Influencer Selection: When we say ‘the right influencer’ what do we mean? - Ep. 21

Welcome to Negronis with Nord. Today’s episode is about influencer selection. On our site, you’ll see we promote choosing not just any influencer, but the right influencer. What do we mean by that? What criteria are we looking for when selecting influencers for brand campaigns? 

Below is a transcript of the full episode for your reading pleasure. Make sure to subscribe to the Fohr YouTube channel to get notified of new episodes. You can submit your questions for future episodes here.

We're not as offensive as we thought

James: Negronis with Nord episode number 21, are we like skipping a week? Episode number 21, we are back. We missed a week. Our YouTube account was disabled, so we couldn't upload anything. We thought it was because of my incessant cursing and drinking and random

Past James: Sh*T, completely fucking crazy through the f*cking roof. $%#@*

James: Over and over in general, offensiveness

Past James: The f*cking logos, doing whatever they want. I'm reading the sh*t every day. Sh*T.

James: But turns out it wasn't about that at all, but just that the account was still connected to Tim's email address. So we had to log in as Tim. So problem solved. We are back, but another good reminder of why you should have a multi-platform approach, you know, who knows if America will ban TikTok one day, it's definitely possible. Who knows what will happen to Instagram in a few years, always a good reminder to hedge your bets, spread your following out across a number of platforms. If possible, DonYe talked about this at more length, we can link to an episode where she specifically talked about. Now, this will be a short episode this week.

Announcing Influencer Drops

We are mostly announcing a new initiative that we have rolling out well today as I'm filming, but not today as you're watching this video, but we recently hit 75 million in influencer payout, which is kind of crazy.

We have put 75 million into influencer's pockets over the last eight or so years. I wanted to do something to kind of celebrate this moment. And so over the next four weeks, we are doing four separate influencer drops in four separate categories. These are each week 10 of the kind of best, highest performing best to work with influencers that we have worked with over the last couple of years, we asked our campaign team and the strategy team to submit kind of who were the people that they worked with that had the most exceptional performance. And we're giving this away. You know, these are people that we go back and work with all the time because they are such high performers. And then they do such a great job. They are in some ways are like little secrets that we try and keep, but we're giving 'em away.

And every week brands will be able to sign up and get the influencer drop for that week. We are limiting it to 500 downloads a week. So once we hit 500 downloads, that's it. You will not be able to get that week's drop. You can sign up for the next week's drop. But for instance, this first week is most engaged community. So we're talking all about not just engagement numbers, but how much of a real community have you built around you and how invested is that community and what you are doing? That's a very different thing than engagement rate. Meme accounts have high engagement rate, but they don't have an engaged community necessarily. We're making that distinction, but we've got 10 amazing people, people with 40% engagement rates, but also people who have gotten huge amount of testimonials on four people who are driving a huge amount of performance on our clients' campaigns.

How do you get on the list?

Alls that to say it is a super exciting list as an influencer, you might say, wait, am I on this list? If you are, will we have, we would've reached out to you. I will say that this is not out of all 180,000 influencers on our platform. It's just people we've worked with. We really wanted to focus on our personal experience. This isn't a data-driven drop. You know, this isn't something where we're just looking at the platform and pulling the highest engagement rates and saying that's the most engaged. This is a more kind of our personal experience in working with working with these influencers. And a lot of it is, is based around that idea. Sophie talked about a few episodes back of invisible influence, right? How do we get behind the more vanity metrics of like engagement rate, right? And really understand what's going on.

So that is kind of our focus through the next four weeks. This is something that we hope to do seasonally. So if you haven't worked with us, of course, we, we would love to work with you. Our minimums are generally around 50,000 followers, 2% engagement rate. So if you're not there, keep building, if you are, you can email Donna and introduce yourself if you haven't worked with us on a campaign, but you know, these will be from personal experience and the people that we have actually worked with. So we can really vouch for them and say, yes, they are great. And I think it brings up an interesting point about again, how brands pick an influencer. This is the most important part of any brand strategy. Any campaign strategy is picking the person, right? The influencers that we pick for a campaign are the distillation of our strategy, you know, of our viewpoint on, you know, data and performance and what is good and what isn't good.

I think for influencers, you know, the more you can understand about this process, the more you can position your account to be selected for more of these campaigns. We've talked about a lot of this before, but I'll just rattle off some of the kind of top things. The thing that is most likely to put you ahead of the pack when looking at influencers to work with on a campaign is existing brand love. Have you talked about the brand before? Are you a customer? Is your audience familiar with that brand? You know, that is something every client loves to see when we recommend people, we always pull out posts that they have already done for the brand and certainly call out if they are a long time committed customer of the brand. So that is huge outside of existing brand love. It gets a little complex, right?

The thing that is most likely to put you ahead of the pack when looking at influencers to work with on a campaign is existing brand love.

4 things we're looking for

Because we have campaign specific attributes that we are looking for, right? When we look for the right influencer, we're looking for:

1. a specific strategy that we built for
2. a specific KPIs that the brand is trying to achieve, you know,
3. for the specific product that they are launching and
4. for a specific budget that they have, right?

You can't as an influencer predict those factors, right? So you can't know necessarily exactly what KPIs a brand is going to be going after. Oh, what you can understand is what KPIs and goals like, do you, as an influencer make sense for right. If you're a converter and you're somebody that can drive sales and as a community that shops off of your Instagram, then you know that when brands are looking for sales converters, that you're a great option, right? If you're an incredible creative and you create this incredible content, you know that when brands are looking for great content, for things that they can reuse for ads, that they're going to be looking towards you.

Playing to your strengths

So everybody has, you know, probably a thing that they are best at. It's really important for you to be able to answer what is the thing that I am best at? What is the thing that I am better at than most people, the better understanding you can have of your strengths. The more you can do to show those things off, the more you can do to highlight those things. Again, I think that too many people spend their time trying to fix their flaws or fill in gaps where they feel they're not stronger rather than just focusing on what they're really good at. I am not great at like building processes and organization and project management. It's just like, not my thing, right? So I don't try to really get better at that. I'm really good at other things. So I've hired people who are super process oriented, who are great project managers, and I just let them do their thing.

Right. And I get to do my thing. The same is true of you, right? Understanding what you're great at and leaning into that and trying to get even better at that and put even more distance between you and potential other people that a brand might look to on a campaign. And also talk about it. A lot of the performance and the things that make you great. Let's say you're a converter. That's something that, you know, unless a brand has access to that data, they're not gonna know that you're a great converter, right. And so you have to brag about it a little bit. I mean, you even see it with like Eva Chen, right? She's always like, all right, y'all calm down. I'm gonna share the links to these products, right? Just the way that Eva talks about sharing links and products, you can tell, people are sitting there shopping her stories.

Your profile is your marketing site

So share that stuff, you know, share DMS of people that said that they bought something because you recommended it. You need to be able to like understand that your Instagram TikTok is yes, very much a place for you to provide value to your community and to the people who follow you, but it's also your marketing page and your homepage, right? And so you need to make sure that when a brand lands there, you know, they can get an understanding of what makes you great, why work with you? And you need to be talking about that consistently and be really, you know, explicit about it. Because if, if you're not being explicit about it, then a brand would potentially have to be following you for months and be a part of that community to understand what makes it so powerful. But you need people who are not a part of your community who don't follow you to be able to see what you're doing without access to data.

Like they would get on for understand why they should work with you. Ask yourself that question. Like, do you think a brand that lands on your page could understand really quickly why they should work with you versus another person? If not, then I think that you should think about what you can do to change that answer, to make it a yes. I mean, I'd love to hear suggestions on what y'all think you can do if you do have any tips on how you do this, but think about that as both of those things, a place for your community and your marketing site. All right. Once again, as always like subscribe and ask us questions, right. We can always use more questions, but also if you're a brand, make sure you will put the link for the influencer drop in here. Make sure you sign up again. I think these are gonna fill up pretty quickly. So it could be difficult to get into the drop. So make sure you're paying attention, but it's gonna be every Monday for the next three weeks rather. So thank you so much. We will see you next week. We'll be back to normal scheduling and Cheers.

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Cheers, and thanks for watching.

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