Influencer marketing is integral to your Brand marketing strategy and vital to forging an authentic connection with your audience—new and existing. Whether it is awareness, conversion, or content that you seek, Creator collaborations can supply your Brand with either or all three. Influencer marketing capitalizes on relatability, relevance, and resonance. When partnering with Creators as part of your Brand marketing strategy, you must ensure your collaborators embody your Brand identity and represent its mission with creative and professional integrity. That said, determining how to find influencers for your Brand can be an overwhelming undertaking given the sheer number of available Creators and the many factors at play. Because choosing the right influencer can make or break your influencer marketing strategy, we’ve put together a guide to help you find influencers who align with your Brand’s goals, values, and budget.
Determine Your Campaign Goal When Choosing the Right Influencer
Begin by defining your campaign goal. This goal can fall into one of three buckets:
- Conversion
- Awareness
- Content
For campaigns with a focus on conversion, a Brand will seek to generate sales, gain followers on social media, build its email subscriber list, encourage downloads of its digital offerings, or increase sign-ups for its service. As you can see, the common thread is converting consumers into customers.
If your campaign goal falls within the awareness bucket, then your Brand most likely wants to increase its reach, strengthen its online identity, and promote product or service consideration amongst consumers.
Lastly, your campaign goal may simply be the acquisition of Branded content to use however you choose. The driving factor behind content-centric campaigns is engaging your audience, staying relevant online, creating meaningful conversations, and promoting audience interaction. Pick one or more goals for your campaign and proceed to the next step.
Define Your Target Audience
Now that you’ve established your campaign goal, it’s time to define your audience. If your goal is to convert, then you will need new, relevant eyes to hook. If your goal is to boost Brand awareness, then you will need to cast an even wider net for maximum reach. For content-oriented goals, the audience becomes more specific and involves customers already familiar with your Brand. Once you’ve made your selection, you can begin to get granular with the details. Start by listing the location, age, interests, and gender identities of your target audience. From here, you can begin identifying Creators whose followers fall within your target market. For an optimal target marketing strategy, you must review the audience insights of your potential collaborators to confirm their demographics match your target audience.
Consider Your Budget
Budget plays an important role in determining your Brand partners. Every Creator charges a unique rate for the content they create. This rate can vary per platform and content type. For instance, a Creator may choose to charge less for an Instagram Story than a TikTok Reel. While some Creators work on gifted collaborations, paid collaborations yield more robust results. This is especially true when working with bigger Creators, like Alix Earle, who can sell out a Brand’s products with a single recommendation. By setting measurable goals, you can ensure your budget allocations align with your Brand marketing strategy for maximum return on investment.
Choosing the Right Influencer: Explore Influencer Tiers
Influencers occupy different tiers depending on their follower size and resulting reach:
- Nano Creators: 1K-10K followers
- Micro Creators: 10K-50K followers
- Mid-tier Creators: 50K-500K followers
- Macro Creators: 500K-1M followers
- Mega Creators: 1M+ followers
Smaller Creators have a greater focus on content and a more intimate relationship with their followers. This allows them to promote Brands to an active audience and yield greater conversion rates.
Although large Creators have greater reach, they cost more and have lower engagement rates than their smaller counterparts. These Creators capitalize on personality, popularity, and a diverse audience to boost Brand credibility and catalyze awareness.
Brands of all sizes can benefit from Creators at any tier. However, budding Brands tend to prefer smaller influencers because they offer a more targeted and cost-effective approach. In comparison, bigger Brands opt for larger influencers to harness their broader follower demographics.
Stay Within Your Industry
One crucial element to consider when scouting influencers is their content category or area of expertise. Brands must partner with Creators in their industry for optimal results. This not only leads to the development of authentic content but also allows for the credible promotion of products. For an influencer marketing strategy to be successful, it must be believable. If a popular Creator is chosen to promote a product that has little to do with their regularly scheduled content, the endorsement will appear manufactured and seem unnatural to their audience. It is paramount that Brands work with Creators in their field and not just Creators who have glittering stats and adoring fans.
Conduct a Search Online
To kick off your Creator discovery, you can conduct a free online search to find influencers for free for your Brand. While this may be cost-effective, it’s not the most effective method all around. However, it never hurts to get a feel for rising or relevant stars in the digital wild. You can do a quick search on Google for influencers in your niche, but they will likely be the most in demand of their peers. Google will direct you toward blog posts and listicles that name industry leaders, so getting in touch with these Creators may present a challenge. You can also rely on social media searches to hunt down talent. However, it’s not an instantaneous process.
To discover potential Creator candidates, you can browse hashtags, location tags, your Brand’s tagged photos, or even your Brand follower lists. Database platforms can also aid you in your search, but those services unethically scrape user data without consent. Such platforms may boast a large network of influencers, but the Creators are not vetted or voluntarily on the platform. Whichever manual method you choose, you must still authenticate the Creators to verify their identity and ensure complete Brand alignment. The optimal, ethical, and effective solution to replace every step atop would be to use an opt-in influencer marketing platform, with more on that topic to follow below.
Choose Your Content Type
From sponsored posts to user-generated content, Brands have an array of content types from which to choose that can facilitate their selection of Creator. Brands that are targeting a more youthful audience may partner with a TikTok Creator to reach Gen Z users through sponsored posts and paid ads. Alternatively, a Brand can commission content for use on websites and as organic social media posts from a lesser known Creator with greater content expertise. While most Creators tend to operate on more than one platform, it is important to consider their native space when making your determination. Because they will be the creative lead during content creation, you want to choose Creators who are leaders in their fields and authorities in their communities.
Check for Values and Vibes
Values and vibes are essential when finding Creators who align with your Brand identity. Doing so amplifies the impact of the partnerships while mitigating any risks associated with conflicting perspectives. When finding influencers for your Brand, your chosen collaborators must share your values. For example, a sustainable Brand may want to avoid a partnership with a fast-fashion Creator, unless, of course, that partnership was undertaken to educate the Creator on more sustainable alternatives. Regardless, foundational alignment is a must for a collaboration to run smoothly. The same philosophy can be applied to the Creator’s visual aesthetic. Brands must ensure their partners have a visual style that is compatible with theirs. It does not have to be an exact match, but the Creator’s work should fall neatly within the Brand universe.
Authenticate Your Collaborators
Manually authenticating Creators can be a laborious process. To ensure a Creator is who they say they are, Brands can look at a Creator’s engagement rates, the quality of their audience interactions, the ratio of sponsored posts to organic posts, and how frequently they share content online. If you’d like to measure a Creator’s engagement rate superficially, compare the number of likes and comments per post to their number of followers. If the rate of engagement seems abnormally low, then the Creator may have purchased their followers or obtained them through unorthodox methods.
By taking a deeper look at comments from followers and the Creator’s response to each, you can also determine the authenticity of a Creator’s community and the dedication of their fanbase. Lastly, for a Creator to be successful in the social media space, content creation must be their full-time occupation. Ideally, active Creators will share content almost daily to keep their audience engaged and their metrics consistent. Otherwise, you can ask Creators to share their insights with you directly to help guide your target marketing strategies.
Communicate With Creators
Upon selecting a pool of viable Creators for your Brand, you can complete the process by initiating communication with your potential collaborators. Opening the lines of communication allows you to gauge their responsiveness, professionalism, availability, and interest in your Brand. It may prove difficult to reach Creators through social media as many are inundated with incessant DMs from fans and Brands alike. Many Creators will list their contact information for Brands within their profiles, so reaching out to them via email is another option if available to you.
Because some Creators are managed by talent agencies, Brands may have to go through a talent manager to start the conversation. This can unnecessarily delay the process and disrupt the natural flow of communication between the Brand and the Creator. Once communication has begun, you can evaluate the rapport (or lack thereof) and foster a connection with the Creator in real time if circumstances allow.
Use an Opt-in Influencer Marketing Platform When Choosing the Right Influencer
If learning how to find influencers for your Brand seems daunting, you can automate almost every step on this guide with Glewee, the go-to influencer marketing platform. As an all-in-one platform, Glewee provides an opt-in network of pre-vetted influencers, advanced audience insights, and end-to-end collaboration management for Brands and Agencies. This means all you have to do to find influencers and launch industry-leading campaigns is join Glewee.
As a Brand on Glewee, you can begin collaborating with on-Brand, on-budget, and on-call Creators in under two minutes with minimal effort on your end. Begin by creating a Customizable Campaign that outlines your brief, specifies Creator eligibility, and lists your desired content types. This entire process can be completed in seconds. Once you launch your campaign, applications from pre-screened Creators will come pouring into your Glewee inbox. Because every Creator has been authenticated, all you have to do is choose.
To aid your selection, every Creator on the platform has their audience insights listed, enabling you to compare their followers to your target demographic. Furthermore, Creators include their content categories, pre-set rates, and portfolios on their Glewee profiles for transparent dealings and ease of review. After reviewing each Creator, approve the applicants who match your criteria, and let the campaigns begin.
If you wish to bypass the campaign creation stage, you can just as easily explore Glewee’s Creator Marketplace and discover partners organically or through filtered searches. The Creator Marketplace lets you strike deals with Creators in an instant for content on demand. Whichever you choose, Glewee’s Brand and Creator Chat guarantees you can communicate with your Creator team in one place and in real time. Learn more about our starter tier or to get started, sign up for free today.
