How can you verify influencer credibility and authenticity before allocating your budget?

Verifying an influencer's credibility and authenticity before allocating your marketing budget is crucial to ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign. Here are the steps to help you verify an influencer's credibility: 1. Review Their Content Quality 2. Analyze Their Follower Engagement 3. Check for Consistency: Consistency in content posting is a sign of a committed influencer. Look for a regular posting schedule that demonstrates dedication to their niche. 4. Scrutinize Audience Demographics 5. Assess Content Relevance 6. Check for Transparency: Examine if the influencer is transparent about sponsored content. Ethical influencers clearly disclose paid partnerships to maintain transparency with their audience.

As an influencer marketing agency, it is crucial for us to ensure the quality of a blogger's audience before launching an advertising campaign. To achieve this, we personally communicate with each influencer and request screenshots of their channel or profile statistics. However, this does not guarantee 100% reliability. To verify the information, we turn to various analytical platforms. Additionally, we maintain our own database with blacklists where dishonest influencers are included.

Check their comments. A lot of short comments or emoji comments usually indicate they have bought their followers and engagement. There are tools for this too!

In gaming it is quite easy. You typically look for influencer campaigns done via Twitch (Instagram, YT, etc.) only come second. Here you got great tools like twitch tracker that show you exactly the average concurrent viewers, how often a streamer is active, etc. Currently, we are about to launch a campaign with an AI streamer. Lots of following, good average viewers but he has not done any previous campaigns. Strange with his size. So here we are indeed in trouble. Price per CTA is fair, he responds fasts, is regularly uploading videos/ content but why no partnership campaign beforehand? This is now a black hole where you sometimes have to give it a shoot albeit some question marks. How would you solve this?

Always take a data-led, audience-first approach when identifying, qualifying, and evaluating influencers. While influencers may be considered industry experts or be featured in media coverage in addition to social conversations, it's important to determine credibility based on the audiences they've cultivated and engage. This audience data in addition to performance metrics, content quality, brand safety ratings, and other factors should all be reviewed when evaluating credibility and authenticity. Historical content audits and reviews as well as background checks can always help supplement audience intelligence to establish brand fit.

Data is important but we have to remember that influencer marketing is a creative media channel - so it isn't always about the science. Be sure to look through their feeds to check they align with your brand and can create the type of content you require. Sometimes it's more important that the creator is a genuine customer and brand advocate than having a 70%+ UK following.

Always request stats and back-end data from the creators you are looking to work with. Make sure they send recent data and don't have banked images of high performing content. Receiving relevant stats like views, reach, shares etc. direct from the creator on the platforms you are looking for them to post on can help make sure your spend is not mis-spent on the wrong influencer or data points.

This is a great idea however I have never seen any (bigger) influencer who wants to do a campaign for free/ trial run. Also, if you are uncertain about his crediblity/ brand impact you still have the risk of him/her harming your brand - even if it is just 1 trial run. Trial runs - to our experience - only works if the brand safety is guaranteed and it is only about "can the influencer actually influence" !