How To Find Influencers For Marketing Your Small Business

Influencers can be an effective way to market your small business but finding the right ones can be difficult. Here’s our guide on how to find influencers for marketing your small business.

How To Find Influencers

The number of influencers to choose from can be intimidating but these tips can help you find the right ones.

• Know Your Audience  - Knowing your audience is the first step to finding influencers for your business. Then, make sure your target audience is following the influencer that you’re thinking about collaborating with. Not every blogger has the same kind of target audience and ensuring that your target audience is the same as the influencers will ensure that your products are shown to relevant audiences.
• Do The Vetting - You’ll need to evaluate your options to avoid hiring the wrong (or even fake) influencers. Here are the criteria for evaluating influencers.
  • Reach - Reach is the total number of followers an influencer has on social media and/or their blogs. To be effective, the influencer should have a decent following on the social channel(s) where you plan to run your campaign.
  • Engagement - Engagement rate shows how many of an influencer’s followers are really interested in their content and how much an influencer can affect purchasing decisions. Check the engagement levels (likes, shares, comments, etc.) an influencer gets on their posts.
  • Authenticity - Followers trust and follow only authentic-sounding recommendations. Posts can’t look like they’re only talking about something they’re getting paid to so check past brand collaborations and content of the influencers you’re considering.
  • Personality - An influencer’s personality and style should match your messaging and brand values to make the content appealing and relevant to your audience.
  • Niche - To be effective, an influencer’s niche should align with your business, products, or industry to make the campaign relevant.

Where To Find Influencers

Once you know what you’re looking for, you have to find influencers that fit your criteria. Here are some places to look for your ideal influencers.

• Hashtags - Hashtags make content searchable and accessible on social platforms. Search for hashtags that are relevant to your business to help you find relevant influencers. 
• Social Media - Two of the best ways to find influencers on social media are brand mentions and social media monitoring.
  • Brand Mentions - Track your brand mentions and look for influencers who are already talking about you.
  • Social Media Monitoring - Social media monitoring and listening tools can help you track your brand mentions on social media and find influencers who are talking about you or your industry.
• Google Alerts - Set alerts for keywords relevant to your brand to find people who write about topics related to your products or industry, posts that mention you, and relevant brand advocates.
• Blogger Outreach Platforms - Read through an influencer’s posts to determine their relevancy, find out their Domain Authority (DA) and social media statistics, and then contact the ones that fit what you’re looking for. If this manual process is more effort than you’d like to spend, try using one of the platforms that will help you find influencers without much effort and provide the stats you’ll want to see.
• Influencer Marketing Platforms - Search databases of influencers and filter by reach, category, engagement, social platforms, etc. They can also identify/disqualify fake influencers, help conduct efficient outreach, and run, track, and measure campaigns.

How To Engage With Influencers

Once you’ve found and vetted the influencers you want, you need to engage with them. Here’s how to do it.

• Get Their Attention - Follow them and engage with their posts. Make meaningful comments, show appreciation for their work, and share their content. This will draw their attention, get them to notice you, and help with outreach.
• Craft A Proposal - After getting an influencer’s attention, follow up with a proposal that contains the following:
  • Who you are and how you found them
  • Why you’re reaching out
  • What you can offer them (not too detailed but still enticing)
  • What you’d like them to do next (call-to-action)
• Follow Up - Influencers get a lot of messages, so if you don’t get an immediate response, wait for a couple of days and send a follow-up email. Do this a couple of times before moving on. 

After the collaboration ends, make sure to nurture your influencer relationships. If you both had a good experience you might want to work with them again in the future.

If you want to know more about influencers read our article, How Much Does Influencer Marketing Cost, or just contact Ellipsis Marketing now!

Tags: influencer marketing