81% of marketers say that a main challenge for producing successful influencer programs is finding the right influencers. Any marketer who has gone through the process of finding and vetting top influencers won’t find this too surprising. It takes a lot of time and effort! There are many things to consider — audience demographics, performance metrics, brand fit/affinity, and more.
The good news is there are now influencer marketing platforms that can help speed up this process, and in some cases, even automate a part of the process. Below we outline how an influencer marketing platform can help you and your team efficiently find top influencers.
How to Find Top Influencers in Less Time with an Influencer Marketing Platform
Quickly hone your search with aggregated data
There is a lot you can do manually, with a lot of time and elbow grease. However, it is often not the most efficient way for you and your team to spend your time.
This is why having an influencer marketing platform that compiles influencer data is so important — imagine having one place you can go to find all the information you need to make a smart decision! Influencer marketing platforms mainly provide three important sets of data:
- Audience demographics like age, gender, location, interests, income, and more.
- Audience type, or an approximate breakdown of how many of the influencer’s followers are real versus spam/bot accounts.
- Performance metrics like impressions, reach, total engagements, total video views, engagement rates, and video view rates. Some of the more sophisticated influencer marketing platforms like Traackr will even provide you with an influencer’s average engagement rate, so you can get a sense of how they perform over time.
Aside from these definite data points, the best types of influencer marketing platforms also allow you to search through an influencer's past content and profile bios with keywords. This allows you to identify them based on interests and topics, and gives you a greater chance of finding influencers that fit well with your brand and product. For example if you are a sensitive skincare brand, you could look for influencers who have openly talked about things like acne, rosacea, eczema, or "irritable skin" in the past. Alternatively, if your brand finds it important to work with influencers that share the same value (e.g. sustainability or body positivity), you could use those and related terms to search.
Tip: This process doesn’t stop at performance metrics and content keywords. Learn more techniques for finding top influencers that are the right fit for your brand.
Replicate success with influencer lookalike features
If you’ve already done the work (manual or not) of finding top influencers once, you might be able to continue building off your success! Some influencer marketing platforms have features that automatically recommend folks who are similar to top influencers, which can help you easily grow your influencer network.
For example, Traackr’s Influencer Lookalike Recommendations feature provides you with specialized lists of creators that have similar attributes to top influencers, like:
- Audiences - Traackr recommends profiles of influencers who have similar audience demographics
- Content - Traackr recommends profiles of influencers with similar content
Traackr’s Influencer Lookalike feature also provides you with deeper insight into how influencers are connected to each other. For example you can browse unique influencer lists that show you:
- Notable Followers - Traackr shows you people who are influential (have a big audience) that follow the influencer you are interested in
- Notable Likers - Traackr shows you influential people who follow the influencer you are interested in, and engage with their content
Tip: Want to know more about Traackr’s capabilities? Here’s a blog post that details some of the ways that Traackr can help you find top influencers. Or, you can chat directly with one of our influencer marketing experts.