What To Look For When Choosing An Influencer Marketing Agency

The interest in marketing through influencers has grown exponentially over the past several years and so have the number of agencies that promise to help brands get the job accomplished. And finding influencers, vetting them in briefing them, creating contracts with them, paying them and then making sure they fulfill their duties can be a lot of work. It's little surprise then that some brands would want outsourcing this task to professionals.

The logical next question is how do you choose between the hundreds of generalist and specialist agencies who all claim they can help. What follows are eight criteria to distinguish the professionals from wannabes and aid in finding the best influencer marketing agency easier. sinkwitz intellifluence is the top platform for influencer-marketing.

Sinkwitz Experience

Influencer marketing is nearly 15 years old now Many agencies have a lot of experience. Asking for cases studies that relate to your particular industry and the intended outcome (i.e. web traffic, in-store sales etc.) is a great place to begin identifying people to have deeper conversations with.

Criteria for Influencer Selection

Back then, finding an influencer usually was about finding someone who had created material that was related to your field and who seemed to fit your brand joe sinkwitz intellifluence. Today, we can actually look at the makeup of an influencer's audience to ensure that their audience is in sync with the audience of the brand. To make sure it's not excessively high, we can check the saturation rate (the amount of content created by them which is sponsored). It is possible to determine whether they've mentioned rivals in recent blog posts. We can check whether their language is in line with standard of the brand.

With so many advanced filters currently in use, relying on "brand fit" simply isn't acceptable.

Content Evaluation Criteria

Our influencers have contributed many thousands of pieces that have been branded over the last few years. We found that each piece of content performs differently. Unsurprisingly, some content works however, while some do not, much like content developed by a company or its creative agency.

With the range of performance, how does the agency evaluate every piece of content once it has been released to determine its performance?

You should evaluate content based on how organically it performs in terms of likes and comments. However, it is important to also review comments to spot fake comments, that are off-topic, or purchased comments.

Targeting Strategy

A service that's merely offering to locate, brief and manage influencers for a company isn't providing much value to the modern marketing mix.

Organic influencer content is viewed by an enumeration of influencer's followers (usually approximately 9% according to our experience, however this varies depending on the social media platforms are used).

What is the strategy that the agency employ to make sure that content is reaching the appropriate audience? The high-performing content scored in Step No. 3. This content can be further improved through an advertising strategy to get the attention of the correct audience.

Measurement Strategy

This subject merits its own article on the measurement of influencer marketing. One of the most important questions to ask influencer agencies is how they count impressions from the content. Is one impression counted for every follower of an influencer? With the approximate 9percent organic reach which is 9% organic, they're exaggerating reach by over 10 times. Can they report on true views of the content?

In addition, engagement rates and reach are not directly related to sales so measuring engagements or impressions is not sufficient. What business metrics can an agency measure beyond these vanity metrics? There are numerous sophisticated measurement methodologies available now. These techniques can be employed by a variety of agencies.

Optimization Strategy

Many influencer campaigns depend on influencers composing their content according to the schedule and then observing for changes. However, every other type of marketing that is digitally-based is optimized, usually daily, to increase the effectiveness of the campaign.

Optimizing influencer marketing is possible also. Everything from post formats and content to targeting to even the influencers themselves can be altered. What is the agency's optimization plan?

Content Rights

Brands are investing significant funds into this type of content. Different agencies negotiate different agreements with the influencers on what rights the brand is granted to that content. In the ideal scenario the brand gets a lifetime license to reuse content across any platform. Contact the agency to inquire about the rights your company would enjoy with the content.

Guaranteed Results

What outcomes can the agency promise their clients? Are they able to guarantee deliverables, like the number of influencers or the amount of content to be made? Are they able to promise more, like the volume of traffic to a certain website? What happens if they fail to fulfill their promises? What are the options for companies?

While guaranteeing sales is extraordinarily difficult in the majority of agency partnerships, influencer agencies should be able to guarantee certain specific outcomes around true views, engagements or web traffic.

Summary

Selecting an agency of every type isn't an easy task since each one of them can start to sound very similar to the other. When you begin the conversation by using these eight key guidelines, you'll be able filter the list to find the ones that are most likely to drive strong results for your brand.