How To Choose An Influencer For Your Brand

Choosing an influencer for your brand can be a tedious task. Thanks to the concept of digital marketing, it has not only opened up an array of job opportunities for influencers, but it has also helped brands strategize their digital marketing and branding campaigns. Choosing the right influencer for your brand, for example, a video game creative agency, can be beneficial for both parties. Brands get fame, recognition, and positive feedback to build their company’s reputation on loyal consumers through the influencer’s clout. Influencers get paid a hefty amount, and such collaborations support their modeling careers. 

Therefore, it is critically important that you choose the right influencer for your brand. 

Selecting The Right Influencer

Picking a person to collaborate with or represent your company’s integrity to an audience and brand promotion can be daunting, and it requires hard work.  

Below are some factors that will help you decide how to choose an influencer for your video game creative agency. 

Engagement over followers

It’s easy to get charmed by a high number of followers of the influencer. However, it is imperative to remember that a higher count of followers does not necessarily mean higher engagement. With the evolving technology, in virtual reality platforms, influencers can buy a couple of thousand fake followers to make it look like they’re famous. Nevertheless, this high count doesn’t reflect on their likes, engagement, promotion, or click-throughs.

A recommended way to analyze the engagement metric is to compare the number of likes to the followers. If the influencer has about 50 thousand followers, then he/she should have at least 10-15 thousand likes. A decent amount of comments is also a favorable indicator. If the influencer has attached links to their post, you can calculate the number of clicks or visits these links get. Increased engagement will lead to increased traffic on your video game creative agency website.

Sharing similar values

The basis of collaboration or a mutual partnership is that both the involved parties get equally benefited from it. For it to work smoothly, it would be ideal that both the company and the influencers share similar values.

It is suitable for long-term benefits if the influencer is as dedicated to his/her work as your company is. Research about your candidates; learn about their characteristic traits. Influencers who believe in their work are willing to cooperate with your brand, and a credible reputation within their social and professional circles are likely the type of influencers you should select for your company’s modeling. 

Healthy debate and minor differences in viewpoint are welcome as they make your company’s branding strategy unique and effective. It’s best if the influencer is familiar with video gaming fundamentals or has a video gaming background.

Types of audience

Any brand has a target audience, which forms the majority of their consumer base. The target audience could be defined based on age, the country or region they live in, the language spoken by them, etc. A target audience helps labels, such as yourself, to customize a branding strategy for maximal efficiency. Therefore, the influencer you hire should also have a majority of followers matching your target audience for excellent brand promotion. You can use advanced features that let you check the demographic characteristics of the influencers’ social media account. These features help you identify the influencers’ audience based on gender, age, and target location. For video game creative agency Los Angeles, you should choose an influencer who is locally very popular and is aware of LA’s cultural norms to attract an audience. Doing so gives your company the right opportunity to reach out to your target audience and communicate better about your product signage and services.

Authenticity

With the expansion of social media marketing, many people have set out to be influencers on their social media handles. The charm of such influencers can be lost in such vast numbers. Their posts and content become generic, which bores the audience. You will also find influencers who are doing it for the sake of it and show no real dedication in their work. Some of them simply copy, paste, and edit captions from other successful influencers. That’s why you must verify the authenticity of these famous social media personalities before you hire them. Authentic influencers should have creative writing skills to generate high engagement with their followers, which helps them build a connection based on trust and loyalty with the audience.

A proven way to verify the influencer’s uniqueness and authenticity is to read their captions, check out their content, and more. Such influencers highlight your brand among their followers and help you increase the sales of your video game creative agency by making sponsored posts about your label.

  • Quality of content

One of the primary reasons you’re hiring an influencer is to promote your brand through creative writing and animation content. The creativity of influencers is what distinguishes them from one another. Once you hire an influencer, their creativity will represent your video game creative agency label. Therefore, you need to ensure that each post or content created by the hired employee is highly engaging and innovative. 

Check out their Instagram profiles and see if they are equipped with sufficient creative writing skills for your product promotion. Influencers should have the knack of top-notch product photography or any other visual content shooting or photography skill. Besides that, they should also write appropriate captions promoting your brand. Besides the quality of content, the posts will also have to be consistent and optimized according to the specific social media platform’s algorithm.

Dependability

For any partnership to be successful, both parties should be able to rely on each other. You ought to reward the influencers handsomely for their hard work, and in return, they should deliver exceptional quality and creative writing or photography content. Influencers should maintain a consistent flow while posting on Instagram to attract several users daily.   

Influencers who are sloppy with deadlines and deliver low-quality content can badly affect your company’s branding process. Whereas influencers who are reliable are always open to constructive criticism, maintain constant communication, put efforts to develop a professional relationship, and more. You can blindly depend upon such media personalities to represent and carry the name of your brand forward. 

Platforms

As discussed before, social media influencers use a myriad of online platforms, to enhance their popularity. Each of the platforms is particularly suited for one type of influencer. For example, if your company is targeting a 100% gaming audience then it’s wise to choose a well-known YouTube streamer or Twitch. Using various features of the app, they can interact with other gamers and even show them how it is played. If you’re trying to gain elevated engagement through viral videos for your ad campaign then a tik tok or twitter media personality is a good start. Furthermore, you can also use Instagram if you want an influencer to post about your products and review them on his/her feed.

Where Can You Look For Influencers?

Generally, in their line of work, the popularity of influencers speaks for themselves. Initially, you won’t face any problems finding them. However, when you put them under a microscope, you will notice some evident flaws that make them unsuitable for you. 

Here are some ways through which you can find some genuine influencers for modeling for your video game creative agency.

Influencer marketing platforms

As the name suggests, such websites are portals for upcoming media personalities to register themselves as influencers. This helps them get verified on their social media accounts and increase their visibility to several brands. You can register yourself as a video game creative agency and find influencers that are relevant to your brand. Many such marketing platforms also provide your firm with branding campaign support. You can launch and manage your merchandise campaigns through these portals.

Databases

Usually, a database comprises all information about an influencer’s social media profile. It contains the number of followers, the average frequency of posting, merchandise details, engagement levels, photography skills, copywriting skills, etc. You won’t be able to launch campaigns on these portals, but they do a pretty great job of keeping you informed about influencers.

Google search

Sometimes, it is okay to do it the old fashioned way as they can produce useful results too. You can simply search on Google about the trending influencers relevant to your video game creative agency or any other company. Google will show you SEO optimized content containing the names of influencers prominent in their respective fields. You can filter your search on Google or any other search engine platform. You will also find relevant details that will help you get in touch with the influencers.

Advertisements

You can create a digital poster and put it up on the social media platforms of your video game creative agency. You can also spread the word through offline means such as newspaper advertising. Interested influencers will directly contact your company and send in their resumes. You can quickly skim through all of them and handpick the ones that stand out. Next, you can interview to know more about them. For a trial run, you can also ask the influencers to wear merchandise from your brand, do a photoshoot, and measure the response of the public. Naturally, a high number of likes, comments, and shares means that the users are happy with the content, which prompts them to look into your company’s products and services. 

To wrap it up

Influencers can help you maximize the profits from your digital marketing campaigns. Many corporations have boosted their sales by collaborating with celebrity influencers and other types of influencers. WAYPOINT is a video game creative agency in California that can market your video game. It can add the liveliness to your branding campaign needs to reach out to your target audience. Do thorough research, evaluate their creativity and their following audience before you hire them. In conclusion, the above factors will help you select a suitable influencer for your video game creative agency.

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