How to Find Social Media Influencers in Your Niche within Minutes

The influencer marketing niche may currently be worth more than $10 billion annually and is set for further rapid growth. The concept of so...

The influencer marketing niche may currently be worth more than $10 billion annually and is set for further rapid growth. The concept of social media influencer marketing relies heavily on a marketing principle that “People Buy from People”, rather than simply choose products based on facts and figures.

While influencer marketing is a good fit for most products and services, it is important to put some thought into your influencer marketing strategy. We’ll list several methods and agencies that can help you to reach established social media influencers, but be ready to answer a long list of questions before you reach out to social media personalities.

How to Find Social Media Influencers in Your Niche within Minutes?

How well do you know your customer?

This may be a good time to review your entire marketing strategy. Who is your target market? What are their needs, and which problems do you solve with your products or services? Do you know your customers well enough to craft messages that would speak to them? Once you’ve established buyer personas for your customers, go further and also develop influencer personas to capture your needs, and to reach the right influencers for your brand.

How to vet prospective influencers?

Look for a good contextual fit with your brand. Compare your values and the values of your prospective influencer by considering the influencer's content quality, engagement methods, and customer reach to ensure a value alignment with your brand. What qualities do you require in the person you will be entrusting with your brand? Prepare a list of criteria before you start shopping around for the person or people who will do brand building on your behalf.

1. Identify your marketing goals

Do you want to sell products or educate people? Are you trying to solve a problem for your potential customer, or introduce a completely new concept? Will this be a long term commitment or just a thrilling product launch? Segment your target demographics and use the correct channel to reach each segment, because influencers specialize in certain types of products, followers, and social media channels.

2. Is your product a visual hit?

Try HypeAuditor to find Instagram influencers. If you can equip your influencers with high-resolution graphics and images they'll find it easy to craft good-looking content. Your influencers are specialists in their chosen social media channels. Their input can turn dry old infographics into lively visual messages that work for your product.

3. The power of #hashtags

Monitor target keywords and phrases to follow relevant topics across social media channels (with e.g. HootSuite) or other internet spaces (with e.g. Mention). You'll gain an understanding of your competition’s activities, and will also find those influencers who can treat your offering with the necessary knowledge and enthusiasm. Google Alerts can also help to identify influencers who are active in your field.

4. Blogging and articles

Product mentions by a random supermodel about a niche product like fleet management software could go down like a lead balloon. The industry as a whole may be better served by quality articles in well-regarded publications or blogs. You may find a solution at GroupHigh, who claims to monitor the world’s largest blogger database, or at Alltop, a curated daily list of top blog posts in particular niches.

5. Social media tracking

Rather than painstakingly trawling Facebook and Instagram looking for suitable influencers for your product, use one of the many social media tracking solutions. Influencity is a great tool for Twitter users. You can filter potential influencers based on the type of followers they have and the type of content they produce, and Influencity also provides a campaign management tool for control of changes and tweaks to your campaign.

A social media tracking tool like followerwonk can help you to narrow down your search for appropriate influencers based on their bios, followers, and activities on Twitter.

6. Internet databases

People-search websites are data aggregators that contain immense amounts of information about millions of people. Use online tools to look for influencers in specific target areas, or to look for people with the type of consumer profile that would be valuable to you. Nuwber consolidates public information such as phone numbers, consumer and lifestyle profiles, and social media activities to provide highly accurate personal profiles.

If you favor a careful, small-scale approach, this option is ideal for matching interests and identifying opportunities for small, highly targeted test campaigns.

7. The full-service option

While influencer marketing has become a tremendously important marketing instrument for all kinds of goods and services, it often represents just one segment of an overall brand marketing strategy.

A great influencer can't just improvise or wing it. Each follower's message or engagement is carefully crafted and scheduled for maximum impact against the backdrop of the comprehensive brand-wide marketing strategy. Influencer marketing has evolved into a specialist field, and you may consider approaching a specialist influencer marketing agency like ViralNation or Influencer.

How to reach out to prospective social media influencers?

While many agencies provide a full service and will engage with influencers on your behalf, you may need to reach out to yourself via email or social channels.

Consider using Discover.ly, a Chrome plugin that displays the social connections of each of your Facebook, LinkedIn, and email contacts. It will, for instance, show whether you and your existing LinkedIn connections share any mutual Facebook friends. It’s a snap to check if any of these contacts have links to influencers in your niche. It makes sense to leverage current relationships with your contacts to reach influencers.

How will you know if a marketing strategy is working or not?

How do you measure the success of your current marketing strategy? Will influencer marketing enhance your current marketing portfolio, or be a complete departure from your past strategy that may require different methods or standards?

If your goal is simply to sell products, your sales figures may speak for themselves. Other goals such as consumer education may require more sophisticated tools. Most market research tools, and indeed most full-service agencies, offer dashboards with granular reporting on your media exposure, client engagement, and ROI.

Remember to incorporate identifiable, measurable factors into each campaign or influencer engagement. You must be able to identify who, what, where, and why works best for your brand. Use the results of each engagement to build stronger campaigns and a better strategy each time around.

Conclusion:

Select one or more influencers after doing extensive homework, but remember that influencer marketing is not a set-and-forget way of reaching your audience. Just as with companies, the ‘real world’ can make or break individuals and turn a massive success into a big headache overnight. For best results, keep your options open, and use different tools and methods to find (and keep) good influencers.