The Process of Selecting Influencers for Marketing Purposes in an Organisation

Influencer marketing practices are growing on social media channels, while the usage of other mass-media channels is decreasing, prompting organisations to search for new tools with which to communicate efficiently with their target audiences. Influencers can affect purchase intentions if the audience identifies with them. For a successful collaboration with an influencer, an organisation needs to ensure that the brand fit is suitable, as the audience will become suspicious if the paid collaboration is too apparent. In addition, an organisation can ask an influencer to perform many roles during the collaboration. The objectives of this study, therefore, are to discover how organisations ensure brand fit with the influencer and to identify the roles fulfilled by the influencer in the organisation. To gain an understanding of the research topic, this qualitative research uses interviews with organisations, and interviews with media and influencer agencies located in Finland. Comparing the findings with previous research, two main implications were found. First, to ensure brand fit, the influencer’s target audience is carefully checked to see if it matches the organisation’s target audience; the values and content of the influencer are then checked in order to understand their character. The second implication is that the influencer’s roles include (among other roles) those of content creator and protagonist. The theoretical implications suggested additional steps for the influencer selection process in order to ensure the brand fit is more accurate; there was also an implication that the extensive use of the influencer’s roles would result in more effective outcomes.