Influencer marketing has experienced significant growth in recent years. What was once a relatively niche marketing strategy has become a core part of many brands’ campaigns, with some 86% of marketers saying they use influencer marketing to some degree.
That rapid rise in adoption has been matched by an equally growing number of influencers. According to research by Goldman Sachs, there are already some 50 million online content creators, a number that is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.
For brands, the sheer number of influencers is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it means that any brand that wants to walk down the influencer marketing path should be able to find the right person for the job.
On the other hand, actually finding the influencer that makes sense for your brand can appear to be more challenging than you’d like it to be. After all, with millions of influencers to choose from, how on earth do you go about selecting the one that’ll help to grow your brand?
With that all-important marketing money on the line, working with a random influencer and hoping for the best is not an option. That’s why we’ve put together a handy, detailed guide on how to find an influencer for your brand that should help your brand unlock all the many benefits of this innovative, modern approach to marketing. Let’s dive in.
Understanding What Makes an Influencer
In the space of a decade, influencer marketing has gone from a niche marketing strategy to one of the most widely used and effective digital marketing strategies on the planet.
It’s so popular that even people who have no interest in digital marketing have heard of ‘influencers.’
Yet, despite its widespread use, there remains plenty of confusion about influencer marketing, including what it is, its effectiveness, and who these seemingly mythical influencers actually are.
So the first step towards finding an influencer for your brand is to familiarise yourself with this type of marketing. You’ll find it easier to go through the process of identifying and working with an influencer once you’ve got a firm grip on the essential, need-to-know information.
What Is An Influencer?
Influencers come in various shapes, sizes, and forms, but they all have one thing in common: they have the power to influence others via their online presence.
Influencers are kind of like the digital version of the most popular kid in school. Remember when the cool kid started collecting Pokémon, and then all of a sudden, everyone at school started doing the same? That wasn’t just because Pokémon rocks (though it does), but because the cool kid had influenced his peers so much that they wanted to get in on the action too.
Influencers work the same way. They already have an audience of loyal followers. Working with brands allows them to monetise their account in exchange for promoting products/services to those followers, who, so long as the brand and influencer are a good fit, genuinely will find the promoted product/service of interest.
Ultimately, it’s a win-win-win for everyone involved.
- The brand taps into a new audience
- The influencer gets paid
- The followers discover a new brand.
Why Influencer Marketing Is On The Rise
Brands are continually looking for ways to reach new audiences. Ideally, the strategy they use would be:
- Effective
- Budget-friendly
Done correctly, influencer marketing ticks both those boxes.
It’s effective because it leverages the authority, credibility, and trust the influencer shares with his or her audience.
It’s budget-friendly because working with an influencer is usually much cheaper than other digital marketing strategies.
And not only is it generally more affordable from an upfront perspective, but it can also offer a terrific ROI, one that far outperforms the ROI of more traditional marketing spend.
A report from Influencer Marketing Hub found that, on average, businesses generate $6.50 in revenue for every $1 of influencer marketing spend. Compare that with the $2 for every $1 spent on Google Ads, and it’s no wonder so many brands are choosing to include influencers in their marketing strategies.
Different Types of Influencers
OK, so we’ve established that influencer marketing can offer brands a whole lotta goodness.
But there’s a catch. You can only hope to get a great ROI (or any ROI at all) if you work with the right influencer. We’ll go into more detail about how to find and identify them below, but first, we need to take a look at the different types of influencers.
You see, all influencers share a common thread — they can influence an audience’s buying decision — but what that looks like in practice can vary widely.
First of all, all good influencers have a niche, which you can think of as being the category their social media profiles fall into. Some of the most popular influencer niches include:
- Health and fitness
- Personal finance
- Beauty and skincare
- Fashion
- Technology
- Travel
- Gaming
- Food and cooking
Most influencers fit squarely into a single niche, but there can be some overlap — for example, health and fitness with beauty and skincare. The good news is that there are influencers for essentially every niche, so no matter what type of product/service your brand sells, there will be an influencer out there who can help you!
The niche is just one factor that distinguishes one influencer from another. The other is their size, which refers to the number of followers.
Nano Influencers
Nano influencers are influencers with between 1000 and 10,000 followers. That might not sound like a lot, but nano influencers often provide the best, most cost-effective results thanks to the high levels of trust and engagement that they have with their tight-knit community of followers.
Micro Influencers
Micro influencers are influencers with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. As with nano influencers, micro-category influencers tend to have a strong bond with their audience, offering excellent engagement.
Macro Influencers
Macro influencers are influencers with between 100,000 and 1 million followers. They’re often social media personalities with high production values, and can be effective at helping brands reach a large audience.
Mega Influencers
Mega influencers are influencers with more than 1 million followers. They tend to be celebrities — Kim Kardashian is a mega influencer — and have phenomenal reach, though they’re also the most expensive and tend to have a lower ROI than other types.
Unless you’re a major, international brand (if so, well done!), you’ll almost certainly be working with nano or micro-influencers, especially if it’s your first foray into influencer marketing.
Identifying Your Brand’s Ideal Influencer
The influencer you select doesn’t just influence the campaign; in many ways, it is the campaign.
After all, who you select to work with will influence:
- Who sees your brand/product/service
- The cost of the campaign
- ROI size.
As such, making sure that you select the right influencer is essential. Most brands that have failed influencer campaigns in their marketing history do so because they worked with the wrong influencer in the first place.
Here are some key factors to keep in mind that should move you in the right direction.
Your Goals
You’re not undertaking influencer marketing just for fun — you’re doing it to benefit your brand in some way.
Before beginning your search for an influencer, clearly define what you’re hoping to achieve through the partnership. Are you hoping to drive sales? Build awareness? Get people to sign up for your newsletter?
Having a clear objective will make it easier to find your ideal influencer, since you’ll have a better understanding of what type of content will help you to achieve your goal.
Niche Relevancy
Relevancy is vital for influencer marketing success. In other words, the influencer’s niche must be as closely aligned with your niche as possible. For example, if you’re a gym apparel brand, then a fitness influencer would make sense; a food/cooking influencer would not.
Deeper Dive
An influencer’s niche could be closely aligned with your brand, yet still be the wrong influencer to work with.
One underrated consideration when assessing potential influencers is to analyse their alignment with your brand values. An influencer might have niche-alignment and plenty of engaged followers, but if their personal brand is out of sync with yours, then it’s unlikely to be a good match.
The Cost
You’ll have a budget for your influencer marketing campaign. How much you’re willing to spend will impact the types of influencers you can approach. Ballpark figures for different types of influencers include:
- Nano Influencers: £50–£250.
- Micro Influencers: £250–£600.
- Macro Influencers: £2,000-£10,000.
- Mega Influencers: £10,000+.
Common Mistakes To Avoid
Choosing Based on Follower Count
High follower counts can look impressive, but looks can be deceiving. While there are some scenarios when more followers = better marketing outcomes, they’re the exception, not the rule. Most brands that have success with influencer marketing — and by that, we mean they get a good ROI — do so by working with influencers with lower follower counts (such as those in Nano/Micro influencer categories).
Micro/macro influencers tend to have better engagement rates, which can be a much more important metric than the number of followers alone.
Overlooking Previous Branded Content
The most effective influencers are the ones who are selective about which brands they work with. Audiences notice when an account repeatedly publishes low-quality sponsored posts on their profiles, and eventually begin to tune them out. If an account is already showing signs that they’re comfortable to take the money and run, then that’ll be a fair warning sign that your campaign might go the same way.
Assessing previous branded content also allows you to see how the influencer handles sponsored content. Did they do so naturally, or did the content feel a bit forced? You’ll know when you see it.
Ignoring the Capacity for Long-Term Collaborations
The best influencer marketing campaigns are the ones that are long-term collaborations, not one-time transactional deals. Keeping in mind the influencer’s capacity to work on a long-term basis, such as by assessing the age of their account and the frequency of their posts, is a good way to maximise your chances of success.
Researching Platforms to Find Influencers
By this stage, you should have a broadly strong idea of what your ideal influencer looks like.
Now, all you need to do is sit back, wait for your awesome campaigns to go live, and then bask in the glory of all the many benefits that influencer marketing can bring.
Oh, wait, we’ve missed a step — you have to actually find the influencer first.
With fifty million online content creators on the planet, you’d think that would be easy.
And it actually kind of is easy if you know where to look, which, as you might expect, is online. Here are the short-and-sweet details of the main online spaces where brands can find their next influencer.
Social Media Sites
Trying to partner with a social media influencer? Well, the easiest place to look is…on social media. If they have a big enough presence that they’ll be able to make a meaningful contribution to your brand, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to find them.
Using hashtags to find content relevant to your niche (such as #YogaLifestyle, #LondonFood, #ParisTravel) will bring up a wealth of content creators.
Pro Tip: Change the tab from ‘Top’ to ‘Recent’; it’s an excellent way to discover relevant micro- and macro influencers who may not be big enough to command the ‘Top’ content spaces, but who still have highly-engaged audiences.
It can also be worthwhile to look at your brand’s existing followers. You never know — the perfect influencer might already be in your midst.
Search Engines
Google can be a surprisingly simple and effective way to find influencers in your field. While much of the influencer world exists directly on social media platforms, there’s often a large body of influencer-related content out there on the normal web, too. Many industry websites publish round-up listicles of the top/emerging influencers across all the many niches.
Influencer Marketplaces
Influencer marketplaces make it easy for brands to find and connect with influencers. Some of the biggest include:
- Collabstr
- Aspire
- Brandwatch
- CreatorIQ
- Favikon
Looking for bloggers to work with? Here at Blogger Tuesday, we have a network of more than 3000 bloggers ready and waiting for opportunities to help brands just like yours.
Evaluating Influencer Engagement and Authenticity
Looks can be deceiving, which is why it’s vital to look beyond the surface level and check that the influencer you’re planning to work with doesn’t just talk the talk, but walks the walk.
By that, we mean checking that they score highly for engagement and authenticity.
See, follower counts are important, but they’re not everything. For one thing, followers can be fake. Think about this: Some sites sell 10,000 Instagram users for $100. Now, imagine you paid to have your brand promoted to those users — you’d have to be extremely lucky to avoid an ROI of 0%.
So follower counts don’t tell you much on their own. What really matters is:
- Are the followers real?
- Do they listen to the influencer?
You can check that the audience is real either by assessing the followers yourself (do they have profile photos? Names that make sense? Do they have followers themselves?) or by using a third-party fake follower checker tool.
The Followers Are Real, But Are They Listening?
OK, so let’s assume that all those thousands of followers are real. Now we’ve got to figure out whether they’re actually listening to the influencer. This is key because, if they’re not currently listening, then it’s unlikely that they’ll quickly switch to being all ears when the influencer publishes a post about your brand.
There’s a simple formula you can use to measure a profile’s engagement rate, which is a good way to figure out how much their audience is paying attention.
The Formula
You’ll need to take data from at least 10 of their posts for this. The last 10 is good for assessing their current engagement rate, though it can also be useful to perform another analysis of a selection of posts from their past, since it’ll show you whether their engagement rate is growing/steady/declining.
For now, let’s focus on the last ten posts.
- For each post, tally up the total number of engagement indicators, such as likes, comments, shares, and saves.
- Divide that number by the total number of followers.
- Multiply that number by 100.
What you’re left with is the engagement rate. What’s considered good/normal/bad depends on the influencer’s level, and the platform they’re using (Instagram/TikTok/other). Once you have your engagement rate figure, a quick Google search can tell you the quality.
The higher the rate, the more engaged the audience — and by this stage, we don’t need to tell you that that’s all important!
Approaching Influencers the Right Way
Imagine you found the perfect influencer, and then you let them slip right through your fingers because you fumbled the approach. You’d never forgive yourself.
Good influencers get a lot of requests, so sending them a quick message and expecting them to get back to you isn’t going to work.
To get their attention, you’ll need to follow some ground rules.
Engage With Their Content
Everyone’s more friendly with someone they already know. In the digital world, that means making contact in the same way everyone else does: giving a follow, throwing out likes, and leaving some genuine comments. It’ll get you on the radar and make it more likely that they respond with something resembling oh, I already know you when your email finally lands in their inbox.
Send Them a Personalised Email
And talking of inboxes — make sure that, first, you choose the right one. Their email inbox is infinitely better than their social media inbox (which no one checks).
Also infinitely better: a personalised email, not a generic, copy-and-pasted message. Tell them what you like about their brand, why you think they’d be a good fit, and what you’re offering.
Some brands shy away from talking about the nitty-gritty details, but it’s better to give the influencer as much information as you can. It’s much more likely that they’ll pay attention to it, and it also shows that you respect their time — not sharing details doesn’t make the details go away, it just makes the influencer have to work to get them.
Send a Well-Timed Follow-Up
You might get a response within a day. You might not. If you haven’t heard anything in a week, send a gentle follow-up — it’s usually at that stage that influencers sit down to actually read the first message.
Building a Lasting Brand-Influencer Partnership
Short-term influencer marketing wins are possible, but as with most things, the more you put in, the more you’ll get out. Brands that invest in their influencer relationships and work with them on a long-term basis tend to outperform those that take a scattergun approach to their influencer marketing.
If you’ve taken the time to select the right influencer(s) to work with, then you can have confidence that they’ll live up to their side of the bargain.
But as a brand, you also have a responsibility to be a good partner. Any influencer that can drive results will not be short on collaboration offers. Investing in the relationship increases the chances that they’ll continue to work with you, and also avoids the risk of appearing on one of those brands not to work with lists that occasionally do the rounds in influencer circles (they talk to each other!).
Happily, this is one of those things that’s pretty straightforward. It’s mostly about being the great business that you are, plus throwing in a few extras.
Be True To Your Word
Influencers are people-businesses, with an emphasis on the business. They expect agreements to be adhered to, payments to be made on time, and the communication lines to be clear. Influencers, just like every other vendor, do not want to spend their time chasing payments that should have automatically made it into their accounts.
Make Them Part of the Family
The best relationships are ones where everyone feels special, valued, and included. The influencers you work with will be letting you into their world, so let them into yours. Inviting them to your brand events, sending them new products before general launch, and letting them in on news before it becomes public will make them feel part of the family, even if it’s just as “the favourite cousin.”
Be Flexible
Influencers are busy, often fitting their influencer obligations around all their other responsibilities. They’re also nearly always one-person operations in charge of, well, everything.
Having a degree of flexibility when things don’t always run as smoothly as you’d like is what separates the great brands from the good. If you’ve chosen well, then your influencer will consistently deliver great value to your brand, potentially over many years. Managing the minor hiccups when they arise, as they will, demonstrates that you’re thinking big picture and that there’s genuine trust.
