How to find an influencer for your brand

Companies often want to partner with influencers and other brands that have large followings, or are in popular demand, to help increase their brand awareness. However, many miss the mark by collaborating with big-names who have no relevance, association or affiliation with their brand.

When looking for a brand partner or ambassador, it’s a two-way street – the ‘influencer’ should want to work with you because they are passionate about your brand and feel it aligns with theirs (and vice versa). Ultimately, you and your ambassador should work as a team towards one goal. This is why it’s extremely important to work with like-minded brands who are authentic and genuinely believe in sharing your key messages. 

Here are a few things to consider when looking for your next brand ambassador:

Do your research

It’s unlikely that you would purchase a car because it’s popular and expensive without conducting any prior research into the car or the brand. This is similar to ambassadors or influencers – often the popular ones are costly and if you're willing to spend money, then you need to make sure you know what they stand for, who they are, and most importantly, whether they align with your brand values.

When conducting research, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Do they embody my brand’s core values and beliefs?
• Is there a common ground that both parties are trying to increase awareness of?

For example, if you are trying to raise awareness on eczema, you would want to partner with an ambassador who lives with eczema and talks openly about their struggles. Or you could partner with a Dermatologist practice to both promote each other’s organisations

• Will this partnership enhance my brand reputation or credibility? 

How do they position themselves?

You want the best, authentic and most credible person promoting or speaking on behalf of your company, so it’s necessary when conducting research to understand what stance they take on your product or service and monitor the brand before signing a contract. It’s important to see what type of content they share to their audience and determine if this style of content aligns with your brand.

For example, you may have found the perfect sports star who embodies your brand values to promote your vitamin products, but they might either be partnered with a direct competitor already, have their own line of vitamins, or even share content that is inappropriate or irrelevant to your target audience.

Do they have the right audience?

So, you’ve conducted research and monitored their channels, but now you have to see if they have the right audience.

If they are already creating content that aligns with your brand, it is likely that they will have followers who are interested in your product or service but it’s still important to look at the types of people engaging with their posts and how they’re reacting. 

When analysing their audiences, consider the following:

• How big is their following and how many followers are actually genuine accounts?
• Do they have a loyal and engaged following?
• Are they strongly opinionated on topics relating to my service / product and are they for or against?

Once you start looking for influencers or brand representatives to partner with, you will easily start to distinguish the authentic versus the spurious.

However, if you don’t have time to conduct this research or need some extra help, at Elevate we can find the right influencer or ambassador to align yourself with to ensure you relay consistent key messaging to the right target audiences.

Find out more on how we can grow your brand today.