How to Find the Right Influencers in Influencer Marketing Using Data?

Having become essential partners for brands seeking to expand their consumer base, opinion leaders or K.O.L (Key Opinion Leaders) take on multifaceted profiles, each with their own particularities. Effectively and sustainably benefiting from the potential of these ambassadors requires first defining a relevant influence strategy with clearly established needs, objectives, and budget.

Who are the players in this rapidly changing ecosystem? How to identify and form quality partnerships with relevant influencers? What pitfalls should be avoided? How to measure the effectiveness of an online influence campaign?

This is what we propose to address in this article.

Influence Marketing or Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing: What Is It?

A communication strategy used for a long time, influencer marketing or word-of-mouth marketing allows a brand to transmit targeted information and promote its products or services through influential people (“e-influencers”) on the web or social networks, to an engaged audience.

The Principle of Online Influence

Using influencers allows a brand to increase its awareness, enhance its visibility on social media, improve its performance, gain new customers, or preserve the trust of its consumers by bringing authenticity and credibility that traditional advertising channels lack, which are often expensive.

Did You Say Influencer?

What Is the Profile of an E-Influencer?

The influencer can use a social platform like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or a blog platform like WordPress, Blogger, etc. They can be considered a media in their own right, thanks to their ability to produce content (text, photo, video, etc.) and distribute it, engage their audience, etc.

Present on the internet, the influencer is an opinion leader for a more or less large group of internet users (or “followers”) who trust them. Considered a source of inspiration, an expert in a given field, or a trendsetter, the influencer can influence the ideas, perception, and purchasing decisions of their community through the creation and distribution of quality content. This ability is based on the trust their audience has in them.

There is no officially established typology of influencers, but it is possible to distinguish four main categories based on the size of the community: nano, micro, macro, and mega influencers:

These figures vary depending on the countries, sectors, and markets concerned, hence the importance of adapting the influence scale according to your ecosystem and also taking into account the engagement rate and conversion rate of influencers. It is also necessary to analyze the alignment of their audience with the target of the products or services concerned.

A Choice Adapted to Campaign Objectives

The Nano Influencer

With a limited and often passionate community, they are very close to their audience with whom they share spontaneous opinions on tested products or services. Despite low notoriety on the web, the nano influencer is highly engaged with their “followers” among whom they enjoy strong credibility and influence.

Why Choose a Nano Influencer?

Your brand has a limited budget and a lot of time or suitable tools, or wants to test a new product or service on a small scale. The nano-influencer represents significant potential allowing you to quickly and easily get closer to your target. Their opinion will be valuable to you.

But…

Ensure the engagement of their subscribers by evaluating their ability to create quality content. Moreover, if you want your campaigns to have sufficient reach, you will need to multiply partnerships to reach as many people as possible.

The Micro Influencer

His notoriety remains limited; however, thanks to his authenticity and proximity, he exerts a quality influence on an active and receptive subscriber base.

Why Choose a Micro-Influencer?

You want to reach an extremely precise and qualified target while maximizing your investment. You have time, appropriate tools, and your primary goal is the trust you want your target to place in you.

But…

Research their areas of expertise and values well in order to engage in constructive dialogue and disseminate a relevant message to their community. Moreover, you will often need to bring together several micro-influencers to maximize user reach and deploy your marketing strategy effectively.

The Macro-Influencer

They are characterized by a large audience and strong notoriety thanks to the creation of quality content.

Why Choose a Macro-Influencer?

You are looking for increased visibility and notoriety with a broad audience without having to manage multiple influencers, and you have a relatively high budget. Your goal is to give your products a certain desirability.

But…

Often represented by intermediaries (agents), the macro-influencer is less available and accessible compared to more modest actors. The authenticity and credibility of their content are also less recognized by their “followers”, partly explaining rarer conversions.

The Mega-Influencer

Considered a social media star, they gather their fans primarily around their personality rather than their content.

Why Choose a Mega-Influencer?

Your goal is to develop your brand image quickly, on a large scale, and you have a substantial budget.

But…

Highly sought after by brands and accessible through specialized agencies, the mega-influencer enjoys low recommendation credibility among their millions of “followers”.

Beware of “Fake Influencers”

These impostors artificially inflate their number of “followers on social media by paying online bots that form fake communities and simulate signs of engagement. According to a study conducted by the American company Captiv8, brands reportedly invested around 174 million” euros at a loss in 2017.

Faced with the scale of the phenomenon, key social networks such as Instagram have reacted by developing an algorithm capable of identifying fake accounts by erasing all fake interactions (comments, likes) and adding a verification request feature for accounts displaying a large community.

Some Simple Tips to Stay Vigilant!

• Check the quality of content generated on the accounts: the editorial line, the tone used, the frequency of posts, and the type of comments regularly shared are valuable indicators.
• Observe the evolution of the number of followers of the account over a given period: an account going from 10,000 to 25,000 followers in one day, for example, seems suspicious.

The Usefulness of Data in Choosing Your Ideal K.O.L

Identifying, contacting, and selecting potential partners is like a real investigation of identified profiles… Prepare to become a Sherlock Holmes of online influence if you don’t have adequate tools!

What Are the Key Criteria to Consider and How to Analyze Them?

Quantitative Criteria for Finding Influencers:

• Audience: the number of followers and their evolution (beware of “fakes”!).
• Engagement with the community (interactions, proximity, …).
• The frequency of posts.
• The socio-demographic criteria of the audience (age distribution, genders, geographic locations…)

Qualitative Criteria for Finding Influencers:

• The relevance and quality of published content (themes and subjects, editorial line, conveyed messages, positioning…).
• The platforms used by the influencer and their geographic location.
• The relationship maintained with other brands and their network of K.O.L (frequency of mentions on other Instagram accounts…).

Automation to Optimize the Process?

AI-based technologies to extract data… To optimize time and manage your social media communication campaign, this mode of operation can be partially automated thanks to the emergence of artificial intelligence-based technologies. Dedicated features are capable of extracting and analyzing data from opinion leaders’ accounts and their audience profiles, and finding the relevant influencer through a matching system: these are the functions of the Favikon software. Other tools for detecting “fake accounts” (Hype Auditor) or tracking publications may be useful for your selection of influencers, as well as “SEO study tools (Semrush…) and” YouTube channel analysis tools.

But They Don’t Replace Human Expertise.

However, keep in mind that these digital marketing assistance technologies remain only supports to facilitate your approach. Human intervention remains necessary for many aspects of an online influence campaign, particularly for researching and selecting the influencer’s profile, contacting them on the platform, negotiating potential compensation, or creating a lasting relationship with your future ambassador.

Marketing Indicators for the Impact of an Influence Campaign

These indicators or “KPIs” (Key Performance Indicators) are numerous, and their relevance will depend on your campaign objectives. Among the most monitored, you will find:

The Engagement Indicator:

It corresponds to all forms of real interactions (clicks, retweets, brand mentions, reactions, shares, etc.) shown by the influencer’s followers following the publication of their content. It is measurable by the engagement rate and the Cost Per Engagement (“CPE”) which informs about the monetary amount invested in each click.

The Traffic Indicator:

This is the generated traffic to your website following the sharing of content published by your K.O.L and can be appreciated using Google Analytics, which will inform you about the total views, session duration, or number of new users…

The Sales Indicator:

This indicator will allow you to evaluate the impact of your influence campaign on your sales volume and calculate your return on investment (ROI).

The Content Indicator:

It informs you about the number of posts published on social media by the influencer during the campaign.

The Visibility Indicator (Reach):

It corresponds to the reach of the publication by informing about the number of unique people who have seen the content published as well as the number of impressions obtained or views of the publication.

Managing Your Influence Marketing Campaign, Yes, But How?

As you understand, influence marketing is an extraordinary lever for your company for various reasons: this communication mode is indeed much less expensive than traditional advertising, while being more profitable: it is estimated that the number of conversions is 11 times higher in the context of an influence marketing campaign than a campaign in traditional media! Today, no one trusts advertising anymore: we all know that what we see in the image is a set of marketing tactics. However, everyone believes in the honesty of their “favorite influencer”, who is often not seen as such. For their fans, an opinion leader is not there to influence, but to share their best advice and good deals in video with their dear audience.

We are therefore witnessing a phenomenon of blind trust of social network users towards their “consumption guru”, which breaks with the mistrust that we have had, for several decades, towards advertising. This reinforced trust inevitably leads to impressive results in terms of marketing indicators: increase in conversions, traffic to the brand’s website, increased awareness, loyalty through sponsorship, affiliation, and promotional codes…

While these benefits of influencer marketing are enticing, setting up such a campaign is not so straightforward: how to target relevant influencers in relation to my brand image? Isn’t there a risk of backlash if the influencer doesn’t belong to the same universe as my brand, or if they or their audience don’t share our values?

And how to manage an entire portfolio of influencers without it becoming too complex and time-consuming?How can I be sure that the influencer talks about my products?

Don’t panic! If all these millions of questions are popping up in your mind, Trustt is here to help you. We don’t just answer your questions… We take care of everything.

Trustt is a solution for brands that want to venture into influencer marketing: with a rich panel of testers and influencers whose precise characteristics we know, Trustt connects your brand with these future opinion leaders who will share sincere and detailed reviews on your own product review platform as well as on social networks. The solution automates your product testing campaigns and lets the magic happen between your brand and the testers thanks to your product’s strengths! Using machine learning technology, Trustt finds the influencers most likely to love your products to guarantee positive reviews, increased awareness, boosted e-reputation, and of course, improved performance and conversions!

In summary:

Several steps are necessary to set up a strategic and effective influencer marketing campaign:

• Define your strategy in advance, the target audience, the most relevant platform, your campaign objectives, your budget.
• Identify, analyze, and understand the influencers in relation to your target audience.
• Take care of your communication with a clear, precise message that corresponds to their profile.
• Combine automation of data processing and analysis with human interaction.
• Specify 3 to 4 performance tracking indicators specific to your marketing campaign objectives.
• Get help from a solution that takes care of everything!