How does a marketer choose the best content creators for their influencer marketing campaign? Often they’ll look at their current or target brand audience and search for content creators that look like, and speak to, that audience.
That tactic can work, but as Justin Zelik, BENlabs Senior Director of Client Development at BENlabs cautions, it’s limiting. It doesn’t give your influencer program room to grow. It doesn’t explore new, possibly more receptive audiences. It limits scale, leads to diminishing returns and too often, it nets boring creative that audiences ignore.
With BENlabs proprietary AI tools and models, developed and trained over the better part of a decade, brands find the most receptive audiences for their message via AI Audience Cluster Analysis. BENlabs AI also takes the work out of vetting content creators to ensure they’re brand-friendly, and their followers are real people, not bots.
So, how does a marketer choose the best content creators for their influence campaign? They follow the data and explore new audiences, they vet to ensure creators are authentic and a brand values match, they test early and often.
Or better yet, they let AI do all the leg work, freeing them to focus on the creative process.
Video Transcript
The methodology that you use to select creators is ultimately going to be what defines your entire creative strategy. Let me explain.
There are many views on how to go about choosing the right creators for your program, but the primary way that I see brands doing this is by finding people who mimic their target audience.
Now this can be a highly effective technique. But I would also argue it can be limiting in terms of content diversification as well as scale. It’s for that reason that here at BENlabs, we recommend taking a community approach.
The first step is to define which niches your customers or potential customers might be showing up at the way we do this is via our AI Cluster Analysis tool, which is highly scientific.
However, if you aren’t a partner of BENlabs, there are still more manual and directional ways to make educated guests.
The next step is to identify the influential voices within those communities, then vet their audiences as well as their brand safety. So, have they done anything in the past that would directly contradict your brand values? And is their audience made-up of real people and not bots?
After you’ve vetted these things, the last thing you want to do is review their content. You are going to be showing up in their channel, which means your product or service will appear in the style that their audience is most familiar with.
You still want to review the content, but we recommend to our clients to be as objective as possible. Now, that’s not because your tastes aren’t valid, it’s just because subjectivity can be the Achilles heel of a great creator marketing program.
Influencer Marketing Made Simple
The BENlabs team uses proprietary AI tools to help make influencer marketing smart, scalable, and successful. From finding the perfect content creators, automating A/B testing of content, copy and CTAs, and surfacing clear, predictive analytic insights early, when they can make the most difference, BENlabs is here to help.
