How to find influencers: step-by-step instructions for marketers

Working with influencers is becoming the standard of marketing for any brand and more and more businesses wonder how to reach out to influencers. Information received from creators is more trusted by consumers than direct advertising in traditional media.

Although influencer marketing emerged not long ago, different approaches to working with creators have already been formed. Some brands rely on advertising with celebrities and some only work with micro- or nano-influencers.

So, how to find influencers that will align with your brand and goals? Stay tuned to learn more. In this article, we’ll discover how to reach out to influencers and build your own influencer marketing program.

What are the benefits of working with influencers?

Today, cooperating with influencers is the fastest-growing customer acquisition channel. Creators set trends and shape public opinion. The popularity of influencer marketing is so great that it is forecasted to reach $16 billion by the end of 2023.

Collaborating with influencers, a brand acquires both access to an audience of many thousands and original content to promote its products. Influencers open up a great opportunity to move through their authority and combine seemingly incompatible things — celebrity effect and trusting tone. At the same time, they set new advertising standards that you need to understand.

Working with opinion leaders requires taking into account many features:

• Brand philosophy and ideas should be relevant to the theme of the influencer’s account. Advertising will only be successful if the influencer’s followers are your target audience;
• Influencers need to have some room for creativity. Just a promotional publication may look inorganic, so before starting an advertising campaign remember that you can not dictate how to create social media content. It would be better to think about how the selected influencer could represent your product and find a common solution;
• Influencers value their reputation. It is their capital. Therefore, they will not advertise every single product, and first, you need to convince them that your product is of high quality, and will be interesting and useful to their subscribers.
• Difficulties of choice and control. The saturated and fashionable influencer marketing market is the perfect environment for fraudulent schemes. Influencers pay for fake followers, provide marketers with fake statistics, and buy likes and comments to show activity. At the same time, tracking fraud is not so easy and only a detailed analysis of statistics helps.

However, anything can be promoted through influencer marketing. If you have ever wondered how to get in front of your target market, influencer marketing is the solution. It helps brands to get in touch with potential customers, erase the boundaries of officiality, as well as increase trust and recognition. It is only important to choose the right influencer and establish cooperation.

How to get influencers to promote your product?

An influencer is any person who has media weight: a YouTuber, a celebrity with subscribers, or a simple user of a social network who enjoys the authority.

There are several ways to interact with influencers: directly, through specialized platforms, or through agencies. Consider how to find influencers and reach out to them in each case. Here’s how to find influencers for your brand:

• Directly

First of all, Influencers are social media users. You can search and negotiate cooperation with them right there. To find a suitable account, you can use the search by hashtags, geolocation, and keywords in the description. When the list of potential candidates is formed, you need to contact each of them to request account statistics and discuss the terms of cooperation.

• Through an agency

Demand creates its own supply. Today, many influencer marketing agencies can organize work with influencers. Agencies provide a full range of services: from selecting a suitable opinion leader to drafting a contract and monitoring compliance with all its conditions.

Agencies charge a fee for their services. As a rule, this is a certain percentage of the contract value.

• Through specialized platforms

Specialized platforms are designed to connect influencers and businesses. This is a fast and safe way to find creators — the advertisers get access to the influencers’ databases and analytics. These platforms help quickly find the right influencers and start an advertising campaign.

The most convenient way to search for influencers is through the BuzzGuru discovery and analytics platform. The catalogue contains a database of more than 27 million influencers on various social networks. Marketers have an opportunity to select influencers by applying various filters that help to narrow down the range of potential candidates.

The service will help not only facilitate the process of searching for an influencer with the audience you need. Our platform fully answers the question of how to find a good influencer: it provides marketers with all the necessary and up-to-date influencer profile statistics. Users have various metrics at their disposal, including those that allow you to track the boost of subscribers, likes and comments, and use our platform as your own social media engagement rate calculator.

How to plan your work with an influencer?

When you have already selected a creator with a suitable audience and predetermined the goals, you still need to correctly plan your work. To protect you from possible difficulties, let’s highlight the critical stages of working with influencers and reveal each of them in detail.

What questions should you ask before starting the cooperation?

Working with an influencer can either take your brand to a new target market or waste your advertising budget. To anticipate the latter, conduct a brief interview with a potential influencer to partner with.

Don’t forget to specify the following issues:

• Who follows the influencer? Influencer subscribers must represent your target audience. Otherwise, you should not count on a large conversion;
• What kind of content does this influencer create? The content of the account should be consistent with the goals and position of your brand. In addition, you need to make sure that what has already been mentioned in the profile will not affect the reputation of your brand;
• Has the creator collaborated with your competitors? A partnership may not make sense if this influencer is already collaborating with your direct competitor, because in this case, the content will seem unreliable and contradictory to the audience;
• How much ad content is posted per account? This may seem like a trifle, but as practice shows, the more often advertising is published in the account, the lower the conversion from cooperation will be;
• What does the influencer already know about your product? If the creators are honest admirers of your products, then the advertising campaign will flow more naturally. If the influencers have never used your products, that’s not always a bad thing either. You just have to introduce them to your brand;
• What will your collaboration look like? Discuss with the influencer how many posts will be placed, and what their format will be. There are plenty of opportunities for creativity here.

How to check audience quality?

Before starting cooperation, you should check the quality of the influencer’s audience — engagement rate, possible fake followers, and compliance with the portrait of your target audience. The BuzzGuru platform will help with this.

Our tool provides detailed statistics about influencers’ accounts on various social media, including such useful metrics for determining the quality of the audience as:

• The engagement rate:

• The audience credibility:

• Demographic characteristics and interests of the audience:

• Subscriber growth:

• The average number of likes and their distribution:

You should not prefer the quantity of the audience to its quality. Social networks do not take into account the number of followers in the ranking for a long time. What you really should take into account is the engagement rate and the audience quality.

Related: How to Check Instagram Engagement Rate & Why It Matters

How to negotiate the cost with influencers and prepare for the launch of an advertising campaign?

If you want your advertising campaign to bring great results, you need to think over everything to the smallest detail. To get started, discuss the goals that you set for the advertising campaign with the influencer. Only in this case, the creator will correctly convey the desired message to the target audience.

Next, ask the opinion leaders what options they can offer to achieve your goals. Would be great if an influencer could provide you with 2–3 example publications of different formats.

All details of the agreements must be included in a full-fledged marketing brief, namely:

• the selected social network;
• publication format;
• scripts and texts of publications;
• timing;
• placement of links;
• release date;
• placement cost;
• copyright;
• participation of an influencer in discussions through comments, etc.

If you have discussed all the points with the creator and come to a mutual understanding, the next step is the production and publication of content. The influencers, like no one else, know their audience, and the publication formats that are the most appealing, so you need to allow them to feel free to create. However, you can ask to submit a draft before publishing it for approval.

The classic storytelling model in influencer marketing is as follows:

• “Story” — a problem faced by a blogger.
• The market situation — poorly performing solutions on the market.
• Offering the ideal solution is native advertising for your product or service.

In a sponsored post, most of the time the influencer will have to tell a life story, and for influencer marketing, this is more than normal. The 80/20 scheme works great here. Therefore, you do not need to try to fit all your benefits into one advertising post. This will only cause mistrust and subconscious blocking of content among users.

So the only thing remaining is to wait for the results and evaluate the effectiveness of cooperation.

Benefits of working with influencers

Influencer marketing is a more delicate approach to promotion than direct advertising. The advertising offer is disguised with a confidential tone and an unobtrusive manner of presentation, and that’s why it does not cause rejection among the audience. People have long been not guided by beautiful advertising when choosing a product. Today, your potential customers prefer to know the opinion of those who tested the product or used the service.

Brand promotion through influencer marketing has several advantages:

• increase in coverage;
• the opportunity to get original content;
• increasing the level of trust;
• increasing the loyalty of potential customers;
• improve brand awareness.

Conclusion

Working with influencers can help you increase the loyalty of potential customers, reach new audiences, and improve your content marketing. But for everything to be successful, you need to cooperate only with those opinion leaders whose audience will be interested in your product. It is equally important to learn how to adapt your offer to the format the influencer prefers and make it as native as possible.

For sure, you can search for the right creators yourself and spend much time and effort on that. Instead, we suggest opting for the BuzzGuru discovery and analytics platform. It is not only a platform where you can find the necessary influencer, it is one of the highest ranking tools to find target customers’ details through statistics and analytics we provide. If you take into account all the nuances of working with influencers, the response from advertising can amaze you!