How to Vet an Influencer for Your Marketing Campaigns

Milan Freeman
Jul 11, 2024
3 min read

Selecting the right influencer requires careful vetting. Similar to doing a background check on an employee before hiring them, you should always research the influencers you partner with. This shouldn’t be an optional part of your influencer marketing process — it is essential.

Doing this research, known as “influencer vetting," helps you decide if an influencer is the right person to have promote your brand. It also gives you valuable insight into how a collaboration with them might perform and how they can benefit your brand.

Below are tips on how to use influencer vetting to make better-informed influencer partnership decisions and increase your marketing ROI.

Determine Your Influencer Marketing Campaign Goals

Different creators suit different needs. Always determine what campaign goals you would like to achieve with influencers first. This way you can identify what qualities to look for in an ideal influencer partner.

Campaign goals can include:

Generating more leads.
Building brand awareness.
Generating user-generated content (UCG).
Increasing customer retention.

Each goal requires a different set of influencer metrics to evaluate. If you have questions on how to evaluate influencers based on your campaign goals, click below to schedule a free intro call with an influencer marketing expert.

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Verify That the Influencer’s Audience Aligns With Your Brand’s

Make sure your influencer’s audience aligns with that of your target buyer.

Not being mindful of an influencer’s audience demographics can lead to a waste in marketing spend. Without researching an influencer’s audience demographics, brands can find themselves promoting products to an audience that is unlikely to make a purchase.

If the distribution of your products are limited to the United States, you will want to prioritize influencers who have an audience that largely lies within the United States. If your product is targeted at women over the age of 30, you will want to partner with an influencer whose audience targets that gender and age group.

Understand who your target buyer is, and then find influencers with audiences that closely match your buyer's demographics.

Prioritize Producing Content That is Authentic to the Creator

Social media audiences are more discerning than ever. Brands need to pay attention to how influencers promote their products as consumers can quickly spot an insincere marketing campaign.

In most cases, you want to partner with an influencer that already makes content for your industry. Chances are these influencers already create content that resonates with your target audience and your partnership will be more authentic. Both are qualities that can lead to a positive impact for your brand.

But don't forget! You'll want to pay particular attention to an influencer's past brand collaborations. This can give you insight into how they'll include your product in their content and/or how their audience will respond(1).

(1) Some sponsored posts can be boosted by the brand they're collaborating with, leading to positive outliers in content engagement. Take this into consideration when reviewing sponsored posts that appear to outperform their usual content.

Check the Influencer’s History for Potential Risk

Influencer partnerships should help positively boost a brand’s image. You don’t want to partner with an influencer who has a high risk for bringing potential damage to your brand’s reputation.

Therefore, you'll always want to verify the following when researching an influencer's history:

Their content and actions align with your brand values.
The sentiment in their content is mostly positive.
They are not associated with any controversies that could harm your brand.

When checking your influencer's history, feel free to add additional criteria that are relevant to your brand and/or industry.

Re-vet Your Influencers Regularly

As the influencer landscape frequently changes, influencer vetting should be an ongoing process. This way you can ensure that your influencer partners continue to perform positively and remain aligned with your brand.

While influencer vetting can be tedius, it’s important. It will not only help reduce marketing costs but it will give you more confidence in your influencer partners' potential for positive impact on your brand’s growth.

If your brand needs assistance with influencer vetting, People’sInfluence can help. Click below to explore how we can fill your influencer vetting needs.

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How to Vet an Influencer for Your Marketing Campaigns