Three Incompatible Goals in Influencer Marketing & How to Find the Right Influencers for Fulfillment

Our guest author Sarah Emmerich explains to you which three goals are crucial in influencer marketing, which factors influence your choice of influencers and how you can proceed successfully. She also shares two helpful influencer marketing tools with you.

Goals in Influencer Marketing

The probably most common questions that arise on the topic Influencer Marketing are probably: "How do I find the right influencers and what do we have to spend on influencer marketing?"

In order to be able to give an answer, there are ultimately three important factors in influencer marketing: the Resources of the company, the stated Goals and the Timing, in which these should be achieved. The resources can be quickly identified and checked, while the question of goals often triggers lengthy consideration and discussions. The goals in influencer marketing are crucial in order to determine the path to take with influencer marketing - and of course, to identify the right influencers. The timing: of course as quickly as possible.

To make things easier, I now distinguish between three different goals in influencer marketing, which need to be prioritized: Content generation, Brand awareness and Performance. All goals that can be achieved through influencer marketing can be divided into these three categories. You want to achieve direct sales through influencer marketing? Performance! You want to reach & recruit new employees? Brand Awareness! You need better content for your own channels or advertisements? Content Generation!

These three influencer marketing goals can go hand in hand, but let's be honest, it makes the most sense to focus on just one of these goals with one measure. Because only then do you work with the appropriate influencers for the respective goal.

You can make it measurable how well a measure performs: by tracking links, market research & Co. - but the selection of the right influencers can strongly differ depending on the objective.

Influencer Marketing Goal: Brand Awareness

If, for example, you want to gain more Brand Awareness at a national level, it is worth looking for so-called Brand Faces with whom you can enter into a long-term cooperation as a brand ambassador. Here, a distinction is made between two different categories:

1. Influencers who have now become relevant in the press & media beyond social media (Examples: Carmen Kroll @carmushka or Dagi Bee @dagibee).
2. Celebrities who are also relevant as social media influencers (examples: Ann-Kathrin Götze @annkathringotze or Kai Pflaume @kaipflaume).

Influencers of this size and relevance are hard to find with tools or win over with standard inquiries – here it is best to let your network play or speak for a good, individual pitch. In addition, when choosing, in addition to hard factors such as target group data or follower numbers, the values, sympathy, and aesthetics of the content of the potential Brand Face are also important. After all, the person represents you as the face of your brand and should generate trust in potential and existing customers.

Tip: Even though we often talk about millions of ranges with Brand Faces, there are also great examples of smaller creators with whom you can work on this level. For some brands, a local Brand Face to boost local brand awareness can also be worthwhile. Also Marie Nasemann (@marienasemann), who for me is a great example of a Brand Face with media relevance, generates significant visibility of her partnering cooperations despite her "only" 200,000 followers.

Especially when it comes to Brand Faces & Awareness one should keep in mind that influencer marketing can no longer be viewed apart from any other marketing measures: Brand Faces can be excellently integrated into Out-Of-Home campaigns, ads & press.

Influencer Marketing Goal: Content Generation

Working with brands faces for more brand awareness does not of course rule out that they also create very good Content that you can use for your own channels. However, the rights of use for this content are usually very expensive. Therefore, it might be worth to work more with smaller influencers as content creators. Because good UGC (User-Generated-Content) can also easily create any micro-influencer whose content & aesthetics you like. Because with them often barter deals or small budgets for cooperations are sufficient to get the rights of use.

To identify content creators, the Influencer Marketing Tool Storyclash is suitable. This influencer search engine was developed to find Instagram influencers based on their content, and not on their data. You can look at past stories & postings and find influencers through new keywords or hashtags. Storyclash then suggests influencers with the appropriate content to you. An alternative to Storyclash would be for example EQOLOT.

Influencer Marketing Goal: Performance

If you are strongly focused on the goal Performance in influencer marketing and thus a direct increase in sales, it is worth selecting the right influencers as data-driven as possible. Here, the appearance or sympathies of the influencer weigh much less in the selection than the topic of brand awareness.

My steps for this are:

1. Define your own target group(s). As specific as possible!!
2. Make assumptions: Which influencers reach exactly this target group? Are there data from the past?
3. Set Influencer Avatar(s) / target group(s).
4. Find suitable influencers via influData using the audience search.

If it's mostly about Performance, we work with the software influData when selecting the right influencers. Here you get all data about an influencer and his target group, without ever having been in contact with him. Particularly important to us in the research are the net reach, engagement rate, where the followers come from (countries and cities), how old they are and also the posting frequency. So we can estimate in the process of selecting the right influencers whether an influencer in his community can realistically achieve the set performance goals, before we ask him.

Even though the possibilities offered by the tools mentioned have greatly simplified the pre-selection of influencers in recent years, a close look at the platform-specific insights of the influencers is still needed. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee of performance.

As you can see, even the selection of the right tools in influencer marketing is very determined by the objective - and only then can the right influencers be identified.