Tops Tips to Find Influencers for Your Business
All over social media, you will see sponsored content or users promoting a product from a brand you haven’t heard of before. This is the work of influencers, people considered to have some online authority and can shape the opinions and tastes of their loyal followers.
An influencer can be a vlogger, a celebrity, or an industry expert. There is no hard and fast rule of how many followers you need to be an influencer. There are macro-influencers with a broad group of fans and micro-influencers whose fans share a particular interest.
Influencer Marketing
A business has multiple options to market itself and reaches its intended consumer base. Google Ads is a favorite platform among advertisers. When you search specific keywords on Google, brief but related advertisements appear with organic search results. Though relatively new, influencer marketing has gained popularity in the past few years with the advent of social media and has quickly become another favorite marketing method among marketers. Businesses leverage the reach of an influencer to build awareness for their brands.
What sets influencer marketing apart from other modes of marketing is its highly personal tone. Followers treat influencers like friends they trust who will be honest with them. Hence, if influencers recommend a particular product or service that they have recently tried, their followers trust that it’s something worth having.
Partnerships with influencers can take form in various ways. The most common is for the influencer to spread the word about the brand by posting content leading their followers to its website or social media pages. An influencer can also serve as a spokesperson or ambassador for a brand. They could even write news and feature stories about products, services, and special promos on behalf of the brand.
Ways to Find Influencers
- Start with Hashtags
Hashtags are a convenient way of accessing and searching for content on social media. Hashtags are often clickable. When you click one, you will get redirected to a page with all posts that carry that hashtag. Use hashtags relevant to your brand to look for influencers. Most influencers with a substantial following rarely use #influencer or #sponsored, so you have to be more specific in your search.
If you find a post you like, check the creator’s profile. Collaborate with this influencer if their content aligns with your brand’s image and aesthetic.
2. Go on Google
Google is a helpful tool to search for almost anything. However, you must be specific in your choice of keywords; otherwise, you’ll have to comb through the overwhelming number of search results. Prepare a list related to your brand’s niche and line of business.
A practical tip is by adding a site: with the URL of the social media platform where you intend to look for influencers. For example, type site: Instagram.com on Google Search. Apart from keywords, you can also add a location to your search query. This is especially helpful if you want to collaborate with local influencers and coordinate in-person events and photoshoots.
3. Scan Competitor’s Mentions and Tags
Sound business judgment dictates that brands must always keep abreast of what their competitors are doing. You use the same strategy for influencer marketing. Some of your competitors might have already partnered with influencers.
For example, brands are being tagged left and right by influencers on sponsored posts on Instagram. If these influencers don’t have an exclusive agreement with one particular brand, you can reach out to them and collaborate. That way, your products or services will also have the audience that your competitors already enjoy.
4. Search Keywords on YouTube
Most content creators have now migrated to producing vlogs for YouTube. One good thing about collaborating with a vlogger is that they also have a following outside YouTube. On their other social media accounts, they promote their channel, so the brand gets the added advantage of being promoted across different platforms.
There are a lot of genres of vlogs on YouTube. You should be familiar with the ones that are relevant and applicable to your brand. For example, if you’re a restaurant owner, you might want to search for the keywords mukbang, food review, and even ASMR. You can reach out to the channel owner and send samples of your products for them to feature on their next vlog.
5. Check Followers on Personal and Competitor Accounts
Influencers in the same niche typically follow similar accounts. Check your competitor’s social media pages or brands in the same niche, and sift through their followers. This is a tedious process, but you might find an influencer who aligns well with your brand strategy and image there. If you’re already collaborating with several influencers, you can also check their followers.
6. Search on LinkedIn
LinkedIn may be the last place you would check if you’re looking for influencers since it’s like the social media equivalent of a resume. But it’s easy to find the right people here because it has users from a vast array of industries. LinkedIn also allows you to refine your search by title.
You can look up users who indicate that they are bloggers or content creators in their profiles. Also, reaching out to influencers via LinkedIn instead of Instagram gives your company a sense of professionalism, or as the kids would say it: your company looks legit.
7. Recruit through Your Brand’s Website
Sometimes, it’s the influencers themselves who reach out to brands and not the other way around. Ensure that your website has your contact details if influencers want to collaborate on a project. Dedicate a landing page specifically for partnerships. You can present basic information about your business and the kind of content you are looking to produce on the page.
Influencers who genuinely love your brand often send proposals on the type of content they can produce for you. This saves you time from actively pursuing influencers because those who contacted you are already engaged with the business.
Tips on Finding Influencer
Understand Your Target Audience
The target market of your business must also be the target audience of the influencer you partner with. Remember that influencers are brands themselves, and they cater to a particular type of followers. You have to ensure that these followers are your brand’s ideal customers; otherwise, you would have invested for nothing.
Suppose that you’re a clothing company that started with the dropshipping model. Now you want to create your line of products. You decide to collaborate with a fashion vlogger. Will anyone do it? No, since not every fashion vlogger has the same kind of audience. Some may be into vintage fashion, while others prefer a minimalistic style. Still, some may be looking for practical fashion tips instead of style inspirations. Choose a vlogger whose audiences are the same as yours.
Vet Your Influencer
If you’ve finally found the influencer who shares the same target market as your brand, it’s time to check if they can deliver sales. You can do this by checking the influencer’s reach and engagement rates. Reach pertains to the number of followers of an influencer, while engagement is indicative of how interested their followers are in the content they put out. There are also other intangible things that you should look into, like the influencer’s personality and authenticity.
