Despite the fact that influencer marketing has matured over the years, many marketers still feel like finding the right influencer for their campaign involves finding a content producer who matches their ideal customer.

This isn’t inherently wrong, it just shouldn’t be your first step in vetting an influencer for consideration in your campaign. The first step is reviewing audience data for each of your prospective influencers. There are a couple ways to do this, but it’s become our go to first step at Carusele.

In looking at influencers, we can find those who over-index for things like a particular household income range, interest in a certain niche, living in a certain city or region and much more. This ensures that the content about your brand is likely to reach people who care about it. (Over-index means that this group is more likely than the average social network users to have that characteristic. In other words, if 23% of users on a social network are interested in fashion, and 34% of an influencer’s followers are interested in it, that influencer’s followers would “over-index” for interest in fashion.)

This is particularly important for a regional campaign, like this award-winning one we did for Sabra, in which you want to reach people who live in a certain part of the country. We’ve switched up influencers and tactics on regional campaigns after finding that a very small percentage of followers would be within that region if we chose the wrong influencers.

Our method of influencer marketing can guarantee that the best content is seen by the exact right audience, but it should start with as wide a base of “correct” followers as possible.

Audience fit is the “A” in what we call The ABCs of Influencer Selection. B is for brand fit, which is when you do make sure that the influencer fits your brand, not only in terms of their persona and the content they create, but also in terms of brand safety, competitor mentions and more.

If your influencer partner isn’t showing you the audience composition for selected influencers, you’re probably not reaching your ideal audience. We’d be happy to help.