The 3 Most Important Steps to Do Before Hiring Influencers

If you aren’t using influence marketing, you’re doing something wrong. Influence marketing is the leading marketing tactic used by fashion boutiques and brands of all sizes. It’s the process of connecting with people who have a large following online and hiring them to wear your clothing and to promote it to their audience. It’s that simple but if done correctly, you can run through your marketing budget without seeing high ROI. So, before you start forking over hundreds of dollars on celeb-status influencers, these are the three influence marketing steps you can’t overlook.

Step 1: Make Sure You Have Fashion People Want to Promote

Any company can get influencers to promote their brand. However, not all influencer posts are created equal. In order to ensure genuine influencers who believe in your brand and the clothing you sell, you need to have quality clothing that people actually want to wear. Otherwise, the influencer post, as well as your brand, will appear tacky and cheap, like an annoying car salesman you’ll go to great lengths to avoid.

So, before you even step into the world of influencer marketing, you must have a reliable and quality clothing supplier for your store. This is key as the level of service and quality offered by your wholesale fashion suppliers will directly affect the way you provide customer service (and clothing) to your customers.

Psst: Mikaree is your #1 fashion supplier. We believe in providing a quality reliable and enjoyable customer experience to fashion boutiques so the same level of style and courtesy can be provided to their customers. Sign up for a wholesale fashion account today.

Step 2: Define Who You Want to Promote Your Brand

If your fashion store is already using social media, you likely don’t need us to tell you that there’s no shortage of people looking to promote your brand. Your social media inbox is likely packed with all types of messages of people asking to receive free clothing. Unfortunately, we live in a day and age where anyone with over 1000 followers believes they are an influencer and certainly, in their own right, they are.

However, when using influencer marketing to take your business to the next level, you have to be picky when choosing who to send product to. Yes, some influencers will promote your brand for free if you send them product but the cheaper price is rarely the best option in this genre of marketing.

So, it’s absolutely imperative that you outline the type of influencers you want to use to promote your brand. Decide on the amount you’re willing to pay, how many followers influencers must have, the engagement level you require, the colour scheme of their account, the appeal of their social media pages, etc.

You can hire the most popular influence marketer to promote your brand but if their audience doesn’t resonate with the items, you will not receive the ROI you could be getting. So, define a list of things influencers must meet prior to considering them for your influence marketing campaign.

Step 3: Ask Influencers These Marketing Questions

You’ve found a great influencer who has a large number listed under their followers. Their profile looks great and they seem to have even better photos… But not so quick. There are many ways influencers can make their profiles seem significantly better than what they actually are.

To avoid spending money where the ROI won't be there, these are the questions you want to ask potential influencer marketers to ensure they have your brand’s best interest in mind:

1. Who makes up the majority of your audience?
2. Where is your audience mainly from?
3. What is your engagement level?
4. What is your influencer marketing process (editing, photography, caption details)?
5. Do you work with any of our competitors?

Before you can move onto steps two and three of influencer marketing, you must first ensure you have a fashion supplier that coincides with your brand’s mission. Sign up for a Mikaree wholesale fashion account today and explore the wonderful selection of styles and prices we have available.