How to pick the perfect pet influencer for your brand

If you’re a marketer working in the pet industry, chances are you have considered working with pet influencers. If you’re a dog lover yourself, you may even follow a few and be inspired by their content to purchase from the brands they’re promoting! There’s no doubt that pet influencers are an important tactic to consider — but how do you get it right?

1. Pick influencers who share your brand’s values

First and foremost, you must know what your brand stands for and the key messages that you want to promote. For example, if your brand is all-natural and vegan, then you need to pick an influencer who shares those values. Authenticity is absolutely key with influencers, so getting your strategy right is important.

Similarly, it is worth investing the time in researching the influencers’ brand history. If they’ve worked with a brand that doesn’t align with their personal brand, it’s likely that their followers won’t see them as an authentic advocate — thus, this will have an impact on the authenticity of your content with them.

Another important factor that can be easily overlooked is the country that the influencer lives and works in. It’s not immediately obvious on some profiles, although chances are you’ll be able to tell where they are based if you scroll through their feed and see the locations they have tagged.

2. Check engagement, not just followers

It can be tempting to see the influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers and think that they are bound to give you the best return on investment. However, there are micro (5k+ followers) and midi influencers (20k+ followers) who have highly engaged audiences, which means that most of their followers are regularly liking and commenting on their content.

Similarly, not all macro (50k+ followers) influencers have engaged audiences. Don’t be fooled by their vanity metrics. A pet influencer with good engagement receives comments and likes on their posts, which is proportionate to their follower size.

3. Be fair and set clear expectations 

For many pet influencers, they have put a lot of time and effort into building their loyal following over a number of years. They adore their pet and their page is their ‘baby’ — they are very proud of what they have achieved, and rightly so!

If you’d like to work with a pet influencer, then you should expect to pay them fairly for their work. The fee depends on the size of the influencer’s following, the engagement they receive, the number of channels that they’ll promote the content on, and the nature of the work that you’re looking for them to carry out.

Often, a contract is useful to have in place so that the goals and the deliverables of the partnership can be agreed by both parties.

4. Pet Influencers are content creators ­­— learn from them

Influencers are content creators at their heart. They know what interest their audience and what doesn’t. When approaching a piece of collaborative content, it’s important to recognise this. Ultimately, this will help you achieve the most genuine, authentic content. You don’t want the content to be too much like a salesy ad — it needs to tell a story that is genuine to both your brand and the influencer. This is the secret to the perfect partnership!

Emily Wardle is associate director of spottydog communications. Read the original post.