For many of us, influencer marketing has become something of a love affair. Fair enough, it’s been knocking around for some time now but the rise of influencers has brought the industry to the general populous and even invaded the c-suite.
To ensure you gain maximum results from working with influencers, It is vital that you find the right influencers for your brand and build effective relationships with your influencers. To do this, you should spend time vetting influencers before you work with them. In this series, I ask a selection of influencer marketing industry leaders for their insights on how influencer marketing should be done. This time, I find out how they vet influencers so others can glean how to evaluate potential influencers before working with them. They try their best to answer them from a practical standpoint.

How do you vet your influencers?

“We scrape social media websites to identify influencers that meet specific follower and engagement thresholds. Then we have a community team that goes through each account individually to rate content quality. We have 40,000 influencers that we track and 10,000 have downloaded our app to participate in open marketplace campaigns,” clarified 

Elijah Whaley, China influencer marketing and CMO at PARKLU

“Experience gives you a wide knowledge of who is who and what they’re good for but when searching from scratch, I like using Instagram’s own recommendations from talent I already know to vet influencers,” said 

Natalia Cortázar, influencer marketing manager at Procure Worldwide

“I vet influencers carefully. I look at a variety of factors and go much deeper than mere social metrics. I look at the quality of their content, who follows them, whether they use poor language and a host of other factors,” explained 

Tom Augenthaler, influencer marketing consultant

“Analytical tools and common sense,” said 

Owain Williams, founder of Make it Mana

“When vetting influencers, the first step is looking at the brand specification and narrowing down the segment of influencers that match their criteria. We then look at vanity metrics, views, followers, subscribers as a first step. In the more in-depth process we look deeper at everything from past campaign sales, conversions, clicks, engagement, influencer fraud, demographics, authenticity and consistency to ensure the influencers are the right fit and will drive ROI and results,” commented 

Suhit Amin, entrepreneur and founder of Saulderson Media

“Audience first. What is their audience like? We use software to determine how their audience is built up; we then take a look at their content and see if this matches what we are looking for. From there, we would then look at their engagement and what kind of engagement they are getting, and then we’d look at who else they have worked with and how those campaigns were received before we take the leap,” said 

Mark Dandy, B2C marketing specialist and co-founder at Bee Influence

“I vet influencers by following the candidate for two to four weeks to see if I like their style, attitude, the language they use, and how much their followers are intrigued and inspired by them. Those that I still like after following them for a while make my shortlist. Then I interview them by asking questions such as ‘Do they love your product? Have they promoted a similar product/brand recently? How much will they charge and why? When is the best time to post for peak engagement? Do they delete posts after a certain time? Can I keep and re-use the creative you’ll make for me? What do you recommend as the best strategy for these posts?’Then I make my decision based on their answers to those questions,” explained NG aka DearMishuDad

, influencer marketing blogger, speaker and teacher

Keep an eye out for Part 3 of the Influencer Marketing Done Right series to land next week. You can read Part 1 here.

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