How to Find the Right Influencers

There’s no doubt the media landscape is changing with audiences watching content across a range of digital devices and formats. With this, bloggers, Vloggers and YouTubers have became producers, presenters and some have tons of followers and watchers to rival any major primetime television show. As the media and digital landscape evolves, the millennial generation in particular are relishing the opportunity to watch content across a range of devices. Referred to as the five screen generation, “millennials” aged 18-34 are more likely to watch hours of YouTube content rather than sitting down to watch linear television in real time.

So what does that mean for advertisers?

When a large number of people watched television at a certain time, television adverts were highly effective as they could captivate a large relevant audience in one format. With this “digital disruption”, how do you then advertise to a range of people who are watching different content on their own individual devices?

Some YouTuber’s have a large following, along with bloggers who can also have a loyal fan base, similar to celebrities, yet they have a direct relationship with their followers and are seen as more accessible - giving insights into their personal lives. People tend to trust peer recommendations and so having influencers who can vouch for your brand can be more effective than an advert.

What are the benefits of working with influencers for a brand?

 By working alongside influencers you can position your brand in front of a relevant, engaged audience to increase brand awareness. You can harness the power of influencers by either guest blogging on their website, or them blogging on yours and then getting them to share the content with their followers. You can invite them to an event, ask them to review a product or treat them to your product , or even feature in a video for social media promotion.

The most popular YouTuber of 2017 is PewDiePie with over 54 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. When you compare this with the US’s most popular TV series of last year - Walking Dead with 9.6 million viewers, you can see that YouTubers hold a great opportunity for advertisers to capitalise on their large audience following.

How to Find Valuable Influencers

So perhaps you’re wondering how you can find these influencers to work with your brand. It’s important to work with YouTubers and bloggers that are aligned to your brand who have similar interests and values to your company and who have a relevant target audience. A high profile blogger will only want to work with brands that they are interested in and who have company values they like and believe in. Not every blogger will want to work with you. They have worked hard to become a leader within a certain niche so want to keep that position and will access whether you’re right for them too.  Those with a loyal fanbase will also not want to mislead their fans so they will say if they’ve been paid to promote your brand or if their video is an advertorial.

Some bloggers and YouTubers may have a large number of followers or subscribers; however this doesn’t automatically mean that they are influencers. It’s becoming increasingly common now for people to buy subscribers or influencers to appear more popular, in a similar way companies were buying likes in a bid to show consumers had affinity with their brand. This fake endorsement can leave advertisers out of pocket when they are working with these bloggers who are no more popular or influential than anyone else.

As there isn’t a lot of technology, data or metrics out there to assess how influential someone is, apart from subscriber lists and bloggers, it can become increasingly challenging for advertisers to know who is a legit person to work with.

A good place to start is by looking at some of the influencer’s top posts to get an idea of how much people are engaging with the brand. Take a look at some of the influencer’s top posts (i.e., those which earned high social shares) to get an idea of their overall engagement and how much they interact with their audience. Check out how often they post, who they’re promoting and the ranking of their blog.

There are various ways you can seek out influencers, below are a list of sites you can utilise to uncover decent influencers.

Buzz Sumo - This site has a devoted tab for “influencers” where you can find influencers by reach, authority, influence, and engagement.

Followerwonk - Use this site to find influencers under the “search bios” to uncover social authority, Twitter handles and keywords.

LinkedIn – Enter specific keywords into the search box to pull up connections related to your search.

How much does it cost to work with an influencer?

Influencers may not necessarily want financial compensation but they may want rewarding in other ways. Paying them to promote you may seem insincere and some influencers may stay away from it, unless they obviously state that this is a paid for promotion.

Perhaps give them a shout out. Say something like “thanks for the mention” or share their content they write about you. The classic way of getting an influencer to mention your brand is to send them something or offer them a discount or a giveaway.

There are tons of ways you can reach out to influencers and different tactics for finding them. Influencer marketing is a great way of getting your brand noticed, regardless of your sector. Next week, I’ll be talking about how to find influencers for different sectors.

In the meantime if you’d like to get your influencer marketing campaign started, you can get in touch with 10 Digital to help you out.

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