How to Find the Right Influencer for Your Pet Business

Influencer marketing can mean big returns for your pet friendly business. Not only is it a great way to increase your brand’s visibility and give you instant credibility, it can also bring in new customers and boost sales. And isn’t that what we all want?

Luckily, within the pet industry, there are many types of influencers to choose from, each with a slightly different focus and audience. The key to an effective influencer campaign is to pick the right pet influencer for your business and goals. But where do you start and how to you choose?

Influence Is More Than Just Numbers

It’s easy to get swept up in huge follower counts and monthly page views. However, it’s important to keep in mind that big numbers don’t necessarily translate into big engagement or interest in your brand.

For example, many celebrities boast tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers. These numbers may be impressive, and they may be influential in terms of fashion or style recommendations. But if they’re not considered the go-to experts in the pet industry, they probably won’t have much effect on your target market (fans can be bought!).

While large numbers are always nice to have, a more crucial piece to the puzzle is engagement. Influencers who have built up credibility over time typically have audiences that interact with them, trust them and, most importantly to brands, take action based on their recommendations.

To determine an influencer’s level of engagement, look at things such as the number of likes, shares, and comments on social media posts. This is often a good indicator of how successful they’ll be in spreading the word about your brand, and helping you to grow your own audience. You should also ask for case studies from previous campaigns with other brands.

Does Their Focus Align with Your Brand?

Another important factor to consider is whether their audience and niche is relevant to your brand. Do some research to determine whether they’re trusted as an authority by your ideal customers and whether their audience will be interested in what you have to offer. For example, you may discover a family activities blogger with a highly engaged audience and in your price range. But, if they focus entirely on products for children and you sell novelty pet dishes, this is probably not the audience for you!

Stick to your niche – most likely pet parents or pet experts.  No matter how enthusiastic a particular influencer’s audience may be, if they aren’t interested in topics that are relative to your business, then they won’t do you much good, and you won’t be helpful to them either.

How to Find the Right Influencer

So how can you find influencers that are relevant to your products and services? A good way to start is by searching keywords and hashtags and finding posts with lots of engagement.

Admittedly, though, this has the potential to be quite time consuming. Thankfully there are tools available that can help you to identify influencers in any topic area. Depending on your specific goals and budget, here are a few that you might want to check out:

• BuzzSumo helps you locate popular content and the people who are sharing it. It also lets you gather social media statistics on the content.
• Traackr helps you discover and connect with influencers and measure the impact they have on your business.
• Kred measures social interactions and assigns users a Kred score.
• Followerwonk focuses on Twitter and provides tools for comparisons.
• Ninja Outreach allows you to search for influencers by keyword and can help you to locate and reach out to bloggers and Twitter or Instagram influencers.
• Klout compares influencers by analyzing social network content and assigning a Klout score.

After you’ve narrowed down your options, it’s time to start making some connections and determine whether it’s a good fit for both you and the influencer. I’ll cover this in more detail in my next blog post. Until then, feel free to skip ahead by downloading my free e-book: Beginner’s Guide to Influencer Marketing for Pet-Friendly Businesses.

If you’re ready to get started with an influencer marketing program that really works, click here to find out more about how I can help you reach thousands of dedicated and enthusiastic pet parents.

 

 

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