Influencer marketing is now one of the most trendy and performing tools for promoting your brand and product. However, you may have noticed how finding the right Instagram influencers is not an easy task, but we’ll share how to do it faster and with less effort!
Influencer selection criteria
Before starting your search, you need to determine specific characteristics influencers must have to fit in with your brand and campaign goals. The better you know your audience, the easier it will be to pull off!
- Influencer category
Depending on the main focus of the influencers’ profiles, they are more likely to promote brands from particular industries. For example, if you promote activewear, then choose bloggers in sports, fitness, and lifestyle – they already have the audience you want.
Within Companion, we have the feature to search for influencers by products. We use the previous advertising experience of the influencer plus their audience interests to analyse what products are the most suitable for them. Simply choose one of the 28 available categories and find out who is more likely to promote your product effectively.
- Location
Even if your brand is international, or you have worldwide shipping, we recommend you limit your campaign geographically. It helps you to be more specific in key messages and use local hooks to attract people. Set the country and even city to promote local events, stores or services.
- Language
What language does your audience speak? And what language do you use to say the key messages of your brand?
One “obvious” but still important recommendation: don’t rely on the location only to find out the language of the influencer. It is a usual thing for them to live in different countries, yet they still use their native language in their profiles.
Luckily, you can utilize an advanced Companion filter for free, using different combinations of Location and Language to find the perfect fitted influencer for your campaign.
- Demographics
The gender and age of the influencer must match the gender and age of your target audience. It helps to create natural and organic advertising for people to believe this creator is really your customer.
- Statistics
There are different types of influencers, such as: nano, micro, macro, and mega. They have different behavioural characteristics, audiences, prices, and even ad efficiency. It’s hard to mix them in one campaign, so try to define which type works best for your brand when creating the strategy.
Obviously, to achieve high campaign results, you have to analyse profile performance as well. So, pay attention to views, engagement, and average audience activity under ad publications.
- Reputation
In the age of cancel culture, we need to choose very carefully the people with whom we’d like to cooperate. In order to not threaten your brand, create a blacklist of products, activities, and social positions of influencers you consider unacceptable to be associated with you and your brand. Remember, influencers are your brand representatives during your campaign, so choose them carefully!
How To Find Instagram Influencers
After you have already created the portrait of the best-fitted influencer for your brand, it is now time to start the search process. Let’s figure out how to do it, considering that in the Instagram app there is no functionality for this.
Manual methods for influencer search using Instagram
- Location. Click on Search and type the city or particular area. You can also use well-known “Instagram locations” from the profiles of other influencers. Look at the Top Posts to find content with the best engagement rate and then analyse its author.
- Hashtags. You may know some influencers who already have done campaigns for products in your niche, or cooperated with your competitors. Discover their commercial and regular content to find specific hashtags they use. Click on the hashtag to find more similar content and get profiles of influencers which could work for you. Don’t forget to check “Related Hashtags”.
- Tags. Go to your brand’s tags to see if any influencers have already posted something with your product. It is the best way to find your real customers. It might not work if your brand is in the process of entering the market and has no brand awareness yet. Note: you can’t find macro and mega influencers using this approach.
- Suggested profiles. If you know at least one influencer who is suitable for your campaign, discover suggested profiles to find similar influencers. Click on the “Arrow” icon next to the “Follow” button in their profile, and you’ll see suggested influencers that have similar content, demographics and audience. Click the “See All” icon to see the complete list.
Manual methods still work, but they can be annoying due to the amount of time and human resources they require. So, if you don’t have a person in your team whose work is completely dedicated to influencer search, it’s better to use automated tools to get things done in one click.
We recommend you start with Companion, which is free, fast and provides you with an extensive list of influencers and a detailed analysis of their profiles.
Automated Influencer Search
The Influencer Discovery Tool lets you set the filter with detailed influencers criteria, such as
- Category of products,
- Country,
- City,
- Language,
- Gender,
- Age,
- Contact information,
- Number of followers,
- The average number of views,
- Accounts, hashtags or words mentioned in the last 100 posts.
Besides these filters, you are also able to set criteria for the audience. It helps find influencers with a particular set of followers and can show you profiles with non-obvious characteristics. So, you won’t miss someone perfectly suitable for you and your brand.
One more advantage – you’ll get an extensive dossier for the influencers you’re interested in cooperating with. Apart from performance analytics, you’ll get up to 30 slides with essential insights about influencer behaviour, their audience interests, brand affinity, and followers’ credibility. You’ll find out their most notable followers and likers, influencers with similar topics and audiences, and more information.
It looks like there is no reason not to try this tool for free!
Sign up here, and we’ll get back to you with your individual access to the features and guidance on how to use Companion to the fullest.
Or contact Fergus Scholes at [email protected] to discuss how to integrate Companion into your business.