You are staring at your platform. You have used the pretty widgets and sliding scales to pick out a lovely set of influencers, all of whom meet your baseline criteria. From a pool of thousands (maybe millions!), you’ve narrowed down your influencer pool to a few hundred. You see rows and rows of smiling faces.
Now what?
The reality is that selecting the right influencers for your program is both science and art.
Your tech solution can provide you with influencers who meet all of your parameters, say, a group of women who are all the right age, live in the right areas, have the right interests, and have great engagement rates. That’s science.
Similar to doing a LinkedIn search for your next hire.
You would never hire someone directly from a LinkedIn profile without actually vetting them first.
But that’s what you’re doing if you select influencers from a tool simply based on the science of searchable data.
How do you decide which of these influencers is going to be a true brand fit? How do you make sure you’re investing in someone who will tell your story well, match your vibe, and stay brand safe? And on budget? And on time? And not be difficult? And totally love your product?
That is the art. No matter how advanced technology may be, there is no algorithm for “brand fit.” True brand fit requires nuanced human evaluation. And while nuanced human evaluation sounds labor-intense and challenging, we have a highly effective solution.
HOW TO HAVE THE BEST OF BOTH ART & SCIENCE: THE TWO SECRETS
- Don’t tell.
Don’t tell an influencer they’ve been selected for a program and hope that they’ll be interested enough to participate.
Instead, identify potential candidates and invite them to apply to be part of the program. This immediately changes the conversation and the selection process. - Ask.
When you invite influencers who meet the scientific requirements to apply for the program, you efficiently and effectively learn so much more about who will be a good brand fit.
Asking even simple questions yields extremely valuable results:
- Why would you like to participate in this program?
- What’s your experience with this product?
- Have you ever worked on a program like this before? How did it go?
With these two simple adjustments to your selection process, you can learn about an influencer’s voice, passion, and brand interest (or lack thereof). At CLEVER, asking these questions has been one of our most valuable differentiators. Now, we’re giving YOU a new way to see them, too!
We’re thrilled to announce our enhanced, interactive Influencer Selection Dashboard. In addition to being able to see our network’s demographic and channel-specific data, you can also peruse the answers to your program application questions. We even give you access to our project managers’ notes about influencers (kind of like multi-round interviews!).
We’re confident that this process of influencer selection is the best way to evaluate program participants, and are excited to share our new dashboard with you. To learn more, request a demo of our Influencer Selection Dashboard.
