How to Find Influencers in Your Niche
Today, Influencer marketing is one of the top marketing strategies. Finding influencers that can help get your product in front of your target market is a great way to drive traffic to your site, reach new people, build brand awareness and increase sales. While most business owners know the power of influencer marketing, many don’t know how to find influencers in their niche. Thankfully, we’re here to help. In this guide, we explore how to find influencers in your niche to boost your business.
What Is an Influencer?
An influencer is an individual who has a following of people online who listen to their opinions about any given topic. Influencers have the power to affect the purchase decisions of their followers because of their authority, position, knowledge, or relationship with their audience. Most influencers have an audience in a particular niche who they engage with regularly. An influencer could be a social media personality, blogger, celebrity, industry expert, lifestyle brand or thought leader.
Establish Your Goals
When searching for an influencer, don’t just contact everyone with a large following. Instead of contacting all the influencers, you need to find the right ones. The right influencers are brands and people that can help you to reach your target audience. When building your influencer marketing campaigns, start by outlining your goals. What do you want to happen as a result of your marketing strategy? You may want to build brand awareness, build an audience, boost engagement, drive traffic to your site, increase your sales or build a brand identity. Once you can define your primary goals, you can decide whether a certain influencer can help you to achieve them.
Decide What Type of Campaign You Want to Run
The next thing to consider is what type of campaign you want to run. Think about what will help you to connect with the type of influencer you want to work with.
Popular influencer campaigns include:
- Guest Posting: Getting an influencer to let you write for their blog.
- Gifting: Giving influencers free products in exchange for posts and mentions.
- Contents and Giveaways: Using giveaways as an incentive to get influencers to share your content.
- Discount Codes: Allowing influencers to give their audience discount codes for your product or service.
- Sponsored Content: Paying an influencer to share your content or create content that relates to your brand.
- Affiliates: Giving influencers affiliate codes so they earn money each time one of their followers uses your brand.
- Brand Ambassadors: Partnering with an influencer so they regularly promote your brand in exchange for free products, discounts and perks from your brand.
Find Influencers in Your Industry
When looking for influencers in your niche, start with well-known or famous figures in your industry. Industry influencers help you to build brand awareness and share your product with your target market. To help you do this, set up a Google alert for industry-related phrases to see who is writing about important topics in your industry. Also, browse forums to see who is answering questions that relate to your product or service.
Find Influences Who Promote Competitors
When searching for influencers in your niche, look for people who are already working with brands in your industry. Influencers who already talk about brands in your industry are more likely to create and share content about your brand than people who never mention products in your niche. Browse social media for industry-related hashtags to see who is sharing content about your competitors.
Find Influences with the Same Audience
Influencers in your niche don’t have to be tied to your industry. The most important thing is that the influencer shares your audience. Often, working with influencers in an industry that is complementary to yours can help you to reach more of your audience than working with someone in the same industry.
If you’re unsure of your audience, do a target market analysis to understand your audience and their interests, needs and other sites they use. This will help you to identify non-industry related influencers with the same audience as yours. This will help you to connect with your target market in a space that hasn’t been oversaturated by your competitors.
Find an Influencer with the Right Authority
When choosing an influencer for your campaign, understand their authority to decide if they have the audience needed to help you meet your goals. Influencer analysis is an important step if you want to find influencers in your niche. When analysing an influencer, consider their number of followers, the engagement rate of their followers, quality of their content, the rank of their website and the depth of niche coverage.
Use Hashtag Searches
Hashtag searches are another great way to find influencers in your niche. This method is particularly useful for finding influencers who you don’t follow that are talking about products similar to yours. This can be done using a simple hashtag search on Google. For best results, use specific hashtags rather than broad. For instance, if you own a stationery business that sells illustrated products, searching for #illustratedstationery instead of simply #stationery will yield better results.
So, there you have it – how to find influencers in your niche. If you do it right, influencer campaigns can be an effective marketing strategy. Not only will it get your product out there, but it could also build brand awareness, build an audience, boost engagement, drive traffic to your site and increase your sales. If you’re hoping to find an influencer to work with, follow the steps above to find a person or brand in your niche. If an influencer doesn’t respond to your proposal, don’t be disheartened. Reach out to other people in your niche and wait for somebody to snap you up!