An influencer is someone who is widely known and perceived as a trusted figure by a large number of people. Generally, influencers are considered to be a reliable source of information for their audience, as they share a common interest with them in regards to interests like traveling, gaming, etc. So, Influencer marketing involves using the credibility of influencers to reach a brand’s target audience and promote the brand and its products.
The overwhelming reach of social media platforms has greatly contributed to the rise of influencer marketing. As of 2022, the global influencer marketing industry size was valued to be approximately $16.4 billion, which is more than double the value estimated for 2019. Moreover, 93% of marketers have already implemented influencer marketing strategies for their campaigns. In fact, 66% of marketers are now planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets due to how effective it is in swaying people’s buying decisions.
All these numbers indicate how important it is for brands to thoroughly understand and employ influencer marketing strategies. However, to run a successful campaign and achieve your targeted ROI, you need to build collaborative relationships with the perfect influencers for your niche. But how can you find them?
In this article, we will discuss everything that you need to know about how to find the perfect influencers for your niche. But before jumping to that discussion, let’s take a look at how the perfect influencers can benefit your brand.
The Importance of Finding the Perfect Influencers
If your influencer is not in line with your target market, niche, and your brand, there can be two consequences. First of all, your target market will not be effectively reached, hence, failing to achieve your campaign goal. Secondly, if the influencer is negatively perceived by your target market, your brand may receive a lot of backlash and face rejection from the audience. A popular term for this effect is called “getting canceled.”
For example, your company sells vegan cosmetics that are not tested on animals, and you proudly highlight your concern for animal welfare. Thus, your target market will include people who are also concerned about animal welfare and appreciate vegan products. Naturally, you will want to hire an influencer popular in the fashion and beauty niche. However, if that influencer often appears on social media wearing real fur coats or genuine leather bags, your target market may disavow all of your products. In fact, your brand will most likely take a massive PR hit, which may cause irreparable damage to your brand image.
On the other hand, hiring the right influencer to promote your brand will help you reach your target market more effectively. In fact, the perfect influencers for your niche can take your brand’s popularity to another level, where not only will your sales receive a boost, but your customers will engage in word-of-mouth marketing for you.
Characteristics of the Perfect Influencers for Your Niche
Now that you understand why you need to pick the perfect influencer for your niche, you may be wondering how you can identify them. Well, when looking for the ideal influencers for your promoting your brand, you have to consider a few key factors, which we have outlined below.
Target Audience
The perfect influencers for your niche attract a large percentage of your target audience. For example, if your brand sells art supplies, then your target audience will consist of artists and art enthusiasts. Therefore, you will need to find influencers who are also artists or art enthusiasts themselves and whose opinions on art supplies matter a lot to the community, and in turn, your target audience.
Engagement
The ideal influencers for your niche will be those who can deliver engaging content and create a buzz around your brand by triggering discussions. In fact, when it comes to influencer marketing, the engagement rate is sometimes more critical than the follower base.
Check out the comments and content quality to determine if the influencer can intrigue your target audience. Influencers with higher engagement rates can promote your brand more effectively by triggering positive responses and conversations from their followers by delivering unique content.
Relevance
Again, your target audience comes into play when assessing the relevance of the perfect influencer for your niche. Find what percentage of your target audiences know the influencer. Understand if the influencer talks about your brand’s area of expertise.
For example, if your brand sells camping tents, your influencer must be well-known as an outdoor enthusiast. Their day-to-day content should be focused on outdoor activities like camping as well. To summarize, the collaboration has to make sense to your target audience.
Background History
We have witnessed issues arising from influencers having controversial histories, resulting in brands ending their partnership with such influencers. Hiring controversial influencers can negatively impact your brand reputation. Therefore, do a thorough background check on the potential influencers you want to collaborate with. If you can identify suspicious or questionable activities and problematic opinions or statements made by the influencer that contradicts your organizational values, steer clear of them.
Brands They Have Worked With
Find out what brands the influencers have collaborated with in the past. Check out the audience responses as well. From this analysis, you can figure out a number of things. For example, you can identify what type of people trusts the influencer the most, if they can successfully promote your products, and how effective they are for influencer marketing campaigns.
However, if the influencer has recently promoted or is still promoting your competitors’ products, it will be wise to look for alternative options.
Location and Age
Unless you sell globally standardized products or services, you will need to assess the influencer’s location. If you want to promote beef burgers in America and hire an influencer living in India, where beef consumption is banned, you will have no benefit from this collaboration.
Moreover, you will need to select influencers of the proper age range. If your brand sells products that are targeted at women over 50 years old, an 18-year-old influencer is unlikely to be able to successfully demonstrate and promote the product as they are rarely credible in this case.
Sincerity and Professionalism
The perfect influencer for your niche should be convenient and easy to work with. They are responsive, cooperative, and professional in approaches. Moreover, sincere and genuine influencers are likely to promote products that they personally find satisfying. Hence, they contribute significantly to your brand’s integrity.
Professionalism is also important in successfully running an influencer marketing campaign. If the influencer is unprofessional and does not do their part well, the whole campaign will fail. Here is an example of such incidents where you do not want to find yourself.
How to Find Influencers in Your Niche in 5 Easy Steps
Finding the perfect influencers for your brand can be a little challenging if you do not plan your approach beforehand. Below, we have prepared an easy-to-follow 5-step plan to help you on your quest.
Define Your Campaign’s Goals
Common influencer marketing campaign goals include boosting sales, brand awareness, customer loyalty, promoting new products, generating leads, etc. When setting objectives based on these goals, express them in a measurable form so that you can track your campaign’s performance more accurately. For example, you can set a goal of boosting sales by 25%, gaining a 30% ROI, or increasing website traffic by 50%.
Once you know your campaign’s goals, you will have an idea of which influencers can help reach them. Some influencers will happily and directly encourage their audience to buy your products in exchange for a commission. However, some influencers do not feel comfortable about that, but they will promote your brand with enthusiasm if they like your products. The latter group of influencers is considered highly credible when it comes to increasing brand awareness.
Set a Budget
Now, you need to allocate a budget for your influencer marketing campaign. If you have a fixed budget, then you will need to find influencers who fit it. Otherwise, you will have to set a budget based on the type and number of influencers, their platforms, type of content, your target market, marketing elements, logistics, ROI, and many other factors.
However, when setting a budget, do not compromise quality for cost or quantity. Hiring a bunch of influencers will give your brand more exposure. But if their credibility or content quality is low, not much of that exposure will turn into sales. On the other hand, if you collaborate with a few credible influencers capable of producing high-quality and engaging content, your campaign will yield much better results. Furthermore, multiple studies revealed that investing in micro-influencers generates more sales than investing in mega-influencers and celebrities.
Start Looking for Influencers
In the following two stages, the previously mentioned characteristics of the perfect influencers for your niche will be crucial. You know what you need; now, you need to know where to look. Below, we will discuss where and how you can look for the perfect influencers for your brand.
With all its integrated services, Google can be your most useful source of information. There are tons of ways to use Google to find the perfect influencer for your niche. For example, you can use Google Alerts. Here, you can set alerts for specific keywords that are related to your product, service, target market, and brand. Therefore, you can monitor who is talking about your niche or brand and where. With a little more digging, you can identify influencers who are perfect for promoting your brand.
- Hashtags
Influencers keep their content up-to-date by including current trends relevant to their niche. Therefore, you need to follow trending topics. The most convenient way to search for current trends is by manually searching for trending hashtags relevant to your niche. Find the influencers who are using those hashtags and check out their content quality, follower base, and engagement rate.
- Social Media
The hashtag search will, of course, take you to social media sites. In fact, searching hashtags works best if you do it on individual social media platforms instead of Google. However, there are other ways social media can help you find the perfect influencers for your brand. If you want an influencer who is already your customer, search for your brand mentions. You can also use social media trackers and listening tools to identify who is talking about your niche.
- YouTube
For genres such as gaming, fashion, and education, YouTube influencers are the ideal choice. YouTube is known for its high-quality content because they are longer and more detailed. By searching for relevant keywords on YouTube, you can easily find influencers who are making content about your niche. Moreover, most of these influencers have appealing social media pages as well. Keep your eyes on mid-tier and micro-influencers, as they can generate a better return at a lower investment.
If you want your brand to be promoted by influencers who are B2B industry experts, LinkedIn can be the most effective platform. You can search by using terms like “content writer” or “blogger” as keywords and narrow your findings further down to your niche. By reaching out to experts through LinkedIn, you can show and expect more professionalism than you could on Instagram. However, make sure your brand has an established page on LinkedIn first.
- Influencer Marketing Platform
There are dedicated influencer marketing platforms that can connect you to the perfect influencers for your niche. Using them, you can search for the top influencers that cover the same industry as your business. You will also find their contact information, account statistics, and other details on these platforms.
- Brand Website
When an influencer likes your products or services, they will want to get in touch with you. You can find relevant influencers among them as well. Therefore, optimize your website with all the necessary information and resources so that those influencers get to know you more. Also, add an influencer landing page and mention your intention to collaborate with influencers on the home page. All in all, make it easy for them to find you and reach out to you.
- Useful Tools
If you want your hunt to follow a more structured pathway and gather more insights, you can use some special tools that we have listed for you.
- Followerwonk: This lightweight search engine is useful for Twitter. Through Followerwonk, you can search for accounts based on your desired tweet frequency, follower count, clout score, and account age.
- Social Blade: Social Blade comes in handy when you look for influencers on YouTube and TikTok. Here, you can track analytics and statistics of particular YouTube channels and TikTok accounts. Social Blade can help you find top influencers in your niche, even narrowed down to each region and topic.
- Heepsy: Through Heepsy, you can conduct your search for influencers on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok. From its database of 11 million influencers, you can easily find, analyze, and organize the perfect influencers for your niche. It also helps you to analyze your audience and outreach them.
- SparkToro: Using SparkToro, you can find popular social media accounts, websites, and podcasts that talk about your niche. It also shows what percentage of your target audience is following which accounts. You can also separate the business accounts and individual accounts. To identify each account’s engagement and relevance, you can check out its SparkScore.
- Klear: Klear offers you an all-encompassing service to manage your influencer marketing campaign. It enables you to find, assess, manage, and communicate with influencers. Moreover, it has tools to analyze the impact of your campaign.
Shortlist Your Favorite Influencers
After conducting extensive research, you should end up with a long list of potential influencers you want to collaborate with. Now it’s time to narrow the list down. Start by removing the influencers who currently are or recently have promoted any of your competitors. Next, do some background checks and remove the influencers with questionable background histories. Finally, based on your desired engagement rate, content type, target audience, and relevance, narrow the list down further.
Pick the Perfect Influencers for Your Niche
Now it’s time to reach out to your shortlisted influencers and discuss terms. You can reach out to them personally or through influencer marketing agencies. However, all of your shortlisted influencers may not be available for work. With some, you may have negotiated about content type, frequency, and compensation. After the discussions, you will have a handful of influencers who are perfect for promoting your brand and satisfying all your requirements.
What’s Next?
The success of an influencer marketing campaign depends on many different factors. Even if you can identify and hire the perfect influencers for your niche, it cannot guarantee the success of your campaign. Therefore, keep evaluating the performance of the campaign and each influencer periodically.
You can set performance goals for each influencer and set incentives to motivate them as well. Furthermore, if you find your influencers to be highly effective and perfect for your niche, work towards building long-term relationships with them. This connection will benefit both you and the influencer in the long run.
