Top 4 Things to Consider When You Hire an Influencer

Influencer marketing can be a highly effective way to reach a larger audience and increase brand awareness. But it’s important to hire an influencer who understands your product and aligns with your core brand values, and this isn’t always easy, especially if you’re new to the world of influencer marketing.

Today we are going to share 4 top tips to help you hire an influencer who can make your campaigns a success. 

Top Tips to Help You Hire an Influencer

When you hire an influencer, there are a few things you need to evaluate to make sure you’ve picked the right person for the job. The more checks you do before reaching out to an influencer, the easier it will be to build a long-term partnership that ensures the success of your ongoing influencer marketing campaigns. 

Here are 4 essential tips to help you understand how to hire influencers in the right way. These tips will guide you so that you can find the best fit for your campaigns and target the right audience, increase brand awareness, and drive higher levels of engagement, traffic, and conversions.

Verify Content Quality & Influencer Voice

The first step before you consider whether to hire an influencer is conducting thorough research on them. This involves reviewing all their past campaigns to determine if their content, style, and voice are relevant to your brand and if it generates enough audience engagement to make your investment worthwhile.

There are a few things to consider here:

• Are they working in the same niche segment of the market as you?
• Do they post regularly? Is it quality content?
• What content formats do they use? 
• Is their content appealing and engaging? Does it resonate with their audience and generate engagement?
• Do their values align with your brand? 

The better the quality of their posts and the more aligned their voice is with the tone of your brand, the easier it will be to deliver powerful, relevant messages that resonate with your target market.

Review Audience Interests & Demographics

Whether you are looking for influencers on Instagram or any other platform, when you hire an influencer, it’s just as important to analyze their audience. 

The best place to start with this is to define the exact type of audience that you want to reach. Think about who your target buyer is and what their interests are. Create a buyer persona if it’s easier. That will help you understand which demographics you need to target and what form of content would best appeal to them. Once you’ve defined that, look for influencers whose audience matches what you are looking for.

Evaluate Influencer Authenticity 

When you hire an influencer, you also need to conduct a series of checks to make sure that their audience is authentic. This is especially important as, thanks to AI advancements, there are all-too-many fake influencers out there who have falsely inflated their audience size by purchasing fake followers and bots. If you end up accidentally collaborating with a fake influencer, it can be incredibly damaging to your brand reputation. 

Here are a couple of clues to help you identify if an influencer is fake:

• Engagement. Review the influencer’s posts to see whether the number of likes, comments, and shares aligns with their number of followers. If an influencer has a large audience but their followers rarely interact with their posts (or they only post generic comments and emojis), then it could suggest that most of their followers are bots or fake accounts. 
• Manually review their followers. What kinds of people follow them? What are their interests? How many other profiles are they following? Do they interact frequently with a range of profiles? 

Alternatively, instead of conducting these checks manually, you can analyze the authenticity of an influencer’s audience by using automated software to speed up the process. 

For example, you can use Influencity's follower quality feature to analyze an influencer’s audience and identify if any of their followers are fake. The platform analyzes a range of factors for this, including an influencer’s engagement rates, follower activities, and how much their followers interact with their campaigns. It then divides an influencer’s followers into two categories: Nice Followers and Doubtful Followers. Doubtful followers tend to be accounts that are either fake, inactive, or bots.

Understand an Influencer’s Reach & Engagement

Finally, before you hire an influencer, you need to make sure you have a clear understanding of what they can achieve in terms of reach and engagement.

An influencer’s reach is the number of followers who could potentially see their content. This includes their direct following and the number of people who might see their campaigns through search results or recommendations. Their engagement level is the number of those they reach that interact with a post once they have seen it. You can either search for this information manually by reviewing their post timeline, or you can use influencer marketing software to automate and speed up the process.

An influencer with high levels of reach and engagement is likely to be far more effective than one who simply has a high following. That’s why it’s so important to dig a little deeper instead of taking an influencer’s audience size at face value. If you put the work in before you hire an influencer, you will stand a much better chance of seeing higher rewards after you have launched your campaign.