Once you’ve established a strategic approach, you have a starting point – the keywords and key phrases you want to monitor to assess if the conversations you think are happening are in fact taking place amongst influencers.
The next stage involves social listening; to establish the tone, frequency and texture of these conversations. Are they interactions your brand would want to be a part of? Is there a meaningful way to engage with, steer, facilitate or cultivate those discussions? Can you dovetail this with an influencer engagement strategy?
Then, after tracking down the active influencers, the process of validation needs to take place.
Too much influencer marketing lacks authenticity, relevance, authority or impact. Asking someone loyal to your competitor to promote your product lacks credibility and authenticity. Asking them to do a genuine side-by-side comparison, and taking the risk they don’t love your product? That requires courage, but with significant potential reward. It could be very effective if you’ve established that your product or service is exactly what that influencer needs.
This validation process can be relatively lightweight if you are assessing a large pool of influencers for potential fit with an outreach campaign, or much more in-depth if you are vetting someone for a co-creation project or a deeper collaboration. But it needs to span the key areas and answer critical questions: