It is a well-known fact that influencer marketing is a powerful tool that helps promote business drastically. Besides, every business niche is rich for influencers who have many followers within the industry.
However, how to find the right influencer who wouldn’t mind working with you?
In this guide, you will get actionable tips on finding influencers. Let’s start!
The importance of working with influencers
First and foremost, think about how real influencers differ from fake ones. The real influencers have authentic followers. But how to distinguish the right influencers for your business?
The followers of these influencers would be relative to your niche and resonate with content.
Secondly, don’t think the number of followers is the only signal of the right influencer for your business. In this particular case, the quality of followers matters.
Besides, collaboration with the wrong influencers may hurt your business reputation in general. Not saying that you will waste tons of money.
Steps to find the right influencers
If you are eager to find the right influencers for your business – you need an actionable plan. Here are exact steps to follow:
1. Brainstorm the goals for your campaign
It is critically important to set goals and objectives for your marketing strategy. Influencer marketing is not an exception either.
Keep in mind that you should identify influencer marketing campaign goals beforehand. Otherwise, your campaign might go in the wrong direction.
Why do brands need to build cooperation with niche-related influencers?
The answer to this question is simple – promotion.
For example, your business niche is video advertising services. There is a new AdPlayer.Pro video ad player launched by your company. You need to promote this tool to increase the number of sales. Influencers related to the video industry can help you a lot.
What’s more important, the goal of your influencer marketing campaign may vary – website visits, eBook downloads, app installs, etc.
Once the goal is set, you should think about the money investments.
2. Allocate the budget
Don’t delude yourself by thinking that influencers will work with you for free. Any influencer marketing campaign requires you to invest money.
However, how to calculate your budget?
First of all, you should consider the factors that influence the budget:
- Influencer type
- The number of influencers you want to collaborate with
- Business niche
- Using platforms for targeting influencers
Secondly, it makes sense to calculate the potential conversions. If your goal is brand awareness, then it will be difficult to calculate the ROI.
3. Types of influencers
You can identify the type of influencers by paying attention to their number of followers across social channels. Basically, there are five types of influencers:
- Nano influencer (1-10K followers)
- Micro influencer (10-100K followers)
- Macro influencer (100-500K followers)
- Mega influencer (500K-1M followers)
- Celebrity influencer (over 1M followers)
It is a great indicator to realize what influencer you need to promote your business.
4. Three ways to find influencers
If you want to find the right influencers, you should run some research. It is possible to do this in three actionable ways:
a) Explore people who cover the same blog topics
Start with compiling a list of content creators within the niche. Go to Google or YouTube and figure out business-related blogs. Afterwards, collect the authors and add them to the list.
Nevertheless, this approach is time-consuming. Instead, use an alternative like Content Explorer tool from Ahrefs.
What do you need to do?
For example, your business revolves around an applicant tracking system. If you review the content of the Recruit CRM blog, you will see that it is about recruiting. Hence, use this topic for finding authors who cover it as well.
Enter the tool and type your topic first. Make sure you switch the search mode to an “In title” one. Afterwards, click the “Authors” tab:
You can review the number of Twitter followers each author has and add them to your list.
b) Run a search on social media platforms
One of the most straightforward ways to find influencers is to search across social media platforms. Look for relevant topics and hashtags. To make the process of search more resultative – don’t shy away from using the suggested tools below.
YouTube
YouTube is the first video search engine where people go to share their video content. You can use a platform called Social Blade that helps track statistics and analytics for YouTube.
How does it work?
Click the “Top lists” tab and choose one of the suggested YouTube top categories. Now, type your niche-related tag. For example, let’s find the top YouTube users tagged with a “fashion” topic. You can filter down the results by the number of subscribers each channel has.
If you need a search engine to explore Twitter accounts – use Followerwonk. It works simply. Enter your target keyword and hit the “search.” The tool allows you to customize your search by applying a few filters like:
- Follower count
- Tweet frequency
- Account age
- Social Authority
c) Third-party tools for finding influencers
The following third-party tools can help you complete your influencer marketing campaign without problems. Let’s review some of them one by one.
Heepsy
This platform has a database of 11M influencers. Heepsy helps find, analyze, and organize influencers across TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, and YouTube.
Klear
Klear is an actionable tool when it comes to managing influencer marketing campaigns. What can you do with Klear?
- Discover influencers
- Analyze influencers
- Communicate with influencers
- Measure the impact of your influencer marketing campaign
To sum up, Klear is an all-in-one influencer marketing tool you should use.
P.S. Sometimes launching multiple influencer marketing campaigns may be quite time-consuming. Hence, it makes sense to hire freelancers to work on this task. If you don’t know where to search for talents, Everytalent can help you with this.
5. Competitor backlink analysis
Influencers promote products or brands with the help of backlinks within their content.
How to figure out backlinks that point out to influencers?
Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs provides a detailed report of backlinks the site in question has. For example, your goal is to find influencers who link back to one of your product pages.
Take your target link and analyze it with the tool. Click the “Backlinks” report and review the results.
Skim through the results and find influencers.
6. Keep an eye on brand ambassadors
Working with influencers is a good way to promote your business. Nevertheless, influencers are not those people who use your product. They are interested in making money through brand promotion. While brand ambassadors use your product and like it so far.
It won’t be hard to find brand ambassadors. Brand ambassadors can get in touch with you via email or social channels personally.
Anyway, to find brand ambassadors stick to these three pieces of advice:
- Analyze newsletters (sign up for newsletters within the niche and track brand mentions)
- Analyze mentions of your brand within the content (set up alerts using Ahrefs)
- Analyze social media channels (pay attention to people who mention your brand or product within their tweets, posts, etc.)
All the above-suggested tactics will help you connect with true brand ambassadors.
Conclusion
The success of an influencer marketing campaign doesn’t depend on the number of followers influencers have.
A collaboration with a celebrity may be less resultative compared to working with a few macro influencers.
Use the steps suggested in the guide and find the right influencers for your business.
About the Author
Sergey Aliokhin is a marketer at Visme – an all-in-one visual content platform to create visual content. Outside of work, he likes spending his time with family and friends. Fond of music, martial arts, and books on science-fiction.