Influencers are a new generation of old-fashioned celebrities who are now running a billion-dollar market all over social media.
They no longer need to be a music/cinema/or sports star to be contacted by brands for advertising their products or services. They can be bloggers, chefs, tech savvies, or any other active user of different social media platforms.
In this article, I will summarize different aspects of influencer marketing and also introduce useful tools that can help you to find niche influencers and contact them.
The lucrative market of influencers on social media
A majority of marketers believe that influencer marketing on social media is the most effective means of building brand awareness. Google has announced that the number of searches for the term “influencer marketing” has increased by more than 1500 percent in three years.
As influencer marketing has become a profitable business, many social users are trying to gain fame and become influencers. This trend has caused a lot of problems for marketers and has made the process of finding a genuine influencer hard. Unfortunately, many influencer accounts on Instagram are fake and the owners just want to sell their Instagram account.
Different categories of influencers
With brands spending more money in recent years, different kinds of influencers have emerged that can be categorized as:
- Mega-influencers: Usually superstars with more than 1 million followers.
- Macro-influencers: With less than 1 million followers, they have gained their followers by creating social content about a specific area via social media itself.
- Micro-influencers: Niche experts who are highly-engaged in a specific area with less than 100,000 followers.
- Nano-influencers: Common social users with a high engagement rate and less than 5000 followers.
Each category has its own characteristics in terms of the number of followers, niche relevancy, and engagement rate, and you need to be prudent in choosing and collaborating with them.
You had better think of all these categories and decide which one can build brand awareness and help you to increase your sales.
It should be noted that organic influencers are also a new generation of brand advocates who can be viewed as Nano-influencers. The most important characteristic of them is that they are not paid to advertise your products or services. They are actually your real customers who want to write and speak about your brand because they genuinely like it.
Important prerequisites for choosing niche influencers
Selecting a good influencer is strongly dependent on your:
- Goal: Try to set clear goals for your campaign before collaborating with influencers. Measurable objectives can help you to find suitable niche influencers and track the results of your investment.
- Niche audience: Without a good knowledge about your target audience you cannot decide what kind of influencer can be effective for them.
- Location: Local businesses undoubtedly need different kinds of influencers compared to national and international brands.
- Marketing budget: Your budget is the most crucial parameter in your influencer strategy. You need to know exactly how much money you can pay influencers to advertise your products or services.
Please do not reach out to any influencer before specifying the above matters.
Tools to find influencers
If you want to start your influencer marketing campaign, you need to find a highly engaged one with a lot of followers related to your field. There are several useful tools that can help you find niche influencers.
Here are 5 great examples:
#1. Awario
Awario is one of the best social media measuring and analysis tools that can track the top social services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, etc.
More importantly, it can easily provide you with a list of niche influencers and the ability to build relationships with them.
Actually, you can track the keywords of your own brand and monitor the most active influential people and finally choose the best of them. You can easily search the top keywords of your own niche on Awario and it will rank social influencers or bloggers according to their account’s followers or blog’s traffic.
#2. Traackr
As it is mentioned on Traackr.com, it provides services such as influencer discovery, vetting, organizing campaigns, analytics, and is probably the benchmark of the influencer market.
It has a great influencer database as well as the most complete influencer relationship management platform. You can use different filters like platform, topic, language, location, age, gender and find suitable influencers for your campaign.
Also, you can evaluate your marketing strategy with insights it will provide into all social activities of influencers and increase the ROI of your campaign.
#3. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a great tool used for content research and also influencer monitoring. The most viewed content in your field has been probably generated by an influencer. BuzzSumo is constantly searching the internet including blogs and social feeds to provide you with the most popular content in your niche.
It can browse the world’s largest social engagement data with more than 5 billion articles as well as performance trends in the past five years.
BuzzSumo can be of use to find bloggers, authors, and generally content creators who are highly engaged on social media.
#4. Klear
Klear’s focus is only on influencer marketing, and as it is described on its site, it is the smartest influencer search engine available. With some advanced search filters, this tool can categorize influencers in more than 60,000 topic fields.
It supports all top social networks like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter with the ability to ignore fake followers, bots, and inactive accounts. It has a great database with a global reach covering all skills and categories along with different filters like interests, geography, age groups, genders, sponsored, and emails.
#5. Heepsy
Heepsy is also a database providing you with access to more than 7 million influencers all of them with more than 5K followers. You can filter them by category, location, engagement rate, outreach, and some advanced filters.
Heepsy can remove suspicious and fake accounts and also provide you with information about posting frequency and other rates of influencers. Moreover, it analyzes influencers by the audience, authenticity scores, audience demographics, cost estimations, and brand collaborations.
Final word
In this article, I tried to summarize the major aspects of influencer marketing so that you can decide where to start and what to do.
Of course, you need to study and experiment more if you want to optimize your influencer strategy. You can, for example, track the influencers who have been useful for your competitors.
In the end, it is strongly recommended to use analytics to constantly measure your performance and improve it accordingly.
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