Every good marketer knows that a successful influencer program starts with finding top influencers who are a good fit for your brand. That being said, this doesn’t come easy. In fact, 81% of marketers say that finding the right influencers is still a main challenge.
The best way to overcome this challenge? Data. Below we outline some key influencer statistics to look for when building out your influencer network.
Audience size can be a huge determinant in whether you decide to partner with an influencer. Influencer tiers are determined based on a creator’s follower count - here’s a breakdown of influencer tiers:
While it’s good to know the different influencer tiers, it’s important that you don’t use them as the main influencer statistic for determining a creator’s value or fit. Tiers are just one way to categorize creators, but how you use this information is really dependent on your goals. Even though it is not uncommon for partnership costs to fall along the tier lines (e.g. VIPs and megas likely charge more than smaller tiers), that doesn’t necessarily mean that the bigger tiers are the right fit for your campaign. In fact our recent US Influencer Marketing Impact Report found that nano and micro influencers that post sponsored content see efficient results. If you’re looking for a real life example of this, you can look at Eau Thermale Avène! This brand used Traackr’ influencer search to find its sweet spot of influencers — mid-tiers (50K+) with highly engaged audiences. Or, you could look to how IMAGE Skincare engaged top influencers in nano, micro, and macro tiers in order to build strong and engaged communities. The brand found these partners by focusing on engagement rates (instead of total engagements or video views), allowing them to identify folks that create compelling content, regardless of their audience size.
The other thing to consider is developing a multi-tiered approach. For example, hims & hers has used a strategy that involves top influencers from multiple tiers, with remarkable success. One way to do this would be to bring on a large influencer (VIP or mega) to be the face of the campaign, and then hire micro and macro influencers to produce content with the campaign messaging, thereby bolstering awareness.
Tip: Did you know that good partnerships start even earlier in your planning? Learn how setting good goals and KPIs informs how you find top influencers, define partnerships, and run campaigns.
When conducting an influencer search it's crucial that potential partners are already reaching your target audience. A creator’s audience demographics like age, gender, location, interests, etc. should align with your customer profile. While it is generally best practice to look at audience demographics for every brand, there are a few instances that it is especially important for:
Audience credibility is another key influencer statistic to evaluate. This is typically a bit harder to do manually, but can be done easily with an influencer marketing platform. For example, Traackr can help you dig further into the actual make-up of an influencer’s audience, mainly analyzing:
Most marketers know that performance metrics are an important category of influencer statistics to evaluate when looking for new partners. A standard list of performance metrics include:
So out of the list, what are the most important ones to focus on? We can take some clues from this:
“As a best practice, avoid metrics that solely focus on volume or absolute numbers, as the data will often skew unfairly (and inaccurately) towards influencers with larger audiences. For example, if you’re comparing a VIP (5+ million followers) influencer to a macro tier influencer (50K-250K followers), of course the VIP is likely to achieve more views due to their scale.” — Halie Soprano, senior influencer marketing consultant at Traackr
The best way to get around this “issue of scale”, and instead hone in on relative impact? Engagement and video view rates. Comparing influencers and their content based on view or engagement rate normalizes the size of their audience and ultimately means that the evaluation of their performance will be proportional to their reach (i.e. there’s no unfair bias towards influencers with large followings).
Of course, there are two caveats to this! One, if your goal is all about broad awareness and less about engaging consumers then your campaign may be better served by influencers that have big reach and earn a ton of impressions (just know that this doesn’t guarantee that those that see it will remember it). Two, not all engagement is good. It’s important to pair quantitative influencer statistics with a qualitative analysis. More on that in the next section.
Last but not least, content quality and relevance. While this is technically an influencer statistic in a strict sense, it is a critical element to consider when searching for and evaluating potential partners. Here are some important areas to focus on:
This next set of items can be quite time consuming if done manually. If you are thinking of getting an influencer marketing platform (or already have one) make sure it allows you to search through past content with keywords and hashtags. This will not only make finding top influencers faster, it will allow you to really search with nuance and specificity!
Again, while these items aren’t necessarily "statistics" in the strict sense, they are qualitative insights that can help you bring on influencers that are a good match for your brand and can become long term partners.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.
Block quote
Ordered list
Unordered list
Bold text
Emphasis
Superscript
Subscript