How to Find the Right Influencer for Your Business in Trinidad & Tobago?

Tips for finding an influencer that matches your brand’s identity and goals

Influencers are quite a controversial topic in the marketing industry. Yet, there is no doubt that influencers are here to stay. Convince & Convert reports that, “nearly two out of every three consumers say that they trust influencer messages about a brand more than a company’s advertising.”

However, for influencer marketing success, especially in the context of Trinidad and Tobago there are a few factors that ensure your business reaps all the benefits of influencer marketing without walking into a Public Relations nightmare.

1. Alignment

Influencer marketing in essence is the partnering of a company’s brand and an influencer's personal brand. Therefore, it is important to verify that the influencer mirrors the values and ethics that the company emulates. Your brand identity and company values are the perfect reference when seeking the best influencer to propel your company forward.

For example, if a company’s values are honesty and transparency, proper research will ensure that these online personalities were not involved in any public controversies that can hamper, damage, or bring these values into question.

A great trick is to also create a persona of your ideal influencer and see if you can find an online personality that matches your criteria or comes close to your ideal characteristics, audience target and the engagement rates that you desire.

2. Metrics

From the onset, your company should have goals for your ideal influencer. These goals must include metrics. This will ensure that your influencer is performing, and the insights provided will help guide your content. You will get significant insight into the organic content that your target audience is responding to.

The goal can be brand awareness to website clicks or conversions. However, deciding on one set goal for the partnership helps guide which pieces of content and call to actions will be successful. For example, website clicks are more successful with a swipe up a link on stories versus Instagram posts directing users to click the link in their bio.

On the other hand, if the company wants to build more brand awareness, they can use consistent Instagram posts. This content must be original, creative, scroll-stopping and out of the box. The content must achieve higher metrics in areas such as views and post engagement.

Matching the overall goal with metrics is a great way to decide which influencers to work with and what content will work best for the audience and your company’s goals.

3. Research

In populous countries like America or England, companies can easily discover an influencer that suits their brand. Higher population numbers within a country means a higher variety of personalities; thus, digital media companies have capitalized on creating a list of influencers that can match their clients. In the context of Trinidad and Tobago with a smaller population, most companies are left to do research on their own.

It is important to ask influencers to send their statistics and audience insights along with their fees, when gauging an influencer’s reputation among the public.

However, the company should conduct their own research and ask questions such as:

- What brands has the influencer worked with? Have they worked with competitors?

- What is the value of the content created by the influencer?

- Comments under their posts - are their comments positive and engaging?

- Is the type of content they produce relevant to your brand? For example, a food company working with a food influencer/blogger that creates recipe videos.

- Does the influencer just work with any brand that approaches them?

- How does their sponsored content perform with their audience?

Influencers are a great avenue to build revenue online, however, it takes a bit more strategy for success. Covering these three basic steps is a great way to find an influencer that is best for your business!

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