Influencer marketing has made a name for itself as an alternative strategy for unofficial brand promotion. However, it is not easy to find influencers.
According to a recent study, 54% of social media users use the platform to research products, and 71% are more likely to buy goods and services based on recommendations from social media influencers.
It’s crucial to identify the right influencers who fit the niche of your brand to reach your target market. Finding influencers in your niche will increase your authority and visibility within your target market.
In this blog, we will understand who influencers are and how you can find influencers for your niche.
Who are the Influencers?
An influencer is a person who has the ability to influence others’ purchasing decisions due to their stature, expertise, position, or connections with their audience.
Influencers follow a distinct niche with whom they actively engage, depending on the size of the niche.
They are essentially social relationship assets that brands can use to work together to accomplish their marketing goals.
How To Find Influencers In Your Niche?
It’s not that hard to find influencers these days. You will eventually find a ton of influencer profiles that you can contact later if you know who and where to look.
If you still don’t know where to look for influencers, these suggestions will enable you to find them specifically for your niche and how you should approach them.
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Determine your campaign goals.
Prior to considering long-term, sustainable relationships with influencers, it is crucial for you to concentrate on the near term with a focused set of concrete, measurable goals.
Here is a list of the top 10 goals for influencer marketing:
- Improve brand advocacy.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Reach new targeted audiences.
- Increase share of voice.
- Improve sales conversion.
- Manage reputation.
- Drive lead generation.
- Accelerate digital transformation.
- Improve customer satisfaction.
- Improve employees’ influence.
2. Plan your influencer spending.
Although it’s difficult to put a price on exactly how many influencers in each bucket charge, suffice it to say that prices rise as follower counts rise. Prices differ depending on the social media platform, as do audience engagement and intent of purchase.
3. Track down influencers.
With some basic social media research, you can find influencers in your niche who are familiar with the industry.
Primarily, you’ll come across the following types of influencers:
- Bloggers who have written about your niche.
- People who talk about competitors’
- Authors of popular industry websites
You can start by doing a competitor analysis and analyzing what influencers are working on for them. You will learn a lot about the hashtags and key search terms they use in their posts. Reach out to them if it feels like a good fit and ask if they’d be interested in working with you.
4. Find influencers on popular platforms.
Social media can be labeled as the 21st-century phonebook. You can find influencers for your niche quite easily.
You can identify the most effective influencers for your company if you have a solid understanding of your target market, the social media platforms they favor, and the kinds of content that speak to them the most.
Here is a list of ways you can use them to find influencers:
- Search hashtags
Native search tools on social networks automatically surface influential accounts. When you enter the hashtag for your industry, a list of hashtags and accounts tailored to you based on your location and activity will appear. The most well-liked hashtags are rarely the best. Choose a more precise one.
- Social media advanced search tools
Advanced search tools are available on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These facilitate faster, deeper digging. Find your topic or niche by searching. Add your industry. To find regional influencers, add your city. In the title field, enter “editor” or “blogger” to find content creators. Influencers who are not yet connected to you will appear in search results.
- Free social media tools
Free tools often come in handy when you are looking to find influencers for a broad topic. However, you need to spend a lot of time filtering people and calculating your authority score for their domains.
- Paid influencer marketing tools
Using a variety of efficient tools, you can locate influencers and keep track of your interactions with them, and these tools have some excellent search features that you won’t find on the free ones.
By filtering and sorting in ways that aren’t possible with free tools, these can aid in your search for niche influencers with whom to collaborate.
- Search engines
Search engines often have lists of influential people in a given industry. After compiling all of these lists into one, you can see who frequently appears on these lists.
5. Pick the most influential people.
You’ll be drawn mostly to influencers with the most followers instinctively. However, you need to be aware if it is really worth your investment and your ROI, not the size of the audience.
And when you don’t know how much the investment will cost and how much you’ll earn from it, calculating returns can be challenging. In such cases, you need a platform that can assist you with ROI calculations and generate accurate reports on your marketing efforts.
Check out how Trackier can help you increase your ROI for your affiliate marketing efforts.
6. Pitch!
When you’ve identified an influencer who might be worth paying for, you need to make an effort to recruit them.
This may be more difficult than you imagine, and many influencers will turn down your offer. We recommend you contact as many influencers as possible at once after you’ve calculated your ROI. Don’t rely on a selected few and always have a bucket list of potential influencers you can work with.
Compare the offers made by the few who reply, and move on to the next bucket list of people if you don’t get a response.
Conclusion
In order to expose your company to millions of potential online customers, it all comes down to connecting with the right influencer and putting a well-thought-out plan into action. To get your influencer marketing campaigns off to a strong start, we advise consulting with a PR agency. Allowing agencies to guide you as you work toward redefining your business in the near future will save you time and effort.
Trackier enables you to create, automate, measure, and optimize all your marketing campaigns on one platform while providing you with actionable real-time analytics, so you can make better marketing decisions.
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