Six tips to find the perfect influencers for your business

Influencer marketing is a $13.8 billion industry. The popularity of influencer marketing is hardly surprising. Influencer marketing campaigns can help improve your business image, expand your reach, and generate sales. Moreover, you can run a campaign on a budget of any size. 

This guide will teach you how to find influencers for your next marketing campaign. So let’s get right into this guide.

Understand your audience 

You need to understand who your audience is to find the right influencers to promote your products. However, they don’t need to be directly linked to your industry. They need to share the same audience as you.

Consider doing a target audience analysis to understand your ideal customers, their needs, and other personal interests. Here are some tips you can use to make your audience analysis more effective:

1. Create buyer personas.
2. Use free survey tools to ask your audience about their interests.
3. Discover audience behavior with Google Analytics.
4. Get advanced audience insights with SimilarWeb.
5. Find out what’s trending in your audience with Twitter Analytics.
6. Use Sprout to monitor your social media accounts.
7. Tap into CRM data to see where your audience is on the buyer journey.
8. Analyze user engagement through email marketing and online reviews.
9. Do competitor research on websites and social media.
10. Join online forums and communities to see what people are talking about.

That will allow you to identify influencers who are not related to your industry. It will also allow you to look for influencers your audience follows and those who don’t belong to your niche. You can create a customer persona alongside this to help you better understand your target audience.

Know the type of campaign you want to run

Before mapping your influencer marketing plans, you need to consider what kind of campaign you want to run. There are many different kinds of campaigns. The goals of your campaign and the channels you want to use will define your approach. 

Some examples of influencer campaigns include, but are not limited to, gifting (giving influencers gifts when they promote your products), guest posting, sponsored content, contests and giveaways, and so on. 

Research on what types of campaigns are available. Choose one that fits with your brand. You must remain true to your brand image. If you’re a B2B company, you also need to track your content ROI to get the most out of your B2B content marketing strategy. 

Furthermore, you can do an efficient outreach and keep track of the progress of your campaigns by using various tools. These influence marketing platforms include Fourstarzz, BuzzSumo, BuzzStream, HYPR, and TRIBE.

List down qualities your influencer should have

As a business owner, you want to get top-notch influencers to promote your best products and services. But how can you do this? There are a few qualities you must keep in mind when choosing influencers for your business:

• Engagement: Influencers earn the right to be called influencers when they are active online and work hard to establish trust in their followers.
• Content quality: An influencer should try to produce as much original content as they can. If they do nothing but repost other peoples’ content, they lose their credibility.
• Brand match: The influencers you engage with should match your brand’s image, tone, and style. 

Focus on authenticity. That’s one of the most important characteristics your influencer should have. Not to mention, it’s something your audience will appreciate. Authentic and genuine content is more likely to attract the consumer’s attention. Therefore, every social media post your influencer puts out must have a degree of authenticity attached. 

Moreover, ensure the influencer of choice is wholly relevant to your brand and what it stands for. The influencer needs to fit in with your brand image naturally.

Don’t let an influencer who has no relevance to your brand promote your sponsored posts. That will look inadequate. 

Another quality to look for in influencers is their social media reach. Assess how many followers they have. A higher reach means more people will see your content. However, it’s important to ensure the influencer can reach your target audience.

 

Use hashtags and Google Alerts to find the right person

Hashtags are helpful as they make content accessible on social media. When looking for influencers for your brand, consider searching for hashtags relevant to your company. You may even use hashtags like #sponsored, #ad, or #blogger, for example, to see if you can find suitable influencers for your brand. 

To check how many followers these influencers have, you can use the Instagram engagement calculator. That will help you ensure engagement and track engagement rates.

Google Alerts is another way to help you identify the right influencers for your business. 

Simply set alerts for keywords that are linked to your brand. Doing this will enable you to find people who are interested in subjects similar to your industry.

Reach out to the selected people

Keep in mind that the influencers you target tend to spend a lot of time on social media. So, consider contacting them via the channels they use most when reaching out to them. The main point is to create a genuine connection with them. It’s best to contact influencers with your business account to maintain professionalism. 

You can reach out to influencers via email. You can use a cloud-based tool like Voila Norbert to help you find the email addresses of influencers. 

Many influencers also use influencer relationship marketing (IRM) systems that allow them to connect with clients. Platforms such as AspireIQ, Famebit, and Upfluence, for instance, have millions of influencers in their databases you can potentially connect with. Consider using these platforms to find relevant influencers relevant to your market niche, location, among others. 

When emailing the influencer be sure to introduce yourself  and the brand, and explain your request. Wrap up the email an invitation to collaborate and provide your contact details. 

Influencers have tight schedules, so the shorter and more straightforward the message, the better. There’s no need to butter up your potential collaborator — they already know what you need from them. It’s up to you to deliver the message clearly.

Track your results

As you launch your influencer marketing campaigns, consider tracking influencer marketing KPIs. These help determine whether you’ve generated your desired results. Once you’re done with your campaign, review your results to see if the campaign was a success or needed more work on your part. 

If you use Linktree, you can post a link to the campaign and track TKTK

You can always use what you learn from your experiences for future campaigns too. For example, if your relationship with the chosen influencer results in the number of leads you initially wanted, consider running another similar campaign. 

Conclusion

In today’s digitized world, business owners and marketers will find many ways to promote their products and services to their target audience. However, it’s always good to mix things up. So develop your market strategies according to the changing times.  

Influencer marketing is a strategy that won’t only enable you to promote your products. It will also allow you to expand your customer base. The result? You experience an increase in profits. 

Moreover, with the rise of social media, influencers can be a gateway to reaching the masses. If these influencers are experienced and relevant to your brand, they’ll do justice to your products. That’s because they’ll likely use the right language and aesthetics while doing so. 

In other words, to succeed, you only need to know how to find influencers for your business. They’ll do the rest.