Three Ways to Find Influencers For Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns
By now, you’ve probably heard of influencers and may even follow some yourself. But did you know that the influencer marketing industry is set to reach $40 billion by 2024?
Influencers have become a popular and successful way for brands to market their products on social media. Gone are celebrity endorsements; we live in the influencer age.
But if your brand wants to work with influencers, how do you find them? Collaborating isn’t as simple as DMing the first influencer you come across on social media. There are three principal places to search for influencers, each with advantages and disadvantages.
Use social media to conduct an in-house search
Advantage: free
Disadvantage: It requires the most work on your part, and it isn’t easy to analyze profiles without contacting influencers
The cheapest way to conduct influencer discovery is to use social media alone. Search for influencers on the network of your choice, and when you find someone who looks attractive, reach out to them for their internal analytics information to assess data about their profile that isn’t publicly visible.
However, you can’t just tell Instagram, for example, to show you all the fashion influencers in Paris who have between 10-50K followers and high engagement. It would be best to search more manually, using keywords and hashtags to direct you to profiles you don’t already know.
Here are some tips to get started when searching directly on social media:
See if you have influencers among your followers who meet your needs. If they’re already fans, they’ll probably be excited to collaborate.
Check your branded hashtags and brand mentions to discover who’s trying to get your attention.
Create hashtag and keyword lists related to your brand and its products, and look at who’s tagging their content or describing their profile with them.
Instagram influencer @eloisejaksic tagged fashion e-commerce @asos in this post, which the brand later republished on its account.
Subscribe to an influencer marketing platform to get search & analytics
Advantage: you can search for influencers more efficiently and analyze their profiles
Disadvantage: subscription fee, you still have to do most of the work on the campaign
An influencer marketing platform is AI-powered software that lets you search for influencers with filters and analyze their profiles without requesting any information.
Remember that example search query we mentioned above? With an influencer marketing platform, we can use search filters to plug it in and see only those profiles that match the parameters.
An example of an influencer marketing platform searching for fashion influencers in Paris with 10-50K followers and high engagement is. Moreover, the software returns information about any profile you click on. You can see data about follower growth, engagement rate, audience demographics, authenticity, etc.
An audience authenticity analysis from an influencer marketing platform.
You can also organize influencer search results in customizable lists, which you can create for your campaign, a specific region, or how you manage yourself. Download a spreadsheet of your list for extensive campaigns, and you have what you need to automate outreach.
Hire an agency to do the work for you
Advantage: the most minuscule amount of work for you
Disadvantage: costly
There are tons of influencer marketing agencies out there waiting for you to ask them to manage your campaigns. Agencies are expensive, so expect to pay hundreds,s if not thousands,s of dollars monthly for their expertise.
The good news is that the agency will do everything for you. You still have to stay in touch with them and participate in the process, but the agency will find influencers, vet their profile, and propose what they think is best for your final approval. Then, they’ll manage influencer negotiations, launch the campaign and monitor its media and results.
Outsourcing your influencer marketing to experts can be a great way to free up your time to work on something else if you can afford it.
What to look for in influencers
Now you know where to find influencers, but you should also know what to look for when browsing their profiles. What makes an influencer good for influencer marketing? What makes them the right fit for your brand?
To start, some key performance metrics can help us predict a successful marketing campaign:
Follower growth shows us how they acquired their followers. Look for organic growth here, which is slow and steady.
Engagement rate measures how much their audience interacts with their content.
Audience demographics help you verify that their audience matches your target audience.
Audience authenticity tells you what percentage of their followers may purchase bots.
Branded content can show you how well they’d perform for your brand by showing you their performance on past campaigns.
However, it’s not enough to analyze metrics. You also have to understand the influencer’s personality and style. Do they align with your brand? Is their voice capable of sharing the message you want to send? Do they uphold your brand’s values? Is their content quality up to par, and does their style fit yours?
Conclusion
Finding influencers isn’t always easy, but if you know the options available, you can choose the best method for your brand. When selecting who to reach out to, always remember what to look for in influencers and your campaign goals.
