20 Mar 8 Tips for Finding the Right Social Influencers for Your Practice

Thinking of collaborating with influencers? We have clients who regularly partner with bloggers to expand their reach to a new audience and bring more awareness to their practice. While influencer marketing can offer many benefits, it’s wasted effort if you aren’t partnering with the right influencers for your brand. Looking at single metrics, such as the number of Instagram followers, may be an easy way to screen potentials, but it’s not all that matters. You want to learn as much as you can about the influencer’s audience and some key metrics before deciding to move forward. Some of these critical metrics can be determined by looking at their profile, but others you will need to request from the blogger. There’s no easy way to figure out exactly how influential someone is online — or how well they will work for your brand — but you can use these seven points to start identifying and evaluating who may be the best fit.

Relevance

It doesn’t matter how many followers or visitors an influencer has; if they aren’t in line with your brand’s tone and overall content message, you won’t see the results you want. Go through the influencer’s posts (on all websites and social media pages and including posts that have been archived) to get a feel for who they are and what type of customer they relate to.

Think about the type of patients you’re seeking? For example, is your goal to get more moms or are you trying to grow your millennial base. Are there specific treatments or procedures, such as injectables or body contouring, you are trying to bring more attention to? These are important things to consider when looking for an influencer because the type of content and audience are far more important than traffic.

Engagement Rate

This is more involved than the number of followers they have on Instagram. It makes more sense to partner with a blogger who has a smaller audience but strong engagement rate versus a blogger with an enormous following with average or below-average engagement rates. To determine someone’s engagement rate, we recommend using Phlanx.com. You can enter any Instagram handle name to learn their engagement rate and the average number of likes and comments per post. Anything above 3.5% is considered above average, and anything above 6% is considered extremely high.

Audience Location

Ask the influencer for the top five cities where their audience is located. They could have a massive following and an amazing engagement rate, but if the majority of their audience is located in another city, it will be more difficult to convert those prospects into patients of the practice. An exception would be if the goal of the collaboration is strictly branding. For example, a collaboration with an influencer such as Negin Mirsalehi (who has around 5.2 million followers) would be an excellent option if your goal is to bring some clout to your profile and gain more followers.

Gender and Age demographics

Find out these stats to help determine if this influencer is the right fit for your practice. Men are gaining more and more traction in the industry, but it is still currently dominated by females. If a blogger’s audience is more than 25-30% men, I would not recommend them unless it’s a male blogger and the purpose of the collaboration is to gain more male patients.

Reach

It may not be the first thing you think of when deciding if an influencer is right for your practice, but reach is important. The number of followers or unique visitors the person has gives you a general idea of the prospective audience you could tap into, but that doesn’t mean they are the audience most likely to want to engage with your practice. For example, a hotel chain company would be better serviced by partnering with a travel blogger who has a smaller reach than with a food blogger who gets monthly visitor counts in the six figures. You’ll also want to look at which platforms the potential influencer is most active on because this can make a difference in the target audience.

Frequency

In many cases, the frequency of the influencer’s posts is directly related to the number of monthly (and repeat) visitors, social media shares and bookmarks they get. Studies show it takes an average of 10 exposures to get the best chance of a click-through or conversion, so an influencer who has a high rate of return visitors may mean more potential clients for you.

Authenticity

It may seem like you’d want to pass on bloggers who don’t already have a high percentage of sponsored content, but this is one area where more isn’t always more. Bloggers who have higher amounts of sponsored content can appear salesy and spammy while those who put up sponsored posts less frequently are considered more authentic and trustworthy — and this is gold when it comes to attracting new clients for your business. Look for influencers who share personal stories and are able to write in an engaging, compelling manner. This type of content gets more engagement from readers than deal alerts or long product reviews.

Past Collaboration Data

Don’t be afraid to ask for the results of collaborations the blogger has done in the past. Although nothing is ever a guarantee, the best prediction of the future is to look at the past. Use these numbers to get an idea of what you can expect.

Bonus Tips

Create a simple contract that outlines exactly what procedures will be performed on the blogger and precisely what the blogger will be doing in return. Blogger partnerships that have gone south have mostly been caused by a miscommunication in expectations for one or both parties or a too-broad agreement, so the practice was not satisfied with the exposure they received. Outlining everything in a clear agreement helps reduce the chances of this happening.

Lastly, to measure the ROI, give the blogger a unique promo code for their audience to use when making an appointment. This is the best way to determine if the collaboration was worth it once the campaign is complete. Without any data, it is difficult to know if this is an influencer you want to partner with again in the future.