Influencer marketing has now become more than just a buzzword. Today, marketers are increasingly developing their strategies around influencers and spending thousands of dollars on them. Why? Well, trust in business among consumers is declining. Nowadays, people don’t trust what the company tells them; they’d rather have someone they trust recommend products and services.

 

In other words, a brand is no longer what they tell the consumer it is, but what the consumers tell each other it is. This can largely be attributed to the high levels of engagement on the social media platforms. Peer recommendations are now influencing purchase decision, and as a result, the pertinence of influencer marketing is rising. 

 

Why Work with Brand Influencers?

When a brand influencer advocates for a brand, his or her audience consider them an unbiased third party, which makes their content a lot more trustworthy than that of the brand. For this reason, there are a few key advantages of collaborating with brand influencers. 

 

They give you access to a highly targeted and large audience, which is highly engaged with their content. The can essentially influence the decisions of their audience to get you traffic, increase sales, and build your brand’s awareness. 

 

How to Find Brand Influencers

Of course, you need to make sure that the influencer you collaborate with have a decent number of followers, with a high engagement rate. You also need to analyze every influencer carefully to see if their engagement rate lines up with their follower

 

Hashtag research

All of the major social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even YouTube use hashtags for the content. These can come in handy to help you find the right influencers in your niche. They can ideally help you discover people who are creating content related to your brand, and in the process discover relevant users that are actively creating content. 

 

Once you discover the key influencers using the hashtags, you can look at their other posts and analyze their engagement rates. This should give you a good idea of their engagement and effectiveness potential. Out of the “Top” brand influencers you come across, you can narrow down a list of brand influencers to collaborate with. 

 

Blogger Research

Finding influential bloggers is a lot harder than finding social media influencers. Fortunately, lots of social media influencers also have personal blogs. In that case, if you do find a potential brand influencer that you can work with, be sure to check if they have a blog. Finding an influencer with an active presence on both their social media and blogs will give you a dual advantage of reaching their blog audiences along with social media followers. 

 

Use Influencer Discovery Tools

Finding reliable brand influencers manually can be such a tedious and cumbersome process. You might end up missing a lot of effective ones, or worse, end up with a list of fake ones. This risks tarnishing the image of your brand, and must be avoided at all costs. 

 

To help with this, you can use influencer discovery tools like HypeAuditor and Traackr. Such tools usually feature huge databases of authentic brand influencers, and all you need is to search through the different influencers in your niche and analyze their profiles. 

 

Thriving Influencers on Social Media

 

Joy Cho: Oh Joy/Joy Cho slays on Pinterest, with over 12 million followers, thousands of pins, and hundreds of boards. She also has over 441k followers on Instagram, and she’s previously worked with Incipio, Target, and Band-Aid. 

 

Damon and Jo: This couple has a YouTube channel focused on exploring the world. They have over 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube, and they also run a blog. They’ve also partnered with brands like Target and SkyScanner. 

 

Sonja Reid: Sonja is a vlogger who has amassed over 1 million subscribers on YouTube. She started her career on Twitch live-streaming videos of herself playing video games, and now has a YouTube channel where she posts funny content on a wide range of topics. Brands she’s worked with include Audi and LootCrate.