Marketing campaigns in general start with a clear vision and goals in mind; influencer marketing campaigns aren’t any different. Once the objectives are set, the team can start looking for potential creators. In some cases, they already have a few individuals under their radar who seem a good fit with the brand’s ethos and are perceived as authoritative voices in their niche.
Yet, the road from a list of promising names to launching a campaign is paved with meticulous evaluations and careful decisions. Brands mustn’t only check a few social media stats or pick influencers by their popularity or size. They need to find partners whose ideas align with the brand’s core values, whose content resonates with the target audience, who reach the established goals and produce measurable outcomes.
Our comprehensive guide covers 10 points that help brands and agencies navigate through the crucial and sometimes overwhelming process of influencer vetting and approval. It will help your brand minimize the risks, maximize success, and provide you with a blueprint for future creator selection.
1. Niche Relevance
An important - if not the most important - point you must consider is niche relevance. When looking for influencers, search for individuals with extensive knowledge about your brand or industry. No matter how tempting it is to work with a celebrity who has a huge follower base on TikTok or Instagram, if they are not familiar with your niche, their endorsement will come off as dishonest. Additionally, their followers may be less interested in what you can offer than the audience of a content creator who is focused on your industry.
The importance of niche relevance:
Niche relevance will ensure you reach targeted audiences, who can be potential customers.
The collaboration will be smoother because you both understand the industry.
The promotions will be more authentic and natural if your influencer has deep knowledge of your sector.
Their expertise will strengthen your position in the market and represent you as a credible company.
How can you assess niche relevance?
Logically, you need to evaluate the influencer’s content. Whether they are blog articles, videos, social media posts, or podcasts, they must be about topics related to your industry. For example, if you’re a home improvement retail store, pick content creators who post about, DIY, remodeling, and refurbishing. Focus on visuality: many DIY influencers share how-to-videos, and before and after photo posts on social media.
Analyze their expertise. A topic expert’s content generates high engagement and views. People naturally turn to these individuals for advice or want to learn about their opinions. Plus, they will use specific terminology and language relevant to your niche naturally in their storytelling.
Take a look at their bios. Many influencers display their area of interest or expertise in their bios. On Instagram, many creators share their personal websites. On YouTube, check whether they organize their videos into themed playlists.
2. Alignment with Brand Values, Mission, and Vision
Another cornerstone to maintaining brand credibility and integrity is partnering with influencers whose personal values match your brand’s core ideas and can identify with its mission and vision. For example, Patagonia, an outdoor recreational clothing brand uses recycled materials for their products. Protecting the environment and decreasing their carbon footprint is one of their core values. Therefore they regularly team up with climate-conscious hikers, climbers, and outdoor enthusiasts.
The importance of brand value alignment:
A collaboration between your business and an influencer with similar views may turn into a long-term, fruitful partnership.
Because of your shared goals, you can help strengthen each other’s reputation.
When you find an influencer, who genuinely believes in your products, their endorsements won’t look forced.
How to ensure alignment with your brand values?
Analyze their behavior, public statements, or interviews on and outside of social media. Do they consistently advocate for the same social issues your brand does?
Identify recurring themes the influencer talks about or causes they support. Are they in line with your mission and beliefs?
How do they communicate with their followers? What style do they use for content creation? If their tone resembles your brand’s then they’ll be a strong fit for your campaign.
3. Past Partnerships
Analyzing past partnerships and campaign performance provides you with insightful information about how effective and professional the influencer is. Former collaborations help you estimate how the creator will perform in your campaign.
The importance of past collaborations:
The way they performed in former campaigns helps you understand what results they can bring you.
You can identify their strengths and weaknesses, or patterns in their performance.
Compare their sponsored and non-sponsored content. Does their sponsored content seem organic or too promotional?
Do they team up with companies in the same industry, or do they work with brands in different sectors for the sake of money?
How can you evaluate past brand partnerships?
You can explore the influencer’s posts and look for brand or product mentions on all the platforms they are active on. Then you can dive deeper into the nature of these mentions. Were they organic or sponsored? How natural was the sponsored content compared to the organic? Compare the effectiveness of various content formats and platforms.
Check how the content has performed. Did they receive a lot of likes and comments? Did many people watch the videos? What was the audience’s reaction to the posts?
Did they endorse businesses from your sector or a related field? Are they all different brands or did they engage with the same companies multiple times? If an influencer worked together with one brand numerous times, that indicates their collaboration was successful and they managed to deliver high results.
4. Legal Compliance
Closely related to past partnerships is checking whether the influencer follows social media guidelines and regulations in terms of disclosure. Do the creators cite other people's intellectual property if they use it? Transparency in advertising is crucial to maintain authenticity and keep the audience’s trust. Besides it will spare you from future legal issues and penalties.
How to check whether the influencer adheres to copyright and disclosure rules?
If you find they cooperated with other businesses check if and how they displayed that on social media. Content creators must adhere to local regulations and platform guidelines when they advertise a brand’s product. For example, they can add the so-called paid partnership label to Instagram posts, and the paid promotion label to YouTube videos. They may use various hashtags such as #ad or #sponsored in their captions.
Examine whether the influencer has a history of violating copyright issues. Using intellectual property, be it a stock photo or video, music, stats, or text without the author’s licensing will cast a bad light on the influencer as well as on you.
By considering the above four points, you’ll ensure that your collaboration and the promotions will be authentic. Your brand will maintain or even increase its credibility because you work with individuals who know your business or your niche and they champion the same ideas and beliefs you stand up for. Make sure their past collaborations were built on genuine interest and not merely transactional.
5. Audience Demographics and Psychographics
Without the right viewers, your campaign won't accomplish its goals, hence you must approve of creators whose audience overlaps with your target customers. For this, you must understand both the objective, statistical, and behavioral aspects of your audience. This is where audience demographics and psychographics enter the scene.
The importance of audience demographics and psychographics:
Audience demographics include age, gender, location, language, marital status, educational level, occupation, ethnicity, and income. Think of them as factual traits that describe your audience. They help you understand a lot about your audience such as what age range is interested in your services. How much would they pay for your products and where do these people live? However, they won’t reveal the reason behind their actions and behaviors.
Audience psychographics, however, fills this gap. They go beyond the basic facts and provide information about your audience’s attitudes, values, lifestyles, motivations, personality traits, interests, and hobbies.
How to assess audience demographics and psychographics?
Use tools. Native analytics features of major social media platforms give insights into followers’ age, gender, location, and language. Third-party tools provide even more data, advanced demographics stats like estimated income, education, and audience interests. These tools may be social media analytics tools or influencer marketing platforms, like HypeAuditor. Our influencer reports break down the audience by various metrics including gender, age, location, language, income, education, and interests among others.
Audience location is broken down by country. You may choose a segmentation by states and cities (from HypeAuditor’s influencer report)
Audience grouped by age and gender. You can check the audience’s ethnicity and language as well (from HypeAuditor’s influencer report)
Educational level and marital status are displayed in HypeAuditor’s influencer report.
Get informed about the audience’s interests and estimated incomes from HypeAuditor’s influencer report.
6. Engagement and Reach
Among the many performance indicators engagement, and reach are two key ones many brands are curious about. While both are crucial, each metric fulfills different campaign goals.
The importance of engagement and reach:
Engagement refers to a type of audience interaction a content receives. The most popular engagement types are likes, comments, shares, and saves. Engagement indicates how interested and responsive the audience is and shows how well the influencer can capture the audience’s attention with their content. A sponsored post that generates high engagement is an indication that an influencer can effectively communicate a brand's message.
Reach presents the number of people who saw an influencer’s content. The more people see the promotion the better the influencer is in exposing your brand to the public.
An influencer with a high reach and lower engagement is perfect for mass awareness campaigns. For example, if you want to introduce your brand or a new product on a new marketing channel, consider the influencer’s reach first and then the engagement.
A creator with high engagement but low reach may be ideal for niche or targeted campaigns. If you aim to increase conversions then check the influencers’ engagement first and then their reach.
But! Always examine the follower quality because high follower numbers may indicate the influencer bought fake or spam accounts.
How can you evaluate engagement and reach?
Ask the influencer for data. Since most platforms provide analytics, influencers can give you the engagement and reach stats of their posts. You can also request them to send you their follower growth rate chart. This allows you to visualize how fast the audience has grown.
Explore influencers’ posts manually. It is a legit approach, but very laborious and stressful. You can comb through influencers’ posts and videos one by one and count the number of likes, comments, and views.
You may calculate the engagement rate from the accumulated data. Instagram ER is calculated by dividing the number of likes and comments by the number of followers and multiplying the number by 100. As an example, if an influencer has 10,000 followers and their post received 310 likes and 35 comments then their post’s ER is 3.45%. You can calculate an average ER for 10 posts or all the posts published in 30 days in the same manner.
Benchmark engagement rates to industry standards. HypeAuditor’s latest report on the state of influencer marketing lists the average ER for each influencer tier based on their platforms.
Again, use tools. When just starting influencer marketing, many businesses consider gathering data manually as their best option. Combing through several platforms and recording and calculating data can be a nightmare, especially if you need historical data. They soon realize they need a more robust tool to ease the process. Besides detailed performance analysis, influencer marketing platforms provide you with graphs and charts so that you can visualize an influencer’s engagement over time, likes spread, and many more.
Engagement rate and average likes and comments showcased in HypeAuditor’s influencer reports.
If the account is old enough HypeAuditor’s influencer reports feature historical ER.
Likes spread shows the likes dynamics of the 12 most recent posts. Some posts are more liked while others are less.
Don’t equate the total number of followers with reach. The actual reach can vary on numerous factors, from the size of the influencer, and the topic to the platform. A make-up tutorial reaches more people than a video about investment advice. To be sure, ask the influencer how many people their past 10, 20, or 30 posts reached and calculate an average from that.
7. Content Quality and Posting Frequency
An influencer’s high-quality content about your brand will elevate your business and enhance brand perception. Frequent posting ensures continuous engagement and the promotions appear regularly in users’ feeds and discussions.
The importance of content quality and posting frequency:
Quality can be measured and determined in various ways. If the influencer relies on visuality and imagery make sure the photos are well-framed, not blurred, and the colors and backgrounds are aesthetic. With videos, review the sound and the editing. If you work together with bloggers, make sure their articles are on-topic and informative. In any case, check that the influencer or blogger maintains high quality in every content piece.
Creators who post on social media or publish on blogs consistently guarantee that your brand will stay top-of-mind. Social media algorithms prioritize influencers who frequently create and share content. Their posts will be more likely featured on the Instagram Explore Page or among Suggested videos on YouTube.
How to check that the influencer creates high-quality content and posts regularly?
As we mentioned earlier, content can be examined from the production point of view as well as whether it fits your brand’s standards. If you strive for minimalism you must select influencers with identical stylistic features. If you prefer monochrome imagery stay with it. Make sure that the influencer’s style and tone naturally integrate with your brand’s.
Another characteristic of quality content is high engagement. Creators who always publish outstanding photos, creative and original videos, informative graphs, and articles will probably have high engagement rates. Study the nature of these interaction types. Liking is easy, it takes only a click. However, commenting takes time and effort on the user’s part. Moreover, the sentiment of these comments is equally important. Lots of generic messages and emojis might suggest that the influencer uses automated services to enhance engagement.
Yes, frequency is key but consider the social media channel as well. While creators post at least once - if not more times - on TikTok a day, on YouTube they upload videos once or twice a week. Check out what is the norm on each platform.
8. Brand Safety
Working with an external partner can bring new perspectives, creativity, and uniqueness to your campaigns. On the negative side, a collaboration with a celebrity or an influential person may pose risks as well. As the proverb goes: “The internet never forgets!” Just imagine what damage it can cause your brand if you team up with an influencer who has a history of being involved in deceitful actions or posting exaggerated posts.
The importance of brand safety:
Check the influencer’s public behavior and content before you contact them. An ugly scandal, a negative reputation, or a former controversial partnership can cause your brand a huge damage. Protect your prestige by conducting thorough research on them.
Brand safety checks involve whether the influencer complies with advertising and platform regulations. Influencer marketing is often determined as more authentic than traditional advertising. Naturally, creators must maintain this by clearly indicating if they work together with a brand under a contractual agreement.
How can you guarantee brand safety?
Google the influencer’s history. Do a background check on the creator. Were they associated with negative behavior, debates, or outrageous manifestations? Review their content for toxic, offensive, and inappropriate themes. Luckily HypeAuditor’s influencer reports include a brand safety check that examines influencer content for risky topics.
HypeAuditor checks an influencer’s content by 9 markers.
Analyze their sponsored posts and look for disclosure labels and specific hashtags. Safeguarding your business’ reputation involves working with reliable individuals who are familiar with advertising rules and regulations.
When you analyze their content for brand alignment gauge their social views and learn about their personal beliefs. A creator who openly discusses issues and matters that are completely the opposite of what your brand represents will demolish your audience’s trust and alienate them.
Finally, assess their past partnerships. What other companies did they work with? Were those companies involved in any negative PR? Are they your fierce competitors? Would a collab cause a serious rift between your business and them?
9. Platform Suitability
Choosing the right platform for your campaign is almost as important as selecting the right influencer. Each platform has its ruling content format thus attracting a diverse audience in terms of age and gender.
The importance of platform suitability:
Different platforms cater to different people. TikTok is famously popular among Gen Z and a lot of TikTok creators themselves come from a younger age group. Millennials visit Instagram mostly, and Gen X and Baby Boomers prefer Facebook.
Content and engagement types vary across platforms. Short funny videos rule TikTok and the audience typically engages with them with likes. YouTube excels in longer, more detailed videos. It is ideal for how-to videos, tutorials, and product descriptions. Due to their in-depth nature, content on YouTube can trigger discussion among users. Twitter and LinkedIn are two other platforms that are more about sparking conversations. Instagram is known for its visually outstanding photo posts and short videos.
How can you make sure that the influencer’s preferred social media channel suits your campaign?
Get informed about your target audience. The audience demographics and psychographics knowledge come in handy here. Who are your target customers? Teenagers, young professionals, married couples with children? Where do they live and what do they do? By answering these questions you may be aware of whether they like videos or articles, long or short-form content, etc.
Does the influencer have platform expertise? No matter how experienced an Instagram influencer is in creating amazing photos, if you need to create a promotional video. Check whether the influencer knows the platform in and out with its features, algorithms, and updates.
Align your industry with the content. Think about your niche! What content would suit it better? Are you a beauty or fashion brand? Consider Instagram’s and Pinterest's visually stunning images. Are you selling electric bikes? The best way to increase interest in them is to showcase them in action. Ask outdoors and bike influencers to try your bicycle on various terrains and in diverse weather conditions and share their honest opinion about it.
10. Compensation and Budget
Let’s not forget about the budget because you need to compensate influencers fairly and ensure your campaign’s success and high return. Don’t feel upset, however, because every business can find suitable creators regardless of their size, niche, and budget.
The importance of proper reimbursement and budgeting:
Influencers put their talent and skills into creating content that engages the audience, promotes your brand, and maintains their reputation. Yes, a collaboration is a two-way street. Both parties can win or lose big time. Paying influencers a reasonable fee for their contribution shows them that you value their effort and can lead to a longer partnership.
Count on influencer rates when you set your budget. Overspending on them will throw off your financial balance and you won’t have enough funding for other areas. Underpaying them can result in low-quality posts which consequently negatively influence your results.
How to approach fair compensation and ensure staying within the budget?
Understand different compensation methods. A lot of influencers charge a flat fee per post. The rate is based on several factors, such as the influencer’s size, the engagement rate, the number of deliverables, the complexity of content creation, and the topic. If the influencer is open to it, you can remunerate them based on their performance. This entails you paying after a specific number of views, clicks, conversions, purchases, and so on. As a third option, you may offer free goodies, experience, or free attendance at events. Micro-influencers accept gifts as payment but make sure their value compensates for the invested effort. Finally, you can opt for a hybrid model that combines two compensation methods.
Before you start negotiating prices, research the influencer’s performance. Study industry reports on average influencer fees, or use tools, like this free calculator for estimating an Instagram influencer’s prices. Once you have an idea of price ranges, you can start the discussion. Set a reasonable fee you can offer and be honest about your budget limitations if there are any.
Estimate the potential ROI each influencer can bring. If a creator charges higher fees, make sure their value - high engagement, or strong brand alignments - justifies the increased costs.
Consider your campaign’s scope and length, the number of influencers, and the platforms involved before when you define your budget. Make sure you set aside money for unexpected costs, like legal and administrative costs, a sum for boosting well-performing posts, etc.
In Conclusion
From planning the campaign to selecting the ideal influencers requires careful consideration from the brand’s side. We explored ten points that can serve as a guideline for businesses and agencies for assessing potential creators. Using our guide and checklist you can ensure your campaign accomplishes the desired goals and your partnership will be built on mutual understanding.
