What Brands Look For In An Influencer

Ever considered a career as an influencer? Apparently, 1 in 5 young people are considering it as their future career and we can totally see why – it’s exciting, interesting and can lead to a whole lot of future opportunities. If you’re thinking of making the move but aren’t sure where to start or what brands are looking for – we’ve got you covered! Here’s what brands look for in an influencer.

The Right Audience

You don’t need to have a million followers, but you do need to have an engaged audience that fits with the brands you’re looking to work with. It might be that you’re really active in a niche that works perfectly with their target audience and have a high level of authority and engagement. Either way, to effectively be an influencer, you have to have someone to influence.

Good Content

Again, it doesn’t have to be the slick, super-edited content that mega influencers put out there, but high-quality content that looks great and resonates with your audience is essential. Blurry, poorly laid-out pics or low effort videos just won’t cut it. Brands want their products to look great and for people to get excited about them. You know what your audience wants so don’t be scared to share your ideas and come up with suggestions either!

Being Easy To Work With

Never underestimate the power of being easy to work with. That doesn’t mean just blindly agreeing to everything but instead means being professional and polite, creating content by agreed deadlines, sticking to the brief and responding to followers, sharing your own ideas and the brand if they have questions. There are so many influencers out there that it’s easy for a brand to move on if they don’t enjoy working with you.

Consistency

If you just pop up online when you have a sponsored post, or you disappear for months at a time and post sporadically then it’s unlikely you’re building an engaged community. Brands don’t want to work with someone who doesn’t look like they care about what they’re doing. They want to see passion, enthusiasm and consistency in the content that you create, along with an audience who care and look forward to seeing what you do next. Your followers want to see that you’re active – sometimes on multiple channels – so consistency is key for those results.

Knowledge and Understanding of the Industry

Whether it’s understanding the rules about advertising, being clear on how algorithms work on social media platforms, being clear on what works on different channels or knowing where to get stats that demonstrate your success to a brand – knowledge is power! It makes a brand’s life easier if you know what you’re doing (they’re paying you to be an expert after all) so take the time to read up and understand how it all works. This makes your conversations with a brand much more straightforward and demonstrates that you’re serious about what you’re doing.

Now we’ve provided you with the top 5 things brands look for in an influencer, what’s stopping you?! If you want to start your journey as an Influencer or Content Creator, get in touch today, we’re here to help!