How to find influencers for your brand
Finding the right influencer can make or break your campaigns, but it’s not easy to find those perfect partnerships. This article will help you find impactful influencer partners whether you are trying to:
- Find influencers for a specific platform like, TikTok, Instagram, or Twitch
- Find influencers in your niche industry for a unique campaign
- Or, find VIP influencers for a large scale product launch
How influencer marketing platforms help you find influencers
As you probably know, finding influencers can be very time consuming without an influencer marketing platform. The processes we offer below can be implemented without a tool, however, influencer marketing platforms can save you tons of time by automating influencer vetting or providing:
- Data on an influencers’ platforms and audience demographics
- In-depth content search tools utilizing influencer interests, hashtags, brand mentions and more
- KPI benchmarks based on historical data detailing how your brand and competitors’ influencer content is performing
- Influencer suggestions based on key attributes
“Traackr’s data quality and breadth of its database are unrivaled. It’s been essential in our work to find the perfect influencers for our clients and prospects – whether we are working on a complex proposal with the creation of custom KPIs or on the day-to-day influencer relationships.”
Nathalie Folco, Account Director, Integrated Media Strategy, Weber Shandwick
Find influencers for your brand
Search for creators who are tagging/mentioning your brand
Partnering with influencers who are organically mentioning your brand can be the start of a very successful relationship. This shows that the creator is excited about your products already, meaning their audience probably feels the same way. This can also open doors to a more favorable partnership filled with not just paid, but also extra, organic love for your brand.
Read more about how to cultivate organic influencer partnerships.
Narrow your search through themes and values
A great way to find well-fitting influencer partners of any size is to look for folks that are talking about themes, values, and topics that are relevant to your brand. Create a list of keywords and hashtags, then audit each influencer's past content to see if they are aligned. The more specific you are with these keywords the better! (e.g. clean beauty, sustainability, graphic liner, hair porosity, etc)
With an influencer marketing tool, these content searches are often automated.
Look for influencers with high engagement, not just high follower counts
Many influencer marketers put too much weight on audience size when deciding who to partner with and how much to pay them. While audience size is undoubtedly a metric to take into account, it does not reflect the success of your campaign. Looking at other metrics like audience engagement rate can be a much more accurate measure of the effectiveness of your potential partnership.
Here’s more information on how audience size vs engagement rate should affect your influencer investments.
Check out your competitors
Sometimes it can be helpful to see which influencers, platforms and what types of content your competitors are finding success with. Chances are, the audience they are having success with is your audience too. It’s always best to come up with your own creative flair, but it can be a good check-in for inspiration.
See what competitive intelligence can do for a brand.
How to ensure influencers meet your brand’s standards
Build a list of brand safety keywords you want to avoid
It is hugely important that your influencer partners align with your brand’s values and positively impact your brand image. All influencer marketing teams should have a list of keywords and phrases that they want to target, as well as a list of those to avoid.
If you don’t have an influencer marketing platform to automatically alert you of brand safety issues, it can be a tedious task to check through someone’s content, however, it is worth it!
Check their audience, check their comments
An influencer marketing platform easily provides audience demographics, but if you don’t have one yet, here are a few things you can check by hand:
- Do the accounts following your potential partner look like real people?
- Do followers generally fall into the demographics you want to reach?
- Are the influencer’s posts receiving thoughtful comments that indicate genuine engagement? Or is it full of bots and spam?
Evaluate the creator’s paid vs organic content
It can be beneficial to work with an influencer who has a mix of paid and organic content. You will probably not get the best results with someone who posts a high volume of paid content because your brand might get lost in a sea of advertisements.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Does it seem like they are posting a large quantity of sponsored content?
- Does their audience seem to respond well to sponsored content?
- Do they work with your competitors, and do you think that will make an ad from your brand feel less authentic?
- Do they have a creative flair you’d like to tap into?
Conduct non-social research
Cover your bases by doing some digging to see if there is anything in an influencer’s past that could be harmful to your brand. You can also step back and do a gut check. After watching their videos and reading their words, does this influencer have the tone, messaging, aesthetic and values that match your brand?