Wondering if you need to vet influencers you work with? The answer is yes. After all, you wouldn’t hire someone without checking their resume and references, right?
In influencer marketing, working with the right creators who share your values is everything. It’s essential to carry out a thorough creator analysis and check their background, online presence, and previous collabs.
Otherwise, the creator’s content might not resonate with your target audience. Or worse still, the collaboration could backfire and draw negative attention to your brand.
Keep reading to find out how to vet influencers in a few easy steps.
What is vetting influencers?
Vetting influencers is the process of evaluating potential influencers to ensure they align with your brand's values, standards, and objectives before engaging in a partnership. It involves an in-depth review of the creator’s:
- Past collaborations: Check for any previous partnerships that might conflict with your brand’s image or values.
- Content quality and relevance: Assess if their content genuinely reflects your brand’s ethos, such as healthy lifestyle, sustainability, or diversity.
- Performance metrics: Evaluate KPIs like engagement rate, follower count, and branded content ratio to gauge potential campaign performance.
- Audience authenticity and demographics: Analyze their follower base for authenticity and demographic alignment with your target market.
How to vet influencers in 5 steps
Let’s imagine you’re a DTC athleisure brand and inclusivity is one of your core values. You’re looking for inspiring, diverse influencers of all sizes who care about topics like fashion, health and fitness.
Now, let’s walk through how you can find and vet influencers using the leading influencer marketing tool, Storyclash.
1. Search for influencers who meet your needs
Why is this crucial? We believe it's essential to work with creators who are a great match for your brand and your target audience. With proper alignment, you're more likely to produce high-perfoming campaigns. Having a good idea about the right platforms, budgets and expectations will help make this process smoother.
How to do it with Storyclash: First, use the influencer search and describe your ideal creator. Stay focused and expand your search if you need to.
In this example campaign, you decide to focus on female, English-speaking influencers based in the U.S. and the U.K. with at least 100k followers.
You can search for keywords and categories like "health *and* fitness" to find creators who talk about these topics in their content.
A popular alternative is to go niche with a search term like "purple yoga pants in a gym" and the results would show relevant content for this.
There are many ways to find influencers. You can decide what works best for you.
Tip: Not a Storyclash customer yet? No problem! You can use storyclash.ai for free to search for influencers using keywords.
2. Review performance metrics
Why is this crucial? A deep dive into an influencer's performance metrics shows you the potential reach and impact of a collaboration. So you can ensure their audience engagement aligns with your campaign goals.
How to do it with Storyclash: When you use the search function, you’ll see a list of influencers that match your criteria, along with key metrics like follower count, engagement rate, and the percentage of branded content. Each influencer also has a relevance score to help you evaluate how closely the influencer fits your criteria.
Let’s say you spot an influencer that could be a fit, like @thecurvygirltrainer.
A quick glance at her profile under the "Statistics" tab reveals some interesting stats, including:
- Follower growth
- Interactions in the last six months
- Number of brand collaborations
- Average estimated reach
- Engagement rate
- And more
This peek into her metrics can reveal how well your campaign might perform. For example, her branded posts typically drive 1.6k likes and 133 comments. This shows what you could expect from a collab with her.
What’s more, the charts show that the creator has experienced steady follower growth over the past few months. This is a good sign that her audience is genuine.
3. Review the creator’s content
Why is this crucial? In our experience, it's better to partner with creators who share your brand's values and are committed to producing high-quality content that resonates. When influencers are passionate about the same things you are, their content naturally reflects this. This makes your collaboration more authentic and impactful to your audience.
How to do it with Storyclash: The platform saves influencer content, making it easy to conduct an in-depth review. Ask yourself, do their posts appeal to you? Are they in line with your brand’s values and standards?
Don't just skim through their latest posts, dive into their content history. For example, let’s imagine you find content from six months ago where they are smoking, using offensive language, or behaving in a way that doesn’t suit your brand. This could be a reason not to pursue a partnership.
We believe it’s important to pay special attention to Instagram stories. They often provide a less filtered view of what an influencer is like and what they post on a daily basis. Stories disappear after 24 hours, but Storyclash saves all Instagram stories so you can view them up to one year later.
Tip: Check all platforms the creator is active on, including TikTok and YouTube.
4. Check the creator’s previous collaborations
Why is this crucial? We recommend checking who influencers have partnered with in the past. It’s also a good idea to consider what the content looked like, and the results they got. This indicates which brands suit them, and how receptive their audience is to similar products or messages.
If they have worked with competitors in the past, that could be a deal-breaker for you. Or not. Either way, it’s better to be aware. You might not want to start a campaign only to realize they promoted your biggest competitor a week before!
How to do it with Storyclash: You can view a complete list of partners under “Brand Collaborations.”
For example, this creator has worked with 48 brands on Instagram in the past 12 months, including top fitness brands like Nike and Fabletics, as well as magazines like Women’s Health.
Scroll down to view the top branded posts and how they performed:
If you scroll down even further, you’ll see a complete list of all brand collaborations, including the number of posts, estimated reach, engagement rate and estimated influencer media value:
Click the arrow to zoom in on content created for a particular brand. Like this collaboration with Nike:
5. Gain audience insights
Why is this crucial? The true value of an influencer lies in the authenticity and relevance of their audience to your brand. It's vital to ensure their followers are your target customers. Some creators seem to have huge accounts, but actually, they might be fake followers.
How to do it with Storyclash: The “Audience” tab in Storyclash reveals who follows an influencer.
Here, we can see the creator’s audience is 94.5% female, and the median age is 27. She has an audience quality score of 9, and that audience is made up of 73.9% real followers.
Scroll down to see a more specific breakdown of the audience. 2.8% of her audience is other influencers, 20.7% are mass followers, and 2.6% are suspicious accounts.
Under “Audience Origin” you can see where her followers are based:
So, if you are looking to reach Millennial females in the U.S., this creator could be an excellent choice. If your target audience is, say, males, or a teen audience, she is probably not the best fit.
We used Storyclash to vet this influencer. While you can get some insights by checking their Insta profile, it’s better to use a professional tool for creator discovery and analysis.
Influencer vetting tools
Here are a few of the top tools on the market for creator analysis and influencer vetting:
Storyclash
Storyclash is the AI-powered influencer marketing platform that makes it easier than ever before to find authentic creators, measure the impact of your campaigns, and manage all your creator data in one place.
Storyclash offers more ways to find influencers than most other tools. Options include AI search, image search, product URL search, lookalike search to help you emulate your favorite influencers, and more.
Storyclash analyzes every piece of content and every single brand collaboration, so you can assess the authenticity and brand-fit of any creator in just a few clicks.
Lefty
Source: Influencer Marketing Hub
Lefty is an influencer marketing platform for lifestyle brands. You can use Lefty to search through profiles in an influencer database. Smart filters make it easy to search for relevant creators. Lefty provides insights like audience quality, audience interests, audience demographics, performance in past campaigns, and content from past campaigns.
CreatorIQ
Source: Influencer Marketing Hub
CreatorIQ is a creator marketing platform that offers data and insights to help you find suitable influencers. You can search through a large database and filter by platform, engagement rate, audience, and more to find creators that fit your brand. To vet creators, you can check recent posts, key metrics, audience analysis, legal drinking age compliance, brand mentions, and hashtags.
Grin
Source: Influencer Marketing Hub
Grin is a creator management platform for influencer marketing. Grin’s Discovery Suite enables you to search through millions of creators based on demographics and key performance metrics. Grin also offers curated lists, where the platform providers provide pre-selected creators for you to choose from.
Vet influencers with Storyclash
Storyclash makes it easier than ever to find the perfect influencers for your brand. As an all-in-one platform, Storyclash streamlines influencer discovery, vetting, outreach, and management. So you can do everything in one place.
With unparalleled insights into creator content, collaborations, and audiences, you can enter new partnerships with confidence. Book a demo to see how Storyclash can help you find better influencers.