Finding influencers that will provide your target return on investment is a difficult, anyone who has undertaken an influencer marketing campaign will agree.
First you have to sift through the hundreds of thousands of creators on YouTube, filtering to try and pick out the ones in line with your target customers’ interests, then attempt to calculate if they will deliver the results you plan.
It’s a mine field.
Having now run hundreds of campaigns ourselves, we’ve developed a few processes that help us select the best YouTube influencers for our customers. Here’s a few things we do.
What kind of YouTubers are you looking for? Fitness, family, socially conscious? Establish some key words to search YouTube for.
For example, if you are looking for family orientated influencers try searching ‘family fun day’.
This should identify channels that talk about the topics you want for your campaign.
Look through their previous content to establish if it is their primary focus.
Next you will want to clarify if they are speaking to your target customers, to do this you need to go through their audience demographics.
YouTube provides the key information, including what proportion of their audience is male and female, the age of people watching and their location.
Narrow down your relevant YouTube influencers to the ones whose audience comprises mostly of your target customers, construct a customer persona to help with this.
Finally, you ought to establish if your selected influencers will yield a good return on your investment.
Go back through their last 10 videos and calculate the average views per video as an indicator of what you can expect from a collaboration. More than 10 and you are not accounting for the growth or decline of the YouTuber, less and you are not getting an accurate picture or their current performance.
Ignore their latest video in your calculation, it will not have reached its full potential and will skew your estimation.
Beware if their views are sporadic, you are better to underestimate the average if there are huge differences in the view counts.
Pay particular attention to their previous brand sponsored content, what kind of views do they bring in?
By the end of this exercise you should have a good idea of the best influencers to hire for your campaign – ones whose audience demographics align to your target customers’, who are producing content in the interest group of your target customers and who will deliver the views you need to meet your performance goals.
