of these software providers make it very easy to identify topical or channel-based influencers. You log into the platform, type in your criteria, select a few filters, hit enter and you’re done.
Topical-based influencers are those who write about or post content related to an industry. For example, if you sell software that protects companies from cyber threats, you would look specifically look for influencers that talk and write about enterprise security.
Channel-based influencers are influential within a particular social media platform, like Snapchat. If you want to reach a larger audience on Snapchat, you would look for channel-based influencers with a large following.
There are other ways to identify influencers, too. You can manually search social media platforms directly like Twitter and LinkedIn. This is a bit more time-consuming than using influencer marketing software, but if you’re in a time crunch, this might be all you have time to do.
A new way to find the most relevant influencers
Another way to find the most relevant influencers is to start with audience analysis. Depending upon your business and what kind of products you sell, you can build an audience of social media profiles based on different variables and parameters that are important. This could include job titles, interests, or even followers of a particular hashtag. You would use a social media intelligence platform to perform this analysis.
For example, if you work for a technology company, you might build an audience of IT decision-makers or engineers. If you work in CPG, your audience might be made up of millennial moms who live in the suburbs and shop at Whole Foods. And if you are in healthcare, your audience might be physicians or other healthcare practitioners.
If you do it right, the audience analysis should uncover their top affinities. An example of audience affinities could be the publications they read, conferences they attend, or podcasts they listen to. It’s calculated by mapping an audience’s social media activity to known interest areas. These are the things that your audience is interested in and also follows on social media.
This is valuable information because it helps you understand the type of media, content, and messages that are going to resonate with them.
The audience’s top affinities will also include influencers. An example of this is if the audience of millennial moms consists of 5K members, and 75% of them follow a specific set of influencers, that would be the group to potentially partner with on a campaign. What’s interesting about this approach is that the identified influencers aren’t usually the same group you’d find using one of the approaches listed above.
What’s the right approach?
There is no right answer. It really depends on your business, what you’re trying to achieve, and how much time and budget you have to spend on influencer identification.
If you want to quickly find a group of people to partner with on a campaign or project, then using influencer marketing software is the way to go. You’ll be able to identify a group of influencers in no time.
If you want to take a more strategic approach and really understand the media, content, and messages that will resonate with your audience, then starting with audience analysis is the way to go. This will help you uncover a different set of influencers that you can partner with to achieve your business goals.