How to find Influencers for your Brand
Influencers are no doubt a fantastic way to promote a product or service, providing you choose the right one for your audience. However, it can be difficult to find influencers - especially micro-influencers who can be more of a benefit than influencers with a mass following.
In this post, I take a look at some great free ways to find influencers.
If you're not sure what kind of influencers to chose, check out our 5 pillars of influencer marketing blog to help you.
Free ways to discover Influencers
There are many listing sites and influencer search engines that can help you sort by niche and follower amount, however, these services usually cost. I'm going to share ways that are free but do require that extra work and research.
Before you start searching away, be sure to understand who your audience is, check out our 5 pillars of influencer marketing blog to assist.
Hashtags
Hashtags are a great way to find influencers in your target market and will provide a whole range of influencers with different social followings.
To use hashtags to find influencers, simply pull together a list of hashtags relevant to your niche - a google search can help you here e.g. "best hashtags for travel".
Once you have your 'niche focused' hashtags you can now explore everyone posting with those hashtags. For instance, type in the hashtag in the Instagram search bar and Instagram will display a feed of the top, trending and most recent posts - top and trending are not necessarily posts from accounts with big followings.
This method also applies to TikTok.
Blogs
Bloggers generally have a following on social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
A simple search in a search engine such as"best [your niche] blogs" will bring up a whole variety of websites from direct blogs to websites that list blogs. You may find that this will only show up bloggers with a large number of followers, but sometimes writers include smaller and upcoming bloggers.
You can also use keywords from your niche to help discover blogs. If automotive was your niche you could try searching "car blogs", "mechanic blog" "best alloy wheels blog", etc. Get creative.
Once you find a blogger, you should be able to contact them directly from their blog. They also tend to list their social channels, which you can research to see how they connect with their audiences.