Influencer Marketing: How Do You Find Influencers Who Are A Good Fit For Your Brand?

What Is Influencer Marketing?

In a nutshell, influencer marketing is a type of eCommerce marketing when a brand collaborates with an influential person on social media channels to promote a product or service. Brands are flocking to influencers to promote their products and services to dedicated and engaged audiences.

Working with the “social media celebrities” or influencers can be a huge boost to your brand and your sales. But how do you know which influencers will be able to grow and scale your business? That’s what we will dive into in this blog post.

Do I Need to Partner Up With Influencers?

Some of you out there might be skeptical about partnering up with these influencers since they aren’t the usual celebrities that you see on TVs and Movies. A survey by Dana Rebecca Designs found that 72 percent of respondents had made a fashion, beauty, or style-related purchase after seeing something on Instagram.

Once you’ve decided to partner up with influencers, what should be your goal? Your main goal should be wanting people to talk about your brand. When people are talking about your products or services, you are creating these three types of influences: likes, authority, and social proof.

The triangle of influencer marketing goals clearly explains your main goal you should focus on when partnering with influencers. When you are the only one talking about your brand, you have zero online influence. However, as you partner up with influencers and have them talk about your brand, the online influence gradually increases until you reach the peak of the triangle where other people talk about your brand.

Are You Both A Good Fit?

There are a few social media channels to locate influencers and the most popular ones are YouTube and Instagram. I highly suggest checking out influencers’ posts, stories, and videos to have a clear understanding of who the influencer is, what niche they create content about, and their general style of content creation.

When searching for potential partnerships with influencers, you need to take into consideration the following three points:

1. Relevancy – The influencer shares content that your brand and audience can relate to. For instance, if you are selling vegan protein powder, you would search for influencers within the fitness niche, not someone who has a pet channel.
2. Reach – The number of people you could potentially reach through the influencer’s followers or subscribers.
3. Resonate – The potential engagements the influencer can create for your brand. Influencers with large followers or subscribers do not mean anything if the engagement rate is low. For instance, an influencer with 10k followers getting at least one thousand likes and comments triumphs another influencer with 100k followers who only has a few hundreds of engagements for each post.

How To Find Influencers For Your Brand

How do you reach out to potential partnerships with influencers? Once you’ve vetted and decided to proceed with the influencer most suitable for your Amazon brand, you can reach out to them through direct messaging or emails.

Pro Tip: When you first approach an influencer, be sure to do a thorough research on their channels, who their audience is, and most importantly how the partnership could create a win-win situation for both parties.

Influencer Marketing Tools You Can Use

As influencer marketing started to become more popular, the biggest challenge brands ran into was finding the right influencers and managing the relationships. Here are three influencer marketing tools you can use to overcome the challenge of how to find brand influencers:

1. Famebit – YouTube’s branded content platform to connect brands with creators. This is a marketplace that you can easily find partnerships that matter to you, and payments for each campaign are once off.

2. Tapinfluence – Similar to Famebit where you can find potential partnerships with influencers, but with the extra option to monitor real-time performance of your content with analytics that show you reach, views, and engagement across social channels.

3. Inzpire.me – Similar to both online tools mentioned above, but you receive extra support from a dedicated customer success team.

A Friendly Reminder About Sponsored Content Disclosure

It is important to clarify and disclose the relationship between your brand and influencers when working together on sponsored content so the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) doesn't come knocking on your door. A simple action you can take is making sure the influencer you work with clearly discloses that they’re being compensated for promoting your brand by using #ad or #sponsored in their post.

Final Word

Influencer marketing is a great marketing strategy for Amazon brands getting started to penetrate the marketplace and also suitable for established brands to further scale their businesses to the next level. Keep in mind that when searching for potential partnerships with influencers, it is important that they can give you the traction your brand needs or else it’s not worth investing in them. Finally, don’t be afraid to say “No” to influencers who don’t align with your brand and keep moving forward until you have established winning partnerships.