The last several years have seen an increase in influencer marketing efforts and, in turn, the rise of many influencer marketing agencies promising to help brands get the job done.
But, as a brand owner, how do you choose among the thousands of specialist and generalist agencies that are all saying they can help?
In this blog, we will list the criteria you should be following when looking for your perfect influencer marketing agency match.
1. Relevant experience
At this stage in the game, the majority of influencer marketing agencies already have years worth of experience under their belt. To filter out those who are worth having deeper conversation with, you can ask potential agencies for relevant case studies to your industry.
2. Influencer selection criteria
A decade ago, influencer outreach consisted of finding someone who created content relevant to your industry and simply partnering with them. Today, the makeup of an influencer’s audience is closely analysed to ensure it overlaps with the brand’s audience, as well as a whole host of other checks to decide whether they would be a good fit.
Selecting an agency who understand this by using advanced filtering systems will benefit your brand in the long-run.
3. Content evaluation criteria
Considering there are just over 100,000 social media influencers in the UK alone, that means hundreds of thousands of branded content pieces have been created and published. But how are each of these ranked in terms of success? More importantly, how does your potential influencer marketing agency evaluate each piece of content after it goes live to measure performance?
The agency should be scoring each piece of content on its organic performance in terms of likes, comments and shares.
4. Targeting strategy
Organic influencer content only reaches a certain subset of their audience. From what we know, this is around 9%, but no one knows for sure whether this 9% is the exact target audience of the content in question.
You should be looking for an influencer agency who are putting strategies in place to ensure that this content is reaching the desired audience.
5. Measurement strategy
If you could ask potential agencies any question, it should be how they count impressions of the content. Are they counting impressions for each follower an influencer has?
In addition, neither reach nor engagement rate is related to sales, so just measuring impressions and engagement is not sufficient. Today, there are so many sophisticated methodologies that you should be choosing an agency who utilises one of these.
6. Optimisation strategy
Any form of digital marketing that isn’t created according to a calendar is optimised daily to maximise performance. What is the agency’s plan for optimisation?
7. Content rights
This may not seem important enough to belong in our criteria selection, but knowing what rights your brand will have to the content being produced is imperative. In the best case, your brand will receive a perpetual licence to reuse the content on any platform.
8. Guaranteed results
Finally, what outcomes are the agencies guaranteeing to their clients?
Remember, guaranteed outcomes should not only revolve around sales. Instead, agencies should be able to guarantee certain specific outcomes around true views, web traffic or engagement.
