Social Media Video

How to Find the Right Influencers Who Can Make the Biggest Impact on Your Brand

How to Find the Right Influencers Who Can Make the Biggest Impact on Your Brand

Who are the right influencers who can make the biggest impact on your brand?
Focus on those who convert Instagram followers who actually love your product, so it is much easier to get them to talk about your brand than finding new Instagram followers.

New Instagram brand influencers tend to be extremely transactional, so you’re kind of coming at them from left field. However, if we start to take a look at different ways in which we can activate and work with people who are already fans of your business, we might be able to find better ways for conversion. There are five ways in which we think you’ll be able to find the right Instagram influencers to help make the biggest impact on your brand.

Number one, there is PeopleMap, an amazing platform that allows you to mine your existing user base. Number two, there is working with agencies. Number three, is learning how to analyze and look at the adjacent brands that sit within your space. Number four, look at strategic hashtags and how to use them to better optimize and find the right influencers for your business. Number five, consider the right channels that you can be looking at to find the right influencers that are then going to make your brand more visible and help you increase sales.

Use PeopleMap.

PeopleMap is an amazing platform that allows you to find who your highest followers are for your brand. You can see who has the most social capital, and who you should be targeting. Those who already love your brand and have a huge reach are the ones that you should be targeting specifically for your Instagram platform. With Instagram, we want to start to research by hashtag. That means that if your brand is focused on Gothic clothes, you probably want to start doing hashtag research like #Gothic. People who tend to only search by hashtags like the hashtag #FashionBlogger, are not necessarily going to be the right fit for you. You’re going to have to do a lot more diluting to find out who all of those online bloggers and Instagram influencers are.

Choose the Right Channels.

Finding influencers isn’t always just for Instagram- there are great platforms on Tumblr, influencers who do really well on YouTube and great vloggers out there. There are certainly even Power Pinners on Pinterest.

When you think about the different channels in which you can get influence and the different channels where your customers engage, don’t just think about influencer marketing in terms of Instagram. Think about all the different channels you can activate to really help bring that visibility to your customer who is ultimately the person we’re trying to attract here.

Look at Adjacent Brands to Determine Authenticity.

When you think you found the influencers that might be a good fit for your brand, you’ve got to see if they’re also promoting adjacent brands. Are they also promoting other brands that have similar price points? Are they promoting brands with the same niche audience? It doesn’t make sense to work with a fashion blogger that promotes a whole bunch of different kinds of products that aren’t really tailored and focused to one customer. The consumer who’s following that is probably not going to want all of those products. As you’re niching down and starting to find the right influencers, make sure you notice that they’re also pitching specifically to your customer and that the adjacent brands they’ve been working with are similar to your particular market.

Agencies that connect brands with influencers are really amazing assets. They do all the heavy lifting, create contacts and manage relationships and budgets to make sure you get the ROI that you want. Unfortunately agencies can be expensive, so you have to make sure that it fits within your budget to be able to activate on something like this. If you’ve ever tried to do influencer relationships on your own, which most of you have, you’ll probably find they can be a little messy. You’re dealing with money changing hands, negotiations, photographs, and controlling the whole process. Do I give them the whole product? Do I get the product back? Much needs to be negotiated and a lot of different things have to go into those contracts. It may be better to look at agencies to really be able to act as a marketing leg for you, when it comes to influencers and building and bridging those relationships.

You can get more on this topic with our article on what influencers are looking for in brand partnerships. Also be sure to get your free download: “The Top 5 Items Your Instagram Influencer Contract Should Include”.