Brand promotion: how to select and partner with social media influencers
Partnering with social media influencers can promote your brand and bring product awareness. To create an influencer marketing strategy, a PR practitioner must do the following: determine your goals, understand your targeted audience, consider relevance, reach, and resonance, and compile a short list of influencers. Once this is accomplished, it is vital to develop effective content with your chosen influencers and measure results.
PR practitioner, Victoria Finn, collaborates with influencers daily to promote Comrad Compression Socks. “While picking social media influencers to partner with, I first evaluate the specific product launch,” she said. “For example, I work for a compression sock company, and we just launched a performance line for athletes. For this specific collection, my target audience was college athletes, trainers, and workout professionals.” Finn emphasized how it is important to target people related to a new product launch who also have a prominent social media presence.
Authenticity and positive brand feedback are other variables to consider when partnering with social media influencers. “It is important to select influencers who will actually enjoy the product and be excited to speak out about it. Authenticity matters,” Finn said.
Choosing social media influencers needs to be selective. Researching the influencer's PR stunts and news stories is just as important as considering your audience and brand relations with the influencer. If an influencer has a reputation for having questionable ethics, well-known media scandals, or a negative persona, it is important to not work with these influencers. Influencers are supposed to uplift the brand but when collaborating with unreputable influencers, it can do the opposite.
According to Sarah Forester, a PR practitioner and blog contributor, using an influencer database will help navigate influencer profiles. There are many paid platforms including Aspire, Buzzsumo, Followerwonk, Upfluence, and Klear. Using these platforms will help create and filter a niche audience of influencers to evaluate.
Forester says, “When looking at influencers, one thing I look at is how many followers they have to how many likes and engagement they have on their posts. This shows me if their followers are engaged and interested in the posts and content of the influencer. After this is done, I evaluate if their posts align with our company, the product, and brand values.”
When navigating through influencers, it is important to know what other brands they work with currently or in the past. This will help you determine if the influencer’s audience truly aligns with your brand’s targeted audience. It will also save you from time and rejection because you will have a better understanding of what products they generally promote.
Considering these tips and advice, you should be able to effectively select and partner with the right social media influencers.
By Ava Montgomery