One of the largest problems with influencer marketing: targeting the right audience

Here's a scenario. Let's say you need to reach a foodie audience in New York City. To do this, you pick an influencer who is a foodie and he or she lives in New York City. Done - right?

Well... no. This approach is actually a big mistake on many levels, but here's the main one. If we break down the influencer's audience, our local NYC influencer has about 20% of their following located in NYC. That's a pretty remarkable number, and rare to find (although we have seen influencers as high as 25, maybe even 30%). But because only 20% of their audience is in NYC, that's 80% of the audience that's waste to your campaign. So how do you make the most of your campaign and reach that target audience?

To start, you need to identify the highest performing content in the campaign and then boost it to your exact target audience. Using our NYC example from before, you should be using that initial organic reach from the local influencer as a focus group and then boosting their top-performing content to people who live in New York City or the New York City metro area and are interested in food (or healthy living, active lifestyle, etc., whatever those criteria are) to make sure there's zero waste of the best content getting to the best people.

If you take this approach, there are many more opportunities that you can execute throughout the campaign that are very interesting. For example, dayparting. We did a program for a food brand centered around their dinner products and we executed the paid media of the influencer content from three to six o'clock, when people are starting to think about what they should be having for dinner. We also targeted the content geographically to support a specific retailer. However, in order to implement this type of strategy, you need that real-time optimization capability and real-time content performance data to figure out what's your best content and how to optimize it. We say real-time because you should be optimizing your paid media DAILY - not just once, or by just hitting the boost button. We see on these daily optimizations that the content that works really well for several days may stop being effective after three, or four days, so you have to switch our the creative and boost differently to reach the target audience.

If you're doing influencer marketing, you need to demand this level of targeting from your programs to get the kind of business results that your programs deserve. If you've having trouble with any part of your execution strategy, download our latest influencer marketing checklist or contact us today for assistance.