Influencer Marketing Made Easy: 20 Must-Ask Questions Before Partnering

Working with influencers is a fantastic way to increase visibility and generate more sales profit for many businesses. This doesn’t come as a surprise, considering the influencer market size is projected to rise to $32.55 billion in 2025—35.63% more than the 2024 figure of $24 billion.

Still, given the relative novelty of influencer marketing as a common marketing tool, working with influencers is untrodden ground for many brands’ sales and marketing departments.

Are you looking to develop or expand your brand’s influencer marketing campaign but aren’t sure how to gauge if potential influencer partners are the right fit for brand collaboration? We’ve prepared 20 essential questions that you can ask potential influencer partners while interviewing them.

20 Questions to Ask Influencers at an Interview

1. What Type of Content do You Produce?

The first thing you want to know is how well your interests align with those of the influencers. To do this, you can check the type of content they produce and also find out if they’re open to branching out into new avenues. 

This is vital because, in most cases, a certain form of content only resonates with a certain demographic. For example, if you’re advertising a product targeting an older, professional audience, it doesn’t make sense to partner with somebody who focuses on creating Twitch streams.

2. Who Is Your Target Audience?

Similar to the above question, knowing about an influencer’s audience demographics helps create a clearer picture of how well their followers fit within your own target audience.

If you’re selling gardening supplies, associating with a content creator who specializes in creating gardening tutorials will produce the best influencer marketing results. This is because their followers’ demography will most likely be interested in your products.

3. What Is Your Engagement Rate Across Various Platforms? 

An influencer’s engagement metrics across different social media platforms they use—especially the ones you intend to focus on—should provide a good approximation of the number of leads they may bring over to your brand. This should also help you determine the rates you may offer them.

Also, tailor your approach based on your campaign intent. If you aim to raise brand awareness, recruiting influencers with more followers for low-intensity campaigns will be best. However, if you aim to drive clicks and direct engagement, micro or nano influencers may be a better choice.

4. How Do You Grow and Maintain Your Social Media Audience?

This question lets you evaluate an influencer’s potential for future growth. While an influencer may appear to have momentum, it doesn’t always mean that they can keep it up. 

Without a strategic approach to growing and maintaining their audience, collaborating with an influencer could mean wasted money on your part.

Before deciding to close a partnership, ensure that the influencer has a clear strategic vision for future growth and uses the appropriate tools to help.

5. What Does Your Process for Creating Engaging Content Look Like?

An effective influencer must have a solid grasp of people’s psychology. This requires an understanding of their audience’s expectations and preferences, encouraging audience feedback, and following trends in a way that still lets the influencer’s personality stand out in the crowd.

When interviewing an influencer, use this question to gauge if they follow a consistently strategic content creation routine. Some key aspects of the content creation process include: 

• Defining and researching the target audience
• Analyzing competitors
• Setting achievable short-term content goals
• Editing and optimizing content to increase its quality and visibility, including engaging visuals, etc.

6. How Do You Stay in Touch With the Current Social Media Trends?

A strategic approach to content creation is impossible without keeping a tab on the current trends on social media platforms. Social media influencers may follow industry news, take webinars, participate in forums, or use relevant analytics tools to stay ahead.

Before conducting an interview, it is a good idea to catch up with basic information on all these topics yourself so you can get a better idea of whether the influencer is truly doing their best to stay up to date.

7. How Do You Measure the Success of Your Content?

When judging an influencer’s dedication to building a strategic growth plan, another important question is to ask them how they measure campaign success. 

Some of the key performance indicators in influencer marketing include reach, growth rate, total number of followers, CTR (click-through rate), CPM (cost per mille), search volume, and more.

Discuss the key performance indicators they choose to prioritize, the tools they use to measure metrics, whether they use strategies such as A/B testing, and how they incorporate insights into their overall strategy.

8. How Do You Adapt Your Strategy in Case of Suboptimal Performance?

This question is meant to test influencers’ flexibility and ability to shift their strategy in case of underperformance, which is occasionally inevitable in any line of work.

Ask the influencer what underperformance means to them personally, as their definition may vary from yours. Then, ask them to provide concrete examples of adjustments they had to make to an underperforming campaign in the past and how they managed to identify flaws in their prior approach.

9. What Brands Have You Previously Worked With?

Does the influencer have any previous experience with brand collaborations? If yes, that should ideally make the onboarding process much smoother, as they already know what being part of an influencer partnership means in practice.

Additionally, if these previous collaborations have been with brands in your niche or close to it, that’s an additional experience that’ll be relevant.

10. What Is the Most Successful Collaboration You’ve Been a Part of?

This question should get your potential partners to reveal what factors make them consider a partnership successful. This will give you a feeling of what they’re likely to prioritize in case you end up closing the partnership deal.

Whether their answer stresses their success or the success of the brand they were working with can sometimes also be a good indicator of how they’re going to treat a potential partnership with you: whether they’ll always put themselves first or look for other metrics of success that may be relevant for you too.

11. How Do Your Content and Values Align With Our Brand?

Authenticity is a crucial part of any brand partnership. If your brand’s values clash too much with what the influencer has established as their values thus far, they’re bound to be less invested in the partnership. Also, the audience itself will notice the dissonance, making the influencer campaign look deeply unconvincing.

Likewise, suppose there is a genuine connection in terms of values and goals. In that case, there’s a solid chance that the influencer may also develop a sincere emotional impulse toward promoting the brand. The audience can sense this sincerity and feel convinced that the influencer truly stands behind their sponsored content.

12. How Do You Balance Your Authenticity With Brand Demands?

It’s not always possible to stay fully in sync between an influencer’s personal preferences and beliefs and the partner brand’s demands. For example, an Instagram model who is outspoken about their veganism may not feel comfortable promoting a clothing brand’s line of jackets made of animal leather. As such, you should know in advance how influencers handle these situations if they occur.

Going too far in either direction is bad for both sides of the partnership: partnerships with influencers who refuse to make any concessions are intensely difficult. At the same time, an overtly conciliatory attitude will hurt the influencer’s brand and lead to lower audience engagement.

13. How Do You Ensure Transparency With Your Followers While Promoting?

For influencers, ensuring full transparency with their audience is one of the trickiest parts of brand partnerships. Whenever an influencer includes promotional content in their output, a section of the audience will be skeptical about its authenticity. The question is how to mitigate this.

The bare minimum is to always disclose sponsored content when it’s included. Ideally, influencers should also aim to find a way to always remain honest about their experience with sponsored content—and convince the audience that this is the case—without hurting the brand’s image.

14. How Do You Handle Negative Feedback on Social Media Channels?

Negative comments can take a psychological toll on influencers, just like with anyone else. Still, when they act as brand representatives, any outbursts or scandals can also harm the positive brand image of their sponsors.

Before closing a partnership, ensure that the influencer has experience with crisis management as well as a healthy attitude, and isn’t prone to going into online spats and controversies.

15. How Do You Prioritize Your Tasks as an Influencer?

Influencer burnout is a serious risk for both parties in an affiliate relationship, and the only solution is a solid sense of time management and task prioritization. These skills, along with a healthy work-life balance, are a solid guarantee that the influencer will keep delivering high-quality content.

Make sure that the influencer you want to work with has a good grasp of time management, as it’s hard to have reliable long-term partners otherwise.

16. How Do You Overcome Challenges in Your Line of Work?

Another skill necessary for preventing burnout is a resilient, optimistic mindset geared towards overcoming obstacles and solving problems whenever they appear.

You can ask the influencer for an example of a serious challenge they’ve overcome recently to get a more concrete idea of how well they can deal with challenges.

17. Do You Collaborate With Other Influencers, and How?

Openness to collaboration with other influencers is usually a net positive, as it can open up your brand to new audiences that you might not have been able to reach that easily. It also displays a propensity for teamwork, which is always good in a collaborative setting.

A potential downside might be the possibility of collaboration with controversial influencers that may indirectly hurt your brand’s image. To prevent this, ask if they’d be open to letting you vet future collaborations.

18. Do You Engage With Your Audience Beyond Posting Content, and How?

The best brand promoters are those who build deep, substantial relationships with their audiences. This is a two-way street, as it can help the influencer gain deeper insight into their audience’s preferences, as well as increase audience trust.

This could mean anything from actively engaging in the comment section, online groups, or forums related to their relevant niche to holding Q&A sessions and interactive events.

19. What Sets You Apart From Other Influencers in Your Niche?

This question allows influencers to present a unique value proposition that they may offer to your brand, which sets them apart from everyone else in the influencer market.

These attributes may be unique skills or experiences related to your brand’s niche, distinct personal attributes, or previous experience with successful campaigns.

20. What Is Your Expected Content Churn Rate?

One of the most vital practical questions you should ask a potential affiliate influencer is their expected content churn rate and how often they can implement promotional content related to your brand relative to their overall content churn.

Settling on a specific churn rate is extremely helpful for keeping track of your overall marketing output and developing a consistent marketing strategy.

How to Find Affiliates

Not sure how to find influencers to recruit for your affiliate program? You can use the following strategies:

1. Work with influencer marketing agencies: Agencies specializing in influencer marketing, such as Vivian Agency, have access to broad networks of trusted influencers they’ve worked with previously and can help you narrow your search down to the best talents available.
2. Use software tools: You can use dedicated software tools that aggregate results from different social media channels to help simplify your search.
3. Take advantage of influencer networks: Influencer networks or marketplaces are platforms that connect brands with extensive databases of influencers looking for potential brands to affiliate with.
4. Use social media: You can also discover social media influencers organically by searching for hashtags relevant to your niche or looking through relevant social media communities.

Get the Most Out of Your Influencer Partnerships

Apart from some practical concerns, this set of interview questions should help you determine if your prospective partners possess the essential qualities required for the role: diligence, a sense of organization, flexibility, optimism, authenticity, and a diplomatic character.

These attributes all make working with affiliate influencers more pleasant and lucrative for both parties involved. Still, there are additional ways to help you drive your influencer marketing campaign without having to rely on subtle aspects of human psychology.
Software tools such as Tapfiliate can help you integrate all your sales and marketing platforms and manage all your affiliates from a single place. This allows deep insight into each affiliate’s individual performance, saving you hours of work that could be much better spent optimizing your campaign.