How to Find Influencers to Promote Your Brand or Product: A Niche-Specific Guide

Influencers – social media celebrities – people with more trust, credibility, and authority among their followers than celebrities these days. You’ve seen them pop up on your Instagram or LinkedIn feeds; they have #sponsored or #paidpartnership tags in their posts.

According to The State of Influencer Marketing 2024: Benchmark Report, the influencer marketing industry is estimated to grow to $24 billion by the end of 2024. Why? Social media is growing at the speed of light, with networks like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok attracting users of all ages and ethnicities. Gen Z is turning to influencers for recommendations, ignoring traditional advertising methods like banners and billboards.

Influencer marketing provides better reach, engagement, and return on investment (ROI) than other forms of marketing. However, finding the right influencer for your brand, product or service is becoming increasingly difficult.

For instance, there are approximately:

• 64 million Instagram influencers across the globe.
• 5 million YouTube influencers worldwide.
• Over 100,000 influencers on TikTok.
• 42,000 Facebook influencers in the US alone.

It’s going to be difficult to find an influencer within your niche industry who is both liked by their audience and capable of driving purchases through ads or recommendations on their social feeds.

Sure, collaborating with influencers gets you in front of a large audience. Yet, a huge fan following is useless if it doesn’t include your target audience. An influencer with a big online presence whose content doesn’t align with your brand values is also a no-go. So, how do you identify influencers who can significantly improve your bottom line?

Our post will help you find influencers to promote your brand or product, along with tips that make working with influencers a seamless experience. Once you have a list of influencers ready, you can easily undertake influencer marketing campaigns to increase brand awareness, boost sales, and achieve business growth.

What Is an Influencer?

An influencer is an individual who has a loyal, often large, follower base on social media. They hold authority in a particular domain and create niche-specific content tailored to their online audience. Lifestyle coaches, fashionistas, celebrities, or YouTubers like MrBeast are great examples of influencers. Their followers interact with their posts and often follow their recommendations.

Influencers build their brands by promoting themselves, their values, experiences, and opinions to others. Not all influencers need a large social media following – it’s enough as long as it’s a community of devoted followers. A good influencer always focuses on quality over quantity in their audiences.

Community is why companies seek influencers to promote their brand or product. They are the best way to reach new audiences and get consumers talking about your brand. Influencers bring in sales and money even after the marketing campaign. Case in point: the Chinese livestreamer Zheng Xiang Xiang sold ​​$14 million worth of products in a week using her three-second approach to product promotion.

However, it’s important to collaborate with influencers whose followers include your target market. Create a customer persona that details the traits of your ideal customer and look for influencers accordingly. You can find Instagram influencers based on demographics, location, interests, and industry.

An influencer vs a creator vs a celebrity

Influencers are people who share sponsored content to persuade their audience to take action, like buying a product or service. They almost always have a financial incentive — a promotional fee or discount. An influencer’s job is to influence people; they may or may not create original content.

On the other hand, content creators are folks who produce original, engaging content, such as videos, blogs, podcasts, or social media posts. They often generate income through memberships, subscriptions, and fan contributions. Creators may or may not partner with brands.

Celebrities were once the golden standard for brands, trusted by everyone they met. If you wanted to reach the masses, they would be your go-to choice. However, celebrities have lost credibility over time – they endorse products because of the paycheck rather than the value. People see through such things. Hence, we now have influencers who may not have the same level of fame but possess higher trust and relatability.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that involves collaboration between a brand and a famous online personality to get influencers to promote or endorse your products. It works on the principle that people relate better with other people and like influencers more than companies. As a brand, you gain publicity while the influencer gets monetary compensation, free products, or discounts.

Social media influencers with large followings usually promote your brand in several ways, like:

• Creating personalized posts and videos about your brand
• Sharing branded resources with their followers
• Directing users to a product page or social media account
• Convincing followers to try out your products

It’s not just about popularity and followers. An authentic influencer with genuine followers increases your credibility and trustworthiness, leading to better engagement, sales, and brand awareness.

Finding influencers for your marketing campaigns is relatively easy, but partnering with creators who can actually get your brand in front of the right people is a challenge. The US military thought it was a great idea to enlist Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to boost army recruitment. Their $11 million deal included five Instagram posts promoting the Army to his massive audience.

However, instead of increasing recruitments, the collaboration led to a loss of 38 new enlistments. It just goes to show that audience relevance, industry, and content match should be your top priority in any influencer marketing campaign. These factors influence your bottom line – whether it’s engagement, conversions, or return on investment (ROI).

Reasons why influencer marketing campaigns work

Influencers offer brands the trust and authenticity they’ve built over the years. People naturally trust the individuals they follow, watch, and interact with regularly more than they trust multinational corporations. It takes a normal creator years to gain the trust and support of their followers – it’s obvious that they won’t like to lose it.

Online personalities are experts in their field and won’t promote something they don’t believe in. After all, one wrong endorsement could end their entire career. They know it, and their audience knows it. As a result, anything they promote will be authentic, aligned with their audience’s preferences, and more likely to boost sales and engagement.

Four Types of Influencers: Nano, Micro, Macro, and Mega Influencers

Influencers are grouped into four categories based on their follower count: nano influencers, micro-influencers, macro influencers, and mega influencers. The more the followers, the more money you shell out. An average nano-influencer could cost you around $20-$150 per post on TikTok. A mega influencer, on the other hand, just starts at $1,200.

You need to know your priorities and budget before finding the perfect influencers for your marketing campaigns. For this purpose, we’ve provided a brief description of each of them below.

Nano influencers: 1,000 to 10,000 followers

Nano influencers have a small following but make up for it with engagement. These influencers are super connected with their audience and respond to almost every comment and message. Their followers are part of a close-knit community that’s genuinely interested in the topic they talk about. Brands with a small budget catering to a niche industry, region, or location, can leverage nano influencers for their campaigns.

Micro-influencers: 10,000 to 100,000 followers

Micro-influencers have a larger following and have built a dedicated audience around one or two interests. They are known for their high engagement rates. Their followers frequently view, like, comment on, and share their content. For example, a micro-influencer in the fitness industry might attract young adults passionate about healthy living.

They are an excellent option for brands with a mid-sized budget, especially those that have collaborated with well-known influencers to reach a niche audience.

Macro influencers: 100,000 to one million followers

Macro influencers are the authority in their niche, whether technology, food, or lifestyle. They have campaign experience and know how to drive sales. A macro-influencer partnership could work well for brands looking to reach a bigger but still somewhat specific audience. You need experience working with influencers like them and be ready to invest more time and resources.

Mega influencers: 1M plus followers

Mega influencers are the big players — actors, musicians, sports stars, and public figures with millions of followers. They can give your brand exposure, but their partnerships come at astronomical rates.

If your brand has mass appeal, like Doritos or Nike, and you have a large marketing budget, partnering with a mega influencer can take your brand to the next level. Just remember, these influencers have PR teams handling their social media accounts and partnerships so the process will be more formal.

How to Find Influencers for Your Brand or Product: 10 Methods Plus Tools

Many brands prefer working with nano and micro-influencers instead of macro-influencers and celebrities. After all, smaller influencers are easier to reach out to, have a tight-knit community of followers, and are skilled at marketing themselves.

However, you should follow these three things while sourcing influencers:

• Prioritize quality over quantity – search for influencers based on follower engagement, industry expertise, and content quality.
• Work with those whose content and messaging align with your brand image.
• Look for influencers who are already talking about you; they are more likely to become brand ambassadors and partners.

We have outlined the easiest ways to find influencers for your brand or product within your niche. Some of the tools below will make it child’s play to discover influencers and build brand partnerships.

1. Social Persona by Delve AI

As discussed before, you should know your target audience and the social media platforms they are active on before finding influencers for your brand or organization. The right way to do this is to create ideal customer profiles for your company. Once you know who your target customer is, you can identify the best influencers they follow and engage with online.

Social Persona by Delve AI helps brands find their ideal audience across major social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube. The process is pretty simple:

• Go to our Social Persona product page.
• Log in or create a new account.
• Enter the website domain.
• Go to Settings and add related social media handles.

You can use Social Persona to easily create personas for your business’s and your competitor’s social media audience. Each persona will enable you to understand the consumer – their interests, reading/listening/browsing habits, and online behavior, ultimately empowering you to build a solid social media outreach program.

Our software analyzes user conversations and extracts the hashtags, topics, and content types that resonate with them.

The INFLUENCERS tab gives you a list of people and organizations that exercise significant social control over this audience segment. These influencer entities are professionals in the industry and have expert knowledge in related topics. This list allows brands to contact relevant influencers who align with their target audience.

For example, Neil Patel is a macro influencer with expertise in SEO and digital marketing – an area our product belongs to. We can reach him by clicking on any of the social media icons, say Instagram, which will direct us to his Instagram account.

Similarly, the Content Marketing Institute provides resources to help people learn more about content marketing through online materials, as well as in-person and digital events.

Neil Patel and CMI are both influencers that our select audiences follow, visit, and interact with; they are the ones who have the most impact on our customers and can successfully endorse our product.

2. Hashtags on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok

Let’s get down to the manual approach of finding influencers online. The best way is to look up the topics and hashtags influencers are using in their social media posts – influencers often use hashtags to reach a wider audience. Open your Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube app, go to the search bar and type in the hashtags related to your brand or product.

Supposing you’re a brand that sells organic vegetables, use hashtags like #organicfood to find TikTok influencers.

Use a combination of niche, location, and product-specific hashtags, along with words like 'influencer,' 'creator,' or 'blogger,' to find influencers in your area. You can then filter results by top, users, and videos on TikTok and by accounts, tags, location, or reel in Instagram. In your search results, specifically look for hashtags #ad or #sponsored or for “Paid partnership” tags to identify influencers creating content and promoting products in your industry.

Once you've found a few influencers, check who they’ve collaborated with in the past, including your competitors. Also, make it a point to search for and follow branded hashtags across different social networks. Stay alert for any brand mentions, as influencers who mention your brand might be more receptive to collaboration proposals.

If you want to collaborate with influencers during new product launches, YouTube is the right platform. YouTubers can create product reviews or 'Get Ready With Me' videos to show your products to their subscribers in detail. Just use YouTube to search for phrases like “smartphone reviews” or “tech unboxing” and check the number of views, likes, comments, and shares for engagement.

3. Search engines like Google

Google search is a free-of-charge method to find influencers. It’s also very taxing – you have to manually look for influencers, assess their online presence, and check their content quality. Yet, it’s a great way to find super well-known, macro influencers in the industry.

Go to Google and enter site: followed by the social media channel you want, like site:instagram.com, and then the topic or niche you're interested in. Try a combination of industry, location, and topics to find local influencers or articles that list the best influencers in that region. For example, site:instagram.com “marketing guru usa.”

Search for “top [industry] influencers” on Google to get a readymade list of creators in your niche industry, such as digital marketing. You’ll find suggestions from Google as well as listicles on popular websites. Employ the search Tools to filter results by time frame or use Advanced Search to narrow your results by language, region, and file type.

Bloggers and podcasters also have a strong following on social media and expertise in the industry. To find the famous ones, enter keywords related to your brand or product along with “blog” or “podcast” and identify the top blogs and podcasts in your field.

With tools like BuzzSumo, you only need to specify the topic to receive data on the most influential people in your niche associated with a specific keyword or domain.

4. Social listening and Google Alerts

Social media listening allows brands to track social sentiments and brand mentions about their company, products, or services. It can be across social media platforms, review sites, online forums, and news channels. It helps you identify influencers who are already familiar with your brand and might be interested in collaborating with you.

Here’s an example of a mention for The North Face, the famous outdoor apparel and equipment company.

You can go through the connections of a particular influencer to find similar influencer groups. Check the hashtags used in the post you were mentioned in and repeat step two to find lookalike influencers.

Google Alerts is the alternative to brand mentions. Enter your brand name and personalize alert settings by language, sources, and region. Once done, you will receive email notifications about mentions of your brand across the internet and discover influencers talking about your company or topics of interest.

5. Social media networks

Social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube should be your first step to finding creators and potential brand ambassadors. Although this search is limited to the words influencers use in their posts, it’s a good place to start. Go to your apps and type in the relevant phrases or hashtags. Set the filter to posts and browse the posts of individuals with a good following.

Trending posts — those with high views, likes, and comments — are a surefire way to identify popular or new influencers.

Don’t just conduct a surface-level search; check their follower count, content type and format, post view rate, likes, shares, and comments to gauge engagement levels. It doesn’t matter if their followers are less; influencers who create content that’s worthwhile will always have a positive impact on your influencer marketing strategies.

Of course, not everyone will be the right fit for your brand. If you don’t have the time, it’s a good idea to use tools that allow you to filter influencers based on account size, domain, and location. Another solution is to go to your competitors’ social media handles and find influencers they have tagged in their posts. This allows you to find similar influencers for your brand.

6. Influencer marketing platforms

Influencer marketing platforms are great tools to find influencers who produce content that aligns with your product or brand. With advanced technology that makes selecting influencers easy, they also help you manage influencer communications, monitor analytics, and track campaign performance to measure the success of your marketing campaigns.

Many of them come with features that enable you to search for influencers by audience demographics, industry, social networks, interests, and engagement metrics, as well as run multiple campaigns. Tools like Upfluence offer verified email addresses and allow users to automate influencer outreach with drip email campaigns.

Besides finding influencers, you can use them to create a data-driven marketing strategy that aligns with the content preferences and social habits of your target market. Just remember that influencer marketing platforms can be ineffective if you're aiming to reach bigger players like celebrities and sports stars. In such cases, agencies are your best bet.

7. Company partner pages

There are two ways to do things: the easy way and the hard way. You can actively find new influencers or wait for them to find you. The first approach will yield faster results, but being accessible to people who want to collaborate with and present your brand to their audiences is also important in the grand scheme of things.

All you need to do is create a dedicated landing page for potential partners and collaborators. Include your contact information, a Calendly link for scheduling meetings, or a form where they can submit their contact details for further communications. It’s also good to have your brand assets and educational resources in one place.

8. LinkedIn connections

B2B brands should focus on LinkedIn for effective brand partnerships. Find influencers by industry, profession, and keywords. Include a link to your website on your company page so that partners can easily find you. You want to stay in the know? Then follow bloggers, creators, and influencers on this network.

Devoutly watch, listen to, and consume their content. It’ll help you see the kind of stuff they create and the companies they partner with.

Reach out to your LinkedIn connections and business partners to check if they know influencers that interest you. If they say yes, ask for a recommendation or personal introduction to ease the influencer outreach process. You can create a post about your influencer search on social media and ask them to repost, interact with, and tag relevant people.

Important: Be wary of influencers who use bots to get better reach and engagement. They buy fake followers to inflate their numbers and use automated tools to like and comment on posts. Some also deploy bots to send mass messages to promote their content. The easiest way to spot them is by post engagement – fewer likes or surface-level comments not related to the post at all.

9. Industry events and conferences

The best place to connect with influencers is at B2C or B2B industry events and conferences. For example, HubSpot’s INBOUND, Salesforce’s Dreamforce, and Social Media Marketing World are excellent B2B marketing events. For B2C, you have the Consumer Electronics Show, Comic-Con, Coachella, and Beautycon Festival.

A creator-specific event like VidCon – a convention for online creators and fans – attracts thousands of people. You can easily find the best influencers for your brand and expand your network.

However, if you cannot attend an event due to time or budget constraints, simply visit the event's dedicated website to find the list of speakers or influencers who will be present. You can then drop them an email or DM them on social media.

Find Niche Social Media Influencers with Delve AI

Audience, follower demographics, niche, account engagement, content formats, and platforms are some of the most important factors to consider when selecting social media influencers. Always know what you want out of the influencer marketing campaign and set KPIs in place. Ensure your influencers have the right experience in the industry and can successfully promote your product.

Look at their posts, captions, and past collaborations to see how well their content resonates with your audience.

So, before you start finding influencers for your brand or product, it’s imperative to understand who your target audience is, where they are, and what they like. Build your social media personas using Delve AI, and identify the right brands and influencer entities.