Top Criteria to Select the Right Influencer for Your Business

Last week, we wrote a blog post sharing our road-tested tips to gain Instagram followers without spending a dime organically.

If you want to gain quick and massive brand/product exposure, you shouldn’t just focus on Instagram. You should consider Influencer Marketing on additional platforms such as RED and Youtube. As we have mentioned in our previous blog posts,  the consumer market in China is expanding quickly, and RED is the most trusted social shopping platform in China because the content created by influencers provides a lot of value to followers. 

Yet, if you are not working with the right ones, it is a wasted investment. Do you think that influencers, with the largest followings, are the best ones? Not exactly.

In this article, we will be sharing others factors to consider when selecting the most suitable influencer for your business/brand.

1. Audience

When you look for an influencer, his/her niche should match with your brand because the ultimate aim of Influencer Marketing is to enhance the awareness of your business to the audience of influencers. For example, if an influencer advocates natural skincare and doesn’t wear makeup, then a makeup brand shouldn’t consider working with them even if they have a large following.

You would also need to investigate the demographic characteristics of the influencer’s audience such as age, gender, location, language, and interests. If your business is a local Chinese restaurant in Vancouver, do you think hiring a Homecook YouTuber located in Sydney to endorse your brand sounds right? Also, Gen X on Social Media might not understand the slang or abbreviations used by Millennials, so you also make sure you are speaking your target audience’s language.

2. Authenticity

The authenticity of influencers is also a KEY factor when choosing your influencer. Some Instagram influencers might have purchased lots of fake followers and post engagements to themselves as prestigious and famous online gurus. The key to authentic influencer marketing is to invite influencers to make genuine product comparisons and recommendations to help drive conversions from their audience. 

RED is the most trusted social platform based on authentic content like product comparisons and reviews, the smart algorithm is optimized to promote content that users will genuinely find interesting and authentic. This is why you see some users with a small following but may have massive engagement on a single post because the algorithm identifies that post as valuable content. 

3. Engagement rate/Conversion rate

Apart from the size of the following, we argue that the engagement rate is even more important as it is the measurement of the interaction between influencers and their followers. When you see followers are genuinely invested in the influencers, they would like, save, and share the posts, and leave comments. That also indicates that branded content is more likely to make an impression too. If an influencer has 150K followers but an engagement rate that is equal to 1000 active followers, then it doesn’t do much for your brand.

RED uses recommendation algorithms to match high-quality content to the most relevant audiences. Also, when influencers create content with your products/services they can also include the product/service tags so audiences can click on the tags and buy directly from the in-app store.

On RED, we can easily calculate the engagement rate because the number of likes, comments, and even saves are publicly shown! This gives you more data to work with when evaluating an influencer’s effectiveness. However, you cannot track the engagement rate on an influencer's Instagram profiles, so you can always ask the influencer for their media kit or use influencer marketing software to find out. 

Excerpts from @dailycici and @李佳琦Austin

4. Price tag

There are two types of incentives for the influencer: monetary and nonmonetary. Pretty self-explanatory in that they are either paid or unpaid. For unpaid influencers, you would offer your product, service, or experience to the influencer in exchange for their services. Some influencers might charge high prices if they have a valuable personal brand (ie. an award-winning celebrity), high engagement, industry expertise (ie. Iron Chef winner). If you want to get the most bang for your buck, make sure you are talking to the right audience in the right language in your niche and pick the right influencer with a high engagement rate! 

Photo from @susurlee

Doing your homework could save you money and will definitely get you better results.

If you are looking for the most updated news and insider tips to maximize your performance on both English and Chinese Social Media platforms, stay tuned to our weekly updates and follow us on all of our social media to stay connected. We will be providing a lot of valuable insights and content to you every week!