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What Makes a Great Influencer?

Influencer Marketing
What Makes a Great Influencer?

Influencer marketing is an excellent way for brands to promote their products or services. However, it can get confusing when it comes to finding great influencers for collaborations. This article will outline the characteristics of a great influencer, the different types of influencers, and resources to help you with influencer marketing. 

What Does It Mean to Be an Influencer?

An influencer is someone with the ability to influence purchasing decisions based on their position, authority, knowledge, or relationship with their audience. While influencers are often thought of as celebrities or those with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers on social media, the term is actually much broader than that. An influencer can be anyone with 1,000 or more followers with the right engagement and presence on social platforms. 

What Characteristics Make Influencers Successful?

If you’re thinking about starting an influencer marketing campaign, it can be helpful to know what characteristics make an influencer successful to choose the best influencers for collaborations. There are five characteristics you should look for to choose a good influencer. 

What are the 5 Characteristics of a Good Influencer?

Five characteristics of a good influencer are:

  • Passion: Influencers who have a passion for what they do, along with a passion for your brand, will put great energy and effort into promotional posts. 
  • Genuine: Good influencers are genuine and authentic in the way they represent themselves. If an influencer has a genuine nature, they will promote brands for the right reasons and because they believe in them. This will shine through to their audience and make promotional posts more effective. 
  • Positive relationship with their community: A good influencer has a positive relationship with their audience. Influencers who actively respond to comments and create engaging content for their audience will have an easier time connecting when they create promotional content. 
  • Trust: A good influencer is someone you can trust and that their audience can trust as well. Influencers with a good history of being trusted sources of information will have their promotional content perform much better. 
  • Skilled content creators: A good influencer is a skilled content creator with the knowledge and experience to make posts stand out. If you’re working with an influencer, you want to ensure they represent your brand image positively. Having promotions integrated with quality content will make your brand appear like a top-of-the-line option. 

Finding influencers who portray these five characteristics will have you on the right track toward creating a successful influencer marketing campaign

What Do Social Media Influencers Do?

Social media influencers create content that is meant to entertain, inform, or educate their audience. Many people follow influencers because they are similar to themselves or are the type of person they want to become. By sharing content and interacting with a like-minded audience, influencers can create a sense of community around their social media presence. 

Role of Social Media Influencers in Marketing

When an influencer partners with a brand for a marketing campaign, they act as a third party to promote the brand to their audience. Since influencers aren’t part of the brand itself, it often makes promotional posts from influencers feel more natural and trustworthy. 

Influencers can significantly impact consumer behavior due to the relationships and bonds they form with audience members. Influencers that portray the characteristics mentioned earlier and build trust with their audience will have success when they recommend products or services that could benefit their followers. 

Influencers can also be an asset during marketing collaborations. It is an excellent idea for brands to ask for their thoughts, opinions, and ideas on effectively portraying promotional content to their audience. 

Influencers have built the following they have for a reason and know many intricacies that go into creating social media content. Taking their ideas into consideration will benefit your influencer marketing strategy greatly. 

Who Are the Top Instagram Influencers?

Some of the most popular influencers on Instagram are Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylie Jenner, Selena Gomez, and Dwayne Johnson (The Rock). All of these influencers have 300 million or more followers on the platform and can have a lot of influence in the social media space. 

Most companies won’t work with huge influencers like this for influencer marketing campaigns, since a promotion through big influencers like these may cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. However, there are many different types of influencers that can effectively promote brands. 

What Are the Different Types of Influencers?

The top Instagram influencers mentioned earlier would be considered celebrity or mega influencers. Mega influencers typically have 1 million or more followers on a social media platform. 

A step down from mega influencers would be macro influencers. Macro influencers usually have between 100,000 and one million followers. Promotions through macro influencers tend to be more affordable than mega influencers while still providing great reach. 

If you need a more affordable option, micro influencers could be the answer. They have small to mid-sized audiences between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. The main benefits of working with micro influencers are they tend to have a closer relationship with their audience and better engagement rates. 

Lastly, nano influencers have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. While nano influencers have the smallest audience size, they tend to have the most engaged followers, which can lead to great conversion rates on promotions. Nano influencers are also the most affordable to collaborate with, making them a great option for smaller businesses.

How Lionize Can Help with Influencer Marketing Strategies

Finding the right influencers for collaborations can seem confusing, but it doesn’t have to be. Lionize is an influencer marketing platform that simplifies the process of finding influencers for marketing campaigns. 

Lionize uses artificial intelligence software to learn about your business and marketing objectives to match you with the right influencers. This process makes it easy to find influencers that meet the characteristics mentioned earlier and fit appropriately with your budget. 

Along with helping you find the right influencers, Lionize will also help you with your influencer marketing strategy. Lionize offers features like automating parts of the influencer management process, helping you create an effective budget and strategy, and tracking data from promotional posts. All these features are available on a streamlined platform that makes influencer marketing easy.

Set up a Discovery Call today to learn more about how Lionize can help your brand with influencer marketing.