How do I find influencers in my niche?

Five steps to finding influencers in your niche

According to a study by GlobalWebIndex, 54 percent of social media users use social media to research products and 71 percent are more likely to purchase products and services based on what social media influencers recommend. It’s essential to find the right influencers that align with your brand’s niche is key, so you can reach your target market. When you find influencers in your niche it will help you gain more visibility and authority within your target market.

With these five simple steps, you can find influencers in your niche:

1. Determine your goals
2. Set up your campaign 
3. Find influencers related to your industry 
4. Find influencers who share your audience 
5. Measure the power and reach of the influencers you pick

If you want to know the ins and outs of influencer marketing, check out our ebook:

1. Finalize your goals before finding influencers for your niche 

Before you start thinking about long-term, sustainable relationships with influencers, it’s good to focus on the near-term with a focused set of tangible, measurable goals, such as:

• Brand awareness
• Brand identity 
• Building an audience
• Increasing engagement 
• Generating leads
• Making sales
• Creating customer loyalty
• List building

Source: FIPP

Once you know your objectives, you can begin to look for the kind of influencer who may help you meet or exceed your goals. 

2. Have a campaign in mind as you start looking for influencers

With so many different campaign types in existence, you can’t approach influencers with a one-size-fits-all approach. Inevitably, different campaigns speak to different types of influencers. 

Take factors like the audience, goals, and outcomes of your campaign into account and keep them in mind as you begin your search. Also, keep in mind how the influencers want to be paid, their creative skills, the kind of content they produce, and their reach and engagement.

The types of campaigns you may run:

• Gifting for mentions, posts, and other content 
• Sponsored content that the influencer shares or creates for your brand
• Guest posting or takeovers where the influencer shares on your feed and theirs
• Contests, giveaways, and other incentives for the influencer’s followers
• Affiliate codes or discounts for them to share with followers
• Brand ambassadors who regularly support your brand and post about it

Some influencers will be perfect for a gifting campaign, because they have a smaller but more targeted audience. Others may have a huge following to bring to your brand and may want to guest post. Whatever you need, start by looking at who understands your industry. 

3. Look for influencers who create content related to your industry

To search and find influencers in your niche who already know your industry is a matter of doing some basic social media research. 

First, look and see what influencers may be working with your competition. You can get a better idea of what hashtags and search terms they use from their posts. If it feels like the right fit, you could reach out to them and see if they’d be open to working with you. Once you have a general understanding of the hashtags and search terms, you can find out who else is already talking about the problems your brand solves or the audience your brand serves. 

4. Find influencers who share your audience 

Have you clearly identified your target audience? Do you understand their demographic and psychographic profile? Are they perhaps a young professional, suburban dwelling homeowner and pet owner that’s environmentally conscious? 

The next step is to figure out which platforms they like the best, where and how they communicate, and look for influencers who create content about this subject

These influencers may be working with other brands, but that is not necessarily a no-go. If they meet all your criteria, keep them on your list. They already know how to reach your audience and your brand may fit in well with their followers. 

Use impact.com’s discovery tool to find your match

The partner discovery tool from impact.com makes it easy to find and recruit the right influencers, content creators, publishers, and more. The discovery tool offers powerful filters to identify the ideal influencer partners for your program. There are filters to search by criteria like their preferred social media platform, geography, audience stats, promotional methods, and more. And there are also tools to explore their content and data.

5. Measure the power and reach of the influencers for your niche

Having a massive follower count is a sign of only one thing: that an influencer has a lot of followers. It doesn’t necessarily make an influencer better than any other, worthy of a partnership, or a perfect fit for your campaign. In fact, brands often make the mistake of choosing celebrity or macro-influencers without taking a closer look at metrics that really matter. 

So, for example, if you are a pet brand that sells natural products, you could work with the most popular pet influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers but receive little engagement. Or you could find several influencer partners with smaller followings. For instance, you could recruit several local veterinarians who create content about natural pet care and receive high engagement from followers who match your audience. 

Look for a broad range of influencers who:

• Have built trust with their followers
• Listen and respond to their followers
• Use the social channels you want to be on
• Have audiences that purchase products that they recommend 

Now you get to choose the right influencers for your topic 

Finally, you get to pick from the list of influencers you have created based on criteria that are the most relevant to your needs at this time. These influencers may become long-term partnerships or be perfect for one campaign. Either way, you’ve succeeded in finding the right influencers in your niche. 

Take a final look at:

• Audience/niche: Who do they talk to? What do they specialize in?
• Relevance: What content resonates with their audience?
• Engagement: What level of engagement do they get?
• Geography: Is the location right for your brand?
• Quality: Is it consistent over time? Does it align with your brand standards?
• Channel: Are the channels they use (blog, Instagram, etc.) relevant for your brand?
• Authenticity and honesty: Do you see any signs of odd activity like purchased likes and comments? 

For the whole life cycle of influencer marketing take a look at the Ultimate guide to influencer marketing.

Now that you’re ready to jump into the wide world of influencer marketing with the influencers who are right for you, schedule a demo to learn how impact.com’s platform can help your brand strategically manage influencer campaigns, and how it connects influencers and creators with the world’s leading brands.

For more ideas and guidance on influencer partnership management, check out these other impact.com resources:

• Seven ways to pay influencers today and tomorrow [ebook]
• Different strokes for different influencer folks [ebook]
• Your influencer program is broken [ebook]
• Scaling influencer marketing globally [ebook]