Brand and Influencer Matchmaking: How to Choose the Best Partner to Support You?

Since the meteoric rise of social networks (Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube…) and the rise to power of influencers, implementing influence marketing campaigns has become a major asset for companies and agencies! Thanks to marketing campaigns with an influencer, brands have the opportunity to expand their popularity, reach a wider audience, and increase their sales. However, for this strategy to be successful, you need to know how to conduct an effective search, sort through hundreds of influencer profiles, and establish contact with them. Subsequently, you must be able to manage campaigns while taking into account the needs and desires of content creators and their followers.

Are you a brand looking to collaborate with influencers? Are you wondering whether it’s better for you to directly contact influencers or use a platform to manage the collaboration? Don’t panic! Trustt – in partnership with Favikon – breaks it down for you…

3 Good Reasons to Use a Partner to Set Up an Influence Campaign

1- Selecting the Right Influencers

Choosing the right influencers is crucial to ensure the success of an influence marketing strategy!

Indeed, it’s essential that the influencers you select align as closely as possible with your brand’s values and match your marketing objectives.

However, with over a billion active users on Instagram alone and two billion on YouTube, it can be challenging to find the right influencers for your brand…

That’s why using a platform to choose the right influencers can help you avoid mistakes and make the right choices.

2- Saving Valuable Time

Entrusting the promotion of your products and services to a network of influencers is a real boon for boosting your brand… However, to succeed in your influence marketing campaign, you’ll need to dedicate time and organization!

Indeed, to set up an influence marketing campaign, it’s necessary to go through a large number of steps such as:

• Selecting the right influencer profiles,
• Writing the influence brief,
• Sending products to influencers,
• Managing deliverables (formats, publication dates and frequencies…),
• Analyzing the results,
• Etc.

If you don’t have the necessary time and internal human resources to carry out all this work, it’s preferable to use a tool to assist you in your influence strategy.

3- Obtaining Comprehensive Analyses of Your Influence Campaigns

As with any marketing campaign, it’s essential to measure and analyze the results of your operation to verify that it meets your initial strategic objectives. Collecting and analyzing all this data is not something to be improvised. That’s why relying on a solution to analyze the KPIs of your influence campaigns allows you to precisely measure the return on investment (ROI) of your operations.

The Solutions That Exist to Support You in Developing Your Influence Campaigns

The Ambassador Program

Setting up an ambassador program on your website is a good way to connect with a network of influencers!

An ambassador program aims to recruit prospects, satisfied customers, or influencers to help you develop and promote your products.

Indeed, through the ambassador program installed on your e-commerce site, you will be able to precisely target relevant and quality influencer profiles to try your products and easily connect with them.

The process is simple and saves you time! Influencers are pre-selected based on their responses to a questionnaire tailored by brands or agencies according to product characteristics. As a result, the software already offers you profiles that match your marketing target and brand values, and allows you to deepen your knowledge of these influencers. Additionally, you can access a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the influencer’s Instagram account to best understand their community and performance.

Trustt centralizes this data in a single dashboard. You can thus monitor influencers’ publications and their reach, measure the ROI of your actions, and establish a final report on your campaigns.

Trustt has developed its own tool, SophIA®, a smart matching technology that identifies the right ambassadors for the right products. These profiles are pre-selected based on their affinities with a brand and its products, their potential to engage, contribute, and talk authentically and relevantly about products or services.

The Trustt tool:

• Identifies the most relevant influencer network for you;
• Connects with selected influencers by sending a personalized message;
• Handles the communication of briefs, negotiation, and follow-up throughout the campaign for you, saving you precious time!
• Compiles multiple KPIs in a single dashboard to allow you to precisely analyze all the outcomes of your campaigns.

Collaborating with an influence agency: Is it a good idea?

Hivency, Influence for you, Kolsquare, Reech, Upfluence, Findly, Octoly… So many renowned influence marketing platforms!

These agencies and platforms are adapted for activating micro-influence. However, they remain costly and are based on the principle of “renting” an external community. The brand therefore pays to exploit a community it does not own.

The advantage of the Trustt solution is to allow companies to bypass intermediaries and build their own community. In parallel, the Trustt tool activates other digital marketing levers that work in synergy to help agencies and brands amplify the success of their products and services. Proprietary data, authentic and developed multi-channel consumer reviews, UGC on social networks…

The use of complementary influence tools to manage collaboration with influencers

To select the right influencer profiles and manage your influence campaign, technological tools can be used as a complement.

The influence analysis tool

To help you select the right influencer profiles, there are advanced influence analysis tools on the market, such as Favikon, which provide you with an in-depth report of influencers’ accounts. Thus, you can target influencers according to well-defined criteria such as:

• The influencer’s age range,
• Their location (city/country),
• The languages they speak,
• Their community’s engagement rate.

The influence analysis software also allows you to target other more qualitative elements related to their interests, such as:

• Keywords present in their Instagram biography,
• The most used hashtags.

Moreover, this type of tool allows you to obtain an estimate of the cost of a collaboration with a macro-influencer or a micro-influencer. Finally, using this type of software gives you information on the previous collaborations of the selected influencers. This can be useful to avoid choosing an influencer who has already collaborated with brands similar or competitive to yours. This would have the effect of tiring their audience and making them lose followers!

This information is valuable for best preparing your campaign. It is certainly important to find an influencer whose content matches your brand and aligns with the product characteristics, but it is equally essential to analyze their statistics. However, looking at their number of followers is no longer sufficient today…

What about micro-influencers then?

Working with a mega-influencer does not necessarily guarantee you a high conversion rate. However, it is interesting to look at the engagement rate of content creators. This indicator, accessible on the Favikon tool, gives you an idea of the influencer’s real influence and helps you avoid profiles with fake followers.

In this sense, connecting with a network of micro-influencers is very profitable for a company. Indeed, micro-influencers have a small audience, but one that is very close and has great trust in the content creators. These followers are thus more likely to make a purchase based on the recommendations of micro-influencers. The latter are therefore a real boon for brands and agencies, due to their incomparable engagement rate!