Your brand needs an influencer. This message is driven home to you via thousands of Marketing, PR and Travel websites. Great, so let’s invite as many bloggers and influencers as possible to our destination, hotel, tourist attraction, cruise ship, etct. The Benelux has an astonishing number of bloggers, influencers, Instagrammers, vloggers but yes, we often say NO to their request for a press trip or paid blog for example. But these same bloggers we refuse to accept on behalf of our clients receive one hundred other invitations the next week…

Lately we see that brands invite about everyone with a blog, website or Instagram account where they have a huge number of followers, a modest number or even very poor numbers. It seems that someone told them that influencers are the way to go. But they clearly don’t understand WHY influencers are important.

So you read online that your brand needs an influencer? Great, so what now? Just go to Instagram and look for the influencer with the biggest numbers, easy right? Or just invite every influencer that is willing to come to your destination? That seems easy enough!

WRONG!

What is it that you are trying to achieve with the use of an influencer? More visitors on your website? More followers on your social media? More sales? And do you even know how to measure the results? And what are decent or good results? Do you know what the influencers engagement rate is? Do you even know what an engagement rate is? And why it is so important?

A lot of questions, I know. But it’s necessary to know these things before you go looking for the right (or maybe even perfect) influencer. So yes, lots and lots of companies and organisations see hiring a PR company as cost or too expensive rather than seeing it as an investment. But think they are doing a great job themselves by a we-can-do-it-ourselves attitude.

This is one of the reasons why you need a PR agency to do this work for you. We have a lot of experience with influencers. We know what to look for in a influencer and what is a good fit for your brand (same niche/target audience). The reason why we don’t invite or even decline requests from certain influencers is because we value Quality over Quantity.

We are not saying that large influencers are always bad. And that most small sized influencers aren’t very good. You just have to know what to look for. But you need experience for that. Something WE have. And we use great tools for checking reach and engagement for example, because there is an amazing amount of not telling the truth in the bloggers scene.

We decline working with certain influencers with a “large” following because they may have a lot of followers (think 100.000+) but their engagement rates are way below average.

A small influencer with <10.000 followers who can convince 100 people to buy/download/visit/follow or whatever your goal may be is more useful for your brand than a influencer that has more than 2.6 million followers but can’t sell 36 T-shirts.

Interested to learn more about influencer and see what we can do for you?