Hiring High Volumes of Influencers Isn't The Right Approach

When brands issue briefs to influencer marketing agencies, we quite often see a request to secure up to 50 or 100 influencers for a single program. However, this approach of "partnering with as many influencers as possible" is extremely ineffective. When you're asking yourself "how many influencers do I need for a successful campaign?" the answer is simple...

Fewer than you think. Here's why.

Quality Over Quantity

The concept of quality over quantity is three-fold when it comes to vetting your influencers:

1. CONTENT CAPABILITIES: An influencer who is constantly churning out sponsored content every minute might be a bit sloppy. You want to find an influencer who not only has a low saturation rate, but shows consistency in their ability to develop high-quality content that produces measurable results.
2. AUDIENCE SIZE: Along with the request for a high volume of influencers often comes the request for those influencers to also have a following that exceed X-Million followers. But reach does not equal influence. Instead of reaching for those EXPENSIVE social stars, focus on micro-influencers whose followings are much more engaged and meaningful.
3. AUDIENCE MAKEUP: Are you looking at the demographic and geographic makeup of the influencers' audience to ensure they over-index for attributes that match your target audience? If not, make that a must.

Content That Converts Audiences

Not all influencer content is good content. In fact, we've historically seen that about 25% of a single campaigns content outperforms the rest. So why have 50 influencers produce all this content when only 25% is really going to make an impact?

With a smaller group of influencers, it's easy to identify which specific assets are doing the heavy lifting. Then you can optimize those pieces in a much more meaningful and effective way (see the next point below).

Reaching the Target Audience

Because you hired fewer influencers, you surely saved a decent amount of your budget. Now's the time to use that budget and implement a paid media plan that pushes those top-performing assets in front of your target audience. There are several ways to run paid media with influencer content, but at Carusele we prefer running ads directly from the influencers channels. This approach not only lets us target more accurately, but gives us the flexibility to optimize campaign content daily to ensure we achieve actual business results.

In summary, we've seen exceptional results from campaigns that only have four or six influencers, proving that you certainly do not need 100 influencers to talk about your brand. We also recently finished a campaign where we ended up with fewer influencers than we expected, yet the campaign drove 2X the amount of website clicks than we bench-marked for. It's all because it's really not the influencer that drives the result but the quality content.

If you need help with any of the components of your influencer strategy, contact our agency today using the form below and we'll get the conversation going.